Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/maggie-lee/page/2/)
Freelance journalist Maggie Lee is based in Atlanta where she covers state and local governments.
This week, the fourth season of the A&E TV show “Beyond Scared Straight” follows two young sisters to the adult jail in Douglas County, Ga. “We’ve got a real serious ethical program here,” said Professor Del Elliott, the founding director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We’ve got a TV production that’s promoting a program which is doing harm to our children.”
A federal study ranked Paulding RYDC second in the nation for youth reports of sexual victimization while incarcerated.
ATLANTA -- During the men’s NCAA Final Four basketball tournament weekend in early April here, the FBI arrested four people on child sex exploitation charges and rescued seven minor females. The sex trade is always more active during large events, as is its sinister little sister, child sex trafficking. But for those minors trapped in the sex trade, where they’re found in the United States has a lot to do with how they will be treated by the law. In part, that’s because “there’s always some discussion of what fits” the definition of child sexual exploitation, said Francine Sherman, a professor at Boston College Law School and a defense attorney. She was leading an April 18 workshop on the topic at the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 3-day Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative conference in Atlanta.
Arresting young people too often turns them in to adults who get arrested, creating a so-called school-to-prison pipeline, say some juvenile justice experts. One way to break that cycle is to intervene early, but it takes a lot of community partners. “Not every kid who does something needs to go to juvenile court. That’s what we try to get across to our administrators,” said John Hall, from the Memphis, Tenn. school system’s School House Adjustment Program Enterprise at an Atlanta conference on Thursday.
ATLANTA-- “There is reason to think that we may, and I emphasize may, have reached a turning point in this era,” said Bart Lubow, director of the juvenile justice strategy group at The Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore. He made the comments Wednesday at an AECF-organized three-day conference of some 800 professionals from juvenile justice and child welfare fields in Atlanta. The U.S. Supreme Court made “an affirmation that youth are fundamentally different from adults,” said Lubow, in their June, 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama. In that case, the court struck down mandatory sentencing programs that send juveniles convicted of murder to life without a chance of parole as unconstitutional. The majority opinion mentioned psychological differences and youths’ greater capacity to reform as part of their thinking.
Georgia’s 244-page revision to its treatment of juvenile delinquents includes diversion ideas from the likes of Texas and Ohio as well as the idea used in many states of intervening with children before they commit a crime. House Bill 242 is the sum of months of research, a recommendation report from the Georgia Criminal Justice Reform Council, and a code update that’s been in the works for several years. “The governor agreed to have the Council’s recommendations incorporated into what we were doing last year, which involved not only a rewrite of the juvenile code but also some policy changes,” said state Rep. Wendell Willard, R-Sandy Springs, the bill’s sponsor. The attorney has led the years-long work on the existing code. The key recommendation from the 2012 report from the Council, a blue-ribbon panel of 20 judges, attorneys, legislators and law enforcement, was that low-risk juveniles be kept near home or at home for treatment, restorative justice and other consequences of rule-breaking.
Georgia’s DJJ boss tells state lawmakers that his department must be transformed to handle the burdens a class of inmates that’s older and more violent, and high employee turnover and low morale, just as the governor pushes a large package of reforms.
For the sake of the safety of inmates, staff and the public, “we must change the culture of the juvenile justice system,” said Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice Commissioner Avery Niles, at state budget hearings on Jan. 23. His fix involves a “realistic approach” and embracing options that include both sanctions and rehabilitation. “I’ve made this a top priority,” said Niles, who has been in office since the beginning of November. The average young person in DJJ custody is older, more aggressive and staying longer than a decade ago.
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is asking the state legislature to spend $5 million dollars to set up community diversion programs for low-risk youth offenders, on the model of other states. The appropriation would “create an incentive funding program” to encourage communities to treat appropriate youth at home, Deal told lawmakers at his annual State of the State address on Jan. 17. “We would emphasize community-based, non-confinement correctional methods for low-risk offenders as an alternative to regional and state youth centers,” Deal said, options like substance abuse treatment and family counseling. He emphasized the chance to save money, saying every secure bed in a Youth Detention Center, a facility for longer-term sentences, costs $91,000 annually.
A blue-ribbon panel in Georgia says the state should keep most misdemeanor offenders out of juvenile hall, and provide cash incentives for communities to channel kids away from custody and into programs that will divert them from further crime. That’s the unanimous vote of the Georgia Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform, after months of study and research assistance from the Pew Center on the States. “We have rethought what works to help that juvenile” who comes in contact with the criminal justice system, said state Court of Appeals Judge Mike Boggs, chair of the Council. “We want to try to incentivize communities to build evidence-based options in their communities. That works better at reducing recidivism than commitment to a secure facility,” Boggs said.
A blue-ribbon panel in Georgia is making the last tweaks to its recommendations for a statewide juvenile justice overhaul, ahead of a vote scheduled for Dec. 13. “There are ongoing meetings and discussions about a fiscal incentive model similar to Ohio,” said state Court of Appeals Judge Mike Boggs at a Dec. 4 meeting of the Georgia Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform in Forsyth, Ga. The so-called Ohio model, named for the state that pioneered it in the early 1990s, channels certain low-level offenders away from state custody and into locally-run diversion programs. The Georgia Council may recommend some formula to give financial incentives to counties for treating or diverting kids who are guilty of certain misdemeanors or things that are only illegal because of their youth, such as truancy.