Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/latest/page/11/)
The backstories of Sakran and Pep couldn’t be more different. But their survivor stories drive their activism about the public health threat that gun violence poses and prove what some of the most alarming news headlines increasingly suggest: Almost anybody, almost anywhere, is a potential victim of gun violence.
Citing, among others, the case of a Black boy who first was incarcerated, at 14, for stealing candy and, at 16, died at a restrictive wilderness camp where he was sent for violating curfew and other parole violations, this new report from The Sentencing Project suggests that U.S. courts divert comparatively fewer minority youth into community-based service or other rehabilitation. And diversion, overall, is sought less often than it should be.
Implemented in June, HB 1905 establishes a five-year budget of over $5 million to reduce homelessness among those aforementioned groups. Washington’s Office of Homeless Youth will be responsible for much of that budget, administering $1.6 million in flexible funding that lets people who are allotted those dollars determine how to spend them on transportation, telephone or other everyday expenses.
Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell last year launched the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. That office funds and evaluates efforts to especially reduce gun violence among youth — 15- through 24-year-olds nationwide accounted for most of a prior decades’ surge in firearm-driven homicides — and has partnered in an effort largely lead by public health professionals who are tackling the problem as more than merely an issue of crime and punishment.
Since 2007, 18 states have raised to 18 the age at which a person can be criminally charged as an adult, according to a 2021 report from The Sentencing Project. In a previous report, that organization concluded that 250,000 youth nationwide were being charged as adults annually in 2000. By 2019, that number was 53,000, an 80% drop.
By September 2020, 11 new unarmed public safety support specialists, many with law enforcement-related backgrounds, were in place and on the Minneapolis Public Schools payroll. Two years and one pandemic later, initial data and interviews with students and staff suggest that fewer Minneapolis students are being punished and, consequently, missing class for suspensions or other punishment.
Non-felony offenses accounted for two out of three arrests of juvenile girls in Florida, according to “The Justice for Girls Blueprint: The Way Forward for Florida,” recently released by the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center.
Two-thirds of the state's justice-involved girls but roughly one-third of boys — 66% versus 38% — were arrested for felony offenses. Two-thirds of girls and almost one-fifth of boys were incarcerated for non-felonies, according to the center's analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Dashboard, Department of Health Youth Substance Abuse Survey and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey...
West Charlotte High School had let out only minutes earlier when, hearing gunfire, school officials ordered an immediate lockdown and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers swarmed the campus. That incident, the week before Christmas break 2021, was the ninth time a gun had been found at one of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s most troubled public schools since the start of the school year.
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.