Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/jjie-org/page/10/)
Concentrated gun violence results in lost population and economic power, increases trauma throughout communities and depresses school outcomes among students exposed to violence. Interventions deliberately designed to empower youth who are frequently exposed to community trauma are an important tool to break the cycle of violence that repeats far too frequently.
On a Friday night in Bloomfield, N.J., middle school children hang out at Foley Field to watch the high school football team play.
Officer Marvid Camacho provides security at the game. As the resource officer at Bloomfield Middle School, he knows all the kids in town.
Camacho is a new breed of cop. His role, as he sees it, is to prevent crimes, not just respond to them afterward. He tries to build a connection with kids and give them life lessons that will keep them out of the criminal justice system.
It was an early morning, uncommonly quiet, and with no movement because of a fog alert, yet people were going to different places, to work, to the yard or day room to play cards and chess. My cellie went on a visit.
Gun violence in the United States has rapidly become a problem that has touched the lives of millions of people. Whether directly or indirectly, research shows that over 1.2 million people have been shot in the past decade, millions have witnessed gun violence firsthand and hundreds of millions of people will know at least one victim of gun violence in their lifetime.
With one worried phone call from the mother of a 16-year-old boy, the modern movement that brought raise the age to North Carolina began, drawing legislators, activists, lawyers, parents and kids into a battle that lasted more than 13 years before the state passed its RTA bill in summer 2017.
Just three months after raise the age took effect on Dec. 1 in North Carolina, early numbers seem to reflect a gentle transition from prosecuting 16- and 17-year-olds in the adult system to prosecuting them in the juvenile system.
The lights are somehow brighter at 2 a.m., fluorescent and imposing, shining directly onto the hard white table in the center of the room. The paramedics wheel in a gurney with a lifeless body, blood-stained clothes and the face of a boy. The words that follow are too familiar, ”16-year-old male, no known past medical, GSW to the abdomen and right lower extremity …” The boy is transferred to the trauma table and the battle for another life begins.
Sarah is a mother living in Madison, Wis., whose son was involved in juvenile court for breaking a window at his school. Now, she’s struggling to pay bills for court fines and fees (which we refer to as legal financial obligations, or LFOs) that just keep on coming in the mail.
I am an inmate at Liberty Correctional in Bristol, Fla. I am going on my 12th year of a 40-year-sentence for a nonviolent, first-time offense I committed 60 days into my 17th birthday.
On Nov. 14, Gary Ervin attended a vigil for a young life cut tragically short by gun violence. Days earlier, a 15-year-old was killed in a shooting near a Burger King on the northwest side of Jacksonville.