Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/jjie-org/page/11/)
A black and white picture of schoolchildren hangs on the wall of Paul Tutwiler’s office. He’s not related to any of the children who attended a segregated school for black people in the early 20th century, nor does he know their descendants. Yet those young faces strike a chord in him.
On a sunny afternoon in 2006, I was driving my four sons to a cookout in Newark, N.J., my hometown.
We had stopped at an intersection when a group of teenagers spilled into the street behind us. They were beating another young man, and it wasn’t a game. My sons started yelling, asking what was happening.
From training to practicing to now teaching, one of the key factors in psychotherapy that continually surfaces is countertransference (sorry self-care), which we know as the phenomenon of the clinician reaction to the client. I prefer to think of countertransference as our “entanglement” with the client — it is never neat and organized. And I think a lot of managing entanglement starts with recognizing that fundamentally, clinicians are entangled with themselves and the stories we create for ourselves. So this is a story about the story about my entanglements.
Imagine: You are 15 years old. Your mother, deep in drug debt, sends you to give a strange man $10. But somehow you know he expects more — your body. The world judges you as reckless, promiscuous, and inconsiderate of others.
—Kenjdra, in state custody
For about three months, Karen Kelly would drive around Enumclaw, Wash., after midnight looking for her 13-year-old daughter, Hollie. She carried Hollie’s photo with her, pulling over to show it to everyone she saw. Sometimes she got lucky. She learned that Hollie had talked a hotel manager into giving her a free room, or that she was camping out near the P.O. boxes in a post office, or that she’d settled into a tent in the bushes behind an industrial park. Hollie remained in Enumclaw, a town of less than 12,000 40 miles southeast of Seattle.
“Youth matters” in determining a juvenile’s sentence declared Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. This comment was offered during oral arguments for Mathena v. Malvo, a statement that seven of the nine justices appeared to agree with.
At the moment, the only experience that seems harder than serving seven years in prison is being free. Yes, you read that correctly. Make no mistake, “gratitude” doesn’t even begin to describe how it feels to be home, reunited with my family. I can finally eat, sleep and bathe when I want.
Five years ago, I was an ordinary mom and like most people I knew nothing about the criminal justice system and quite honestly, like most, I didn’t care. It didn’t affect me.
What can youth advocates in rural New England learn about reducing teen drug and alcohol use from a small island nation just below the Arctic Circle?
As the juvenile justice system has evolved, the use of statistics and data to inform decision-making have become commonplace. Risk assessment in...