Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/)
Georgia DJJ Commissioner Avery Niles
Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice Commissioner Avery D. Niles announced Thursday the suspension with pay of 20 DJJ investigators, including the Office of Investigation’s former chief investigator. The disciplinary actions come in the wake of a scathing report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showing Georgia’s juvenile detention facilities had among the highest rates of sexual abuse reports in the country, which prompted Niles to assign an advisory committee to look into the matter.
Have you heard Sara’s story? She was raised by an abusive, drug addicted mother. Her father was almost entirely absent from their lives.
Texas may soon come into compliance with Miller v. Alabama, last year’s Supreme Court ruling barring states from sentencing juveniles under 18 to mandatory life without parole.
NEW YORK--New York’s juvenile justice system is slowly being overhauled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Close To Home initiative, a set of proposals designed to keep youth close to their communities and facilitate their return to society.
Photographer Richard Ross knows the juvenile justice system well. For his “Juvenile In Justice” project, he scoured the United States, interviewing thousands of detained young people in hundreds of facilities across the nation.
A report released last week by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth calls for the state’s Dept. of Children’s Services to step up its efforts in meeting the needs of young people with psychological and other health problems. Continue Reading →
As a criminal defense lawyer and the mother of two girls, I have a very effective disciplinary tool at my disposal: I can take just about any undesirable interaction between my daughters and frame it as a crime. If the older one smacks the younger one, it’s an assault. If the younger one takes her big sister’s earrings, it’s larceny. If they are both yelling and shouting at each other, it’s disorderly conduct. Over the years, I’ve been able to advise them that this behavior not only breaks the rules of our home but also violates North Carolina’s criminal statutes. As someone who defends children in juvenile delinquency court, I can also warn them that they could be criminally prosecuted and end up – as my young clients do – facing a judge and the possibility of a year of supervised probation, removal from their home, or long-term detention and commitment. Continue Reading →
Following the release of a recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report, Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice Commissioner Avery D. Niles released an official statement responding to the report’s claims that the state’s juvenile facilities post among the highest rates of sexual victimization in the nation. Continue Reading →
The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a new report detailing rates of sexual victimization in the nation’s juvenile facilities. The report, incorporating data from the 2012 National Survey of Youth in Custody, found that nearly one in 10 young people in state-operated or state-contracted juvenile facilities reported at least one sexual victimization incident last year. Continue Reading →
Humans naturally form groups, and the way we treat those inside our groups is different, usually radically so, from the way we treat outsiders. One cause of this is moral exclusion, “excluding other individuals or groups from one’s own moral community; i.e. viewing others as lying beyond the boundary within which moral values and rules of justice and fairness apply.”
Those within our group are part of our “scope of justice.” Those outside are treated to varying degrees of fairness. This is why people in churches, normally peaceful places, cheered when Osama Bin Laden was killed. This is why Americans in general are horrified by Newtown and indifferent to children who are casualties of drone strikes in Pakistan. One of the most glaring examples of moral exclusion and the limited scope of justice in the United States occurs in youth detention. Continue Reading →