Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/ideas-and-opinions/page/73/)
Prisons, or concrete cages, are outdated concepts for animals. Our zoos have turned animal enclosures into humane reproductions of their natural home environment. Yet our detention centers/prisons remain cold, cruel and inhospitable for adults, let alone children.
If the U.S. Supreme Court has declared gay marriage to be part of the fundamental rights of privacy, speech and expression for all American citizens, does that signal the acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals?
For the juvenile justice and child welfare courts, the answer is decidedly “No.”
There are some things that this Southern white male with black slave-owning ancestors can say and get away with: “If I can see the racism in zero tolerance, why can’t you?”
Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man from Baltimore, made eye contact with a police officer and, at that moment, decided to run. There was seemingly little reason he would choose to do so, as he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Tragically, Gray died in police custody when he was being transported to a police station. Walter Scott, an older man from South Carolina, also ran from police officers after a traffic stop. He had a warrant out for his arrest, which might partly explain his fleeing the scene.
Many youth are deemed to have mental disabilities as a result of inadequate screening and the lack of responsive programming. Bipolar disorder diagnoses in particular have increased by 40 times among all youth, outpacing diagnoses among adults, in the last 10 years.
As a kid who has been involved in the streets, endured racial inequality and been incarcerated facing adult time, three things comes to my mind about how we can fix this: prevention, fair treatment of kids and re-entry.
“Without the help of good people and youth programs I would have a different life. I would have been one of those statistics my mother tried to warn me about.”
In the past two decades, the proportion of detained girls has increased at a rate four times as fast as the number of detained boys. And racial and ethnic disparities among justice-involved girls remain stark: Girls of color are detained, committed and sent to residential placements at rates significantly higher than their Caucasian counterparts.
I will never forget when the steel cell door slammed shut behind me. I stood in the darkness trying to fix my eyes and readjust the thoughts that were telling me this was not home. That this tiny space would not, could not be where I would spend a nickel of my life.
My daughter is deathly afraid of police. When I was pulled over for rolling through a stop sign when she was about 6, she leaped into the cargo area of the car to hide from the officer before I could even stop the car.