Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/nickolasbagley/page/3/)
Ghost guns — so-called because they are nearly impossible to trace — are sold in parts and assembled by the buyer. Until recently, they were not classified as firearms, meaning there were no background checks and dealers didn’t have to be federally-licensed.
That has opened the door for traffickers, teens and people with felony records to get ghost guns.
"The United States incarcerates an alarming number of children and adolescents every year. Disproportionately, they are youth of color.
Given the short- and long-term damages stemming from youth out of home placement, it is vital to understand its true scope. In 2019, there were more than 240,000 instances of a young person detained, committed, or both in the juvenile justice system. However, youth incarceration is typically measured via a one-day count taken in late October. This metric vastly understates its footprint: at least 80% of incarcerated youth are excluded from the one-day count..."
Surveillance video shows a Black 17-year-old struggling with staff at a Wichita juvenile center last fall before he died after he was restrained facedown for more than 30 minutes.
Sedgwick County released 18 video clips late Friday afternoon of what happened before Cedric Lofton was rushed to a hospital on Sept. 24. He died two days later.
The Louisiana inmate whose Supreme Court case was instrumental in extending the possibility of freedom to hundreds of people sentenced to life in prison without the opportunity for parole when they were juveniles was freed on parole Wednesday after spending nearly six decades behind bars.
Henry Montgomery, 75, was released from prison just hours after the parole board's decision and went to the offices of the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit which is supporting him after his release. There he was embraced by tearful staff and former juvenile lifers who were freed as a result of the court case that bears Montgomery's name.
Kids are still an afterthought in reforms championed by lawmakers and pushed by police departments. But in case after case, an Associated Press investigation has found that children as young as 6 have been treated harshly — even brutally — by officers of the law. They've been handcuffed, felled by stun guns, taken down and pinned to the ground by officers often far larger than they were. Departments nationwide have few or no guardrails to prevent such incidents.
Gun violence is killing an increasing number of American children, from toddlers caught in crossfires to teenagers gunned down in turf wars, drug squabbles or for posting the wrong thing on social media. Experts say idleness caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shares the blame with easy access to guns and disputes that too often end with gunfire.
Based on a September 2020 analysis finding that South Carolina schools in 2018 referred almost 61,000 students to juvenile courts solely for being excessively absent from school, the Council on State Governments Justice Center recently re-issued guidance for changing juvenile probation protocols that aim to improve the students' educational prospects and classroom attendance.
Since Just Us launched in January, 25 youth have enrolled in a three-year pilot project that pays girls and queer youth involved in the criminal justice system, or who are at-risk for winding up there, to participate in projects aimed at keeping them out of detention facilities.
Run by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services and created by a Vera Institute of Justice task force, JustUs provides individual and group counseling; legal advocacy; employment workshops; and internships for Brooklyn youth. The program serves females who are lesbian, bisexual and straight and youth who are non-binary, trans or queer.
“A lot of times, people are looking for support and they want to be heard and seen,” said Helianis Quijada Salazar, director of JustUs. “We try to customize everything to meet the unique needs of a person.”
It had been scarcely a year since his son was discharged from the Navy following a suicide attempt, Ramon Day said, and only a few months since he’d voluntarily undergone in-patient care at Mental Health Resource Center in Jacksonville, Fla. So, when then 25-year-old Tyler Day returned from a Department of Veterans Affairs counseling appointment and offhandedly mentioned that he’d bought a gun, his father was stunned.
“You having a gun upsets me a great deal,” Ramon Day said, recalling his fright over his son’s revelation back in the summer of 2011. “If you would do me a personal favor, return the gun.”
Black youth were more than four times as likely as white ones to be detained or committed to a juvenile facility, according to a report released this month by The Sentencing Project, which also noted that the Black-white disparity in detention and incarceration declined since it last analyzed the data. The newest report is based on the 36,479 youth in a total of 1,510 detention centers, youth prisons, residential treatment centers and youth homes as of October 2019; the prior analysis was conducted in 2015.