Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/kgray/)
To Syrita Steib, the University of New Orleans denied her first application for admission in what seemed like lightning speed. With equal speed, though, the university accepted her second application. The difference? The second time around, Steib didn’t disclose her criminal history.
After transferring juvenile detention and rehabilitation from the state’s hands to that of California’s counties, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Katherine Lucero, a former San Jose judge, as the first director of the new Office of Youth and Community Restoration in 2021.
Read the individual stories of Xochtil Larios, youth justice coordinator, Jacob Jackson, a community organizer, and Israel Villa, mentor to many juvenile justice-involved youth, about how personal experiences in the juvenile justice system shape their individuals' advocacy of justice reform.
In the months leading up to the June 30 shutdown of California’s more than 100-year-old lockups for juveniles, teenagers through 25-year-olds convicted of crimes such as robbery, rape and murder were transferred to county-run juvenile detention facilities nearer to their homes.
“I want everyone to hear me and hear me clearly,” Mayor Brandon Scott said during a press conference regarding youth-on-youth gun violence. “We are going back to the old days. We will be enforcing a youth curfew as we move into the latter spring and summer months.”
In his junior year of high school, an older boyfriend of Ethan Andrew’s sister introduced him to high-potency cannabis. The Colorado high schooler started regularly experimenting with that drug, legalized for adult Coloradans’ recreational use in 2012. He relied on it to sleep and get through his day. He didn’t expect its adverse effects on him.
While locked in a California prison for juveniles, Paul Bocenegra got his first shave, sprouted his first patch of chest hair and, he said, learned to fight at that facility, dubbed "gladiator school" because of its levels of violence. "I was condemned to prison to die in a cage at 17 years old," said Bocanegra, now 48, who was tried as an adult in 1992 and served 25 years of what was supposed to be a life-without-parole prison sentence.
“Solitary confinement tried to break my soul and whatever was left of me after my childhood trauma,” said Harlem, New York, native Guzman, now 30 and the executive director of America on Trial, a New York group that advocates for incarcerated people.
While in solitary, corrections officers sometimes refused to let him shower or made him forego being fed whenever he wasn’t at the opening of the doorway of his solitary cell when a meal arrived, added Guzman.
“These incidents could have had multiple victims or multiple perpetrators, which could result in more persons involved than the total number of incidents,” wrote researchers, who collect that data to meet mandates of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Most of the victims were boys, who, as a group, outnumber incarcerated girls, analysts found.
Girls accounted for 31% of all arrested youth in 2019, an increase from 18% in 1990, according to a new report from The Sentencing Project also finding that, as with boys, fewer girls ultimately were incarcerated between 2000 and 2019.