Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/mississippi/)
“I want everyone to hear me and hear me clearly,” Mayor Brandon Scott said during a press conference regarding youth-on-youth gun violence. “We are going back to the old days. We will be enforcing a youth curfew as we move into the latter spring and summer months.”
The near-stagnant pace of federal gun law reform and lack of gun possession restrictions in Mississippi make it easy to get a gun in the Magnolia State — and for hundreds of them to end up on Chicago streets every year. Police stated that they don’t even bother arresting gun traffickers in some cases because weak laws reduce such arrests to petty crimes.
The U.S. Supreme Court last month affirmed that lifetime imprisonment without the possibility of parole is just punishment for Brett Jones, who was convicted in 2005 of murdering his grandfather, a tragedy that the then 15-year-old said was an act of self-defense.
For close to seven years, a Mississippi man bought firearms in and around Natchez before sending them to contacts in Chicago, many of them family members he grew up with.
Once there, the weapons would find their way to the streets of some of the city’s most violence-plagued communities and be used in homicides, shootings and other crimes.
“I don't know how to tell you this, but your brother was shot.”
Michael Taylor’s heartbeat quickened. He was having difficulty breathing. The words...
Do not call Brittany Gray, Kenderick Cox and Marcellus Gray activists. The Greenwood natives prefer to be called who they are — members of the community...
Mississippi’s capital city is becoming a petri dish for an experiment designed to stop an epidemic of gun violence that claimed 84 lives in 2018 and took 16 less than two months into 2019.
She remembers the frantic knocks at the door and the family friend who waited almost hysterical on the other side.
Johnnie McDaniels, executive director of Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center, often repeats a Frederick Douglass quote.
"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men," Douglas wrote in 1855.
"And I'll add women to that," McDaniels said in an interview at the youth detention center on Feb. 28.
Juan Cloy remembers being suspended when he was at Provine High School in the 1980s. He and several friends got in a fight with some kids from the neighborhood at school. Everyone involved got suspended.