Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/youth/)
West Charlotte High School had let out only minutes earlier when, hearing gunfire, school officials ordered an immediate lockdown and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers swarmed the campus. That incident, the week before Christmas break 2021, was the ninth time a gun had been found at one of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s most troubled public schools since the start of the school year.
Defendants who are 18 years old and younger will have the same access to legal counsel as adults in Washington, starting next January. That new law trails another juvenile justice reform, which took effect on July 25, aimed at trimming the number of youth in foster care who wind up in juvenile detention. The latter aims to expand the number of community-based endeavors offering trauma-informed rehabilitative care that is culturally competent and focused on racial equity among youth in the justice system. Currently those less restrictive, community placements are available to 25% of juveniles in the state, according to legislators who drafted the measure. The initiative expanding juveniles’ access to lawyers mandates that juveniles can phone, videoconference or talk in person with a lawyer before waiving any constitutional rights, if a law enforcement officer, among other things:
Questions a youth after advising that person of rights granted under the landmark Miranda ruling.
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.”
More than two-thirds of 2,558 Californians living in homes with children or teens who owned firearms and more than half who did not own guns but lived in homes with guns said they believed those weapons made their homes safer, according to a study published this month by the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Network journal.
Supporters of the juvenile justice status quo wrongly claim that community-based organizations are not yet strong enough to serve all youth who may otherwise cycle through juvenile courts, detention centers and on and off parole rosters. Ideally, opponents to reform say, youth would be served by nonprofits close to home, but that cannot happen until enough suitable nonprofits are available. This line of thinking ignores the community-based direct services already offered in many areas, from life coaching in Oakland to legal support in Los Angeles. Failing to adequately support these existing community services keeps us stuck in a cycle of waiting. Instead of waiting for community-based organizations to grow above and beyond their present capacities, how about we actually do the work required for their growth?
In my 15 years of working with youth who cycle through the criminal justice system — initially as a social worker and, now, as a lawyer — I’ve represented exactly two white clients. Mainly, my clients have been Latinx kids and Black kids like that one whose tragic story I’ve partly shared. Too often, Black and Latinx kids aren’t granted the same allowances, including diversion from incarceration, that are given to white youth deemed guilty of the very same infractions.
Part of the solution lies in projects such as Ambassadors for Racial Justice, which trains juvenile defenders across the nation on how to combat systemic racism through case advocacy, community activism and legislation. Georgetown Law Professor Kristin Henning launched the program and National Juvenile Defender Center Executive Director Mary Ann Scali has been a driving force in its development; both of have been battling racial inequities in the juvenile legal system for more than 25 years.
The tally of Black youth detained in juvenile facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic reached a record high last January, while the same count for white youth was the second lowest since the Annie E. Casey Foundation started tracking that data. The foundation’s most recent monthly analysis showed that, as of Feb. 1, whites had spent less time in detention than Blacks, who also were incarcerated for longer periods than they’d been detained before the pandemic started. Aimed at measuring the pandemic’s impact on 144 juvenile justice systems across 33 states, the Casey Foundation survey started in March 2020.
By its most recent count, during January 2021, there was a:
6% decline in the population of non-Latinx white youth in juvenile detention. 2% uptick in the population of Latinx youth in juvenile detention.
In 2018, about 6 out of 10 youth found guilty of an offense – more than 130,000 young people nationally — were placed on probation. Black youth have continued to be overrepresented among youth on probation, and at every point in the justice system. Structural racism drives harsher treatment of Black youth, who are more likely than white youth to be arrested, incarcerated, placed on probation and, when they don’t meet the terms of probation, plunged deeper into the criminal justice system. What’s the result? Black youth comprised just 14 percent of the general population, but 36 percent of youth on probation and 41 percent of incarcerated youth.
To help probation departments reduce the scope of probation, especially for Black youth, we just released a new, research-informed framework.
Big data has already come to big city policing. The technology may be new, but some juvenile justice advocates worry that it may already be compromised by an age-old tech problem: Garbage in, garbage out.
Author and reporter Maia Szalavitz, who writes about substance use and related issues recently spoke with Youth Today and JJIE about her experience and her newest book: “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction,” released in April. Here’s Szalavitz’s take on addiction and its complexities, from her own experience and in her own words.