New Report Rates Each State On Its Juvenile Justice System

Since 2016, Elder Yusef Qualls has been on a tireless campaign to have officials in Michigan revisit a criminal case that has kept his son incarcerated for over two decades. 

A so-called “juvenile lifer,” Qualls’ son, also named Yusef Qualls, has lived within Michigan’s adult correctional system since 1997. At 17 Qualls was sentenced to life without parole after police linked him as an accomplice to the murder of a woman in Detroit.

Elder Qualls has been a juvenile justice advocate since his son’s incarceration began. But the fight took a new turn when, in 2016, the Supreme Court retroactively banned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. That meant the courts had to revisit his son’s case.

Advocates like Qualls are now accusing the state of moving too slowly to revisit the cases of juveniles who were sentenced to life, forming a huge backlog of cases like his son’s.

“He’s been sitting, waiting for an opportunity for a resentencing hearing for over five years, and not one time has there been a legitimate reason for why it hasn’t been held,” Elder Qualls said. “He sits in the same situation as 159 other people just in the state of Michigan.”

Though advocates like him have long understood the problem in their individual states, a new report from the advocacy group Human Rights for Kids outlines, for the first time, they say, how each state stacks up against the others.

The report creates an index using 12 categories of law — ranging from whether juveniles are allowed to stand trial in adult court to what happens when they’re released from incarceration — in an attempt to rank each of the 50 states’ juvenile justice systems.

Some conservative states score high

Comparing state laws against existing juvenile justice frameworks championed by the United Nations, states were awarded points for each category in which they protect the rights of juveniles.

States with the highest scores — including California, North Dakota, Arkansas and West Virginia — were found to have the most comprehensive rights for juvenile offenders.

Former Del. John Ellem, a Republican who served in the West Virginia House of Delegates until 2015, says criminal justice reform is not only a bipartisan issue, but when states frame the issue as a fiscal issue, many so-called “red states” will actually support it.

“We saw the rising number in the prison system, and the last six to seven years in particular we needed a smarter, more balanced approach to criminal justice issues, one that would protect public safety and be fiscally smart,” Ellem said.

The report shows that many states with conservative legislatures scored quite high. Similarly, some states like New York, whose government is controlled by Democrats, have scored in the bottom half of the country.

Many of the states that scored the highest, like Arkansas, only recently changed their laws after Supreme Court rulings forced them into compliance.

Originally sentenced to life in prison in Arkansas in 1985 at age 17, Laura Berry was released in 2017 on the condition of lifetime parole when her case was revisited under the new law.

Human Rights for Kids Twitter

James Dold, CEO of Human Rights for Kids, and Laura Berry, who was freed from a life sentence in 2017 and is now a juvenile justice advocate.

“It gave me a chance to reconnect with my son, it gave me a chance to reconnect with my mother who has been by me all those years,” Berry said. “It just gave me a chance ... for the very first time to live in society as an adult.”

Many like Yusef Qualls in Michigan are still waiting. His father blames the prosecutor’s office in Wayne County, where he was charged, for not revisiting the cases fast enough.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy pushed back against the claim that they were slow-walking cases. In a statement the office said that of the 144 juveniles serving life sentences charged in her county, her office had successfully revisited 96 and 66 had been released from prison.

Regardless of the numbers, Elder Qualls remains terrified for his son’s safety as he waits for the state to revisit his case, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage correctional facilities across Michigan.

The Marshall Project, which tracks COVID-19 data in correctional facilities across the country, shows Michigan at 6,617 — one of the highest per capita infection rates in the nation.

With the infection spreading, and no end in sight for his son, Elder Qualls worries about him. The younger Qualls recently lost his best friend, another man sentenced to life as a teenager, to the virus.

“I’m in constant terror. Every time I hear of a potential explosion [of the virus], I’m in panic,” Elder Qualls said. “Truth is, there is very little he can do to protect himself. I don’t rest, because there’s a sense of hopelessness. There’s nothing you can do.”