Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/ideas-and-opinions/page/39/)
It isn’t often that a district attorney’s race draws as much national attention as the one in Philadelphia did last fall. While much of the country was bemoaning the new national rhetoric that indicated a sharp departure from America’s centrist values on crime and punishment, Philadelphia was singing a different tune.
It’s fair to say that most of us working in the youth justice field do so because we’re committed to brighter futures for all kids, especially the ones facing the longest odds. We believe in human potential and second chances. We also believe that ensuring young people reach that potential requires policies that keep families together and allow them to flourish, communities that support them and systems that protect them.
I am writing you to let you know that the decisions I made at a young age has caught up to me.
I mean I started to use meth when I was 14 years old and at 16 years old I started to inject the meth.
At the end of a long week of classes, a 10th-grade girl from student government made an announcement in assembly over the buzz of 300 students. When she finished she passed the microphone to another student council member.
The work done during the Models for Change Initiative (funded by the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation) has embedded structural and practice improvements that continue to influence policy change in juvenile justice toward a more developmentally oriented and equitably responsive system.
Before the slaughter at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, The New York Times produced a powerful graphic showing the millions of NRA dollars some individual, yes, individual, U.S. senators and members of Congress have received, juxtaposed with their prayers and condolences to the families of shooting victims. That kind of hypocrisy didn’t surprise. It’s what we, as a nation, have become.
The juvenile justice system in the United States is ineffective, harmful and extremely expensive. It does not work, it makes youth worse, and it costs too much.
“To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.” —Malcolm X
While we often hear about the challenges in every area of juvenile justice, how often do we hear about the rewards? Perhaps nowhere within “the system” can we find a greater win-win situation for everyone involved than in internship opportunities for post-secondary students.
Minority youth are more likely to become incarcerated than white youth. This fact is so prevalent that even people outside the juvenile justice field are familiar with the term school-to-prison pipeline.