As kids' behavior reaches crisis points after the stress and isolation of pandemic shutdowns, many schools are facing pressure from critics to rethink their approaches to discipline — including policies intended to reduce suspensions and expulsions.
Courts have long mandated fees, aiming to hold youth accountable, deter them from future crime and often to cover the justice system’s administrative and other costs. Yet, advocates of juvenile justice reform contend that those conventional methods of demanding accountability from young offenders are counterproductive, neither serving the interests of youth nor their victims
How one prisoner, sentenced as a teen, sees spending millions on new juvenile jail:
For almost 25 years, I’ve been on North Carolina’s death row. The people on death row who have signed onto my letter protesting that new jail – and more than 40 other men on death row who wanted to sign but were physically unable to position themselves to do so – were confined as children to boot camps, reformatories, detention centers and youth prisons.
Some juvenile and criminal justice reform advocates laud restorative justice — it requires those who commit crimes to make amends, rather than merely face a prison sentence — as a potent solution to curbing crime. This model presumes that the wrongdoing is corrected when a defendant’s apology and efforts to take accountability somehow satisfy the victim. Restitution is measured by the defendant engaging in dialogue with the victim, alongside a neutral third-party, for months, if not years.
The day they came face-to-face with the teen who accidentally shot and killed their son, Brad and Meagan Hulett confirmed, in their minds, that prison was the last place the shooter should end up.
This is how practitioners of restorative justice approach things: First, focus on building strong, authentic relationships in a community, including schools that now are reopening. Then, if and when community members or students make a mistake or cause harm, rather than simply looking at which rule was broken and which punishment should be prescribed, collaborate to help ensure that the erring individual has the space and support to hold herself or himself accountable.
A June 2021 report from the U.S. Department of Education found that, from the 2015-16 through 2017-18 school years, there was a 5% spike in the number of on-campus students arrests and a 12% increase in police answering calls to campuses.
For Madeline Borrelli, a special education teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., having NYPD-trained law enforcement officers in schools is a cut-and-dry issue: “School safety agents,” she said, using their official job title, “ … should not exist at all.”
Imagine building a house on unstable ground and then only working to address the cracks in the walls, uneven floors and leaking roof, all symptoms of a faulty foundation. Many contractors would find this unreasonable, if not dangerous.
Yet that is essentially what we have done in the United States. After having built our nation's house on unstable ground, we have stubbornly clung to the irrational idea that all we need to do is fix the resulting, cosmetic issues. In doing so, we have begun to use restorative justice as one of those "easy fixes," to the detriment of both the practice and the communities asked to participate in it. The practices and approaches the Western world today refers to as “restorative justice” have roots in indigenous, including indigenous African, peacemaking and ways of being in community.
Formed in 2013 and established as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2014, the Florida Restorative Justice Association (FRJA) is the only entity in the state dedicated to supporting, strengthening and expanding Florida’s restorative justice practices (RJPs). In the last few years, the primary strategy to accomplish this task has been the creation of statewide conferences — one in Sarasota in September 2018 and one coming up in Broward County on Jan. 31, 2020.