Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/latest/page/20/)
The U.S. government picked up nearly 19,000 children traveling alone across the Mexican border in March, authorities said Thursday, the largest monthly number ever recorded and a major test for President Joe Biden as he reverses many of his predecessor's hardline immigration tactics.
It was the fall of 1988 when Rose Wilson, then 33, was given a life sentence for murder in South Carolina. Her daughter, Kasi, was only 8 months old. Like many children of incarcerated parents, Kasi was raised by relatives — in this case her grandparents — but her mother was always in her life. “We made constant visits. We would go see her once every three or four months or so,” Kasi Wilson said.
VIDEOGRAPHER: JACOB LANGSTON
JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Teri Sopp’s former self stares down from a wall in Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit Public Defender’s Office. The painting, a gift more than a dozen years ago, bears silent witness as she works to free people also frozen in time, serving lifelong sentences for crimes committed before they turned 18. For one client, she’s arguing reduced culpability because of lead. She expects to argue the same for other clients. Sopp is the director of the resentencing project for juveniles serving life without parole.
JACKSONVILLE, Florida — In the decades after the civil rights era, Black communities in Jacksonville remained disproportionately impoverished, blighted and policed. Some activists would say this continues to present day. This was the world in which John grew up. Born in the 1970s, John’s childhood was characterized by instability, neglect and abuse. John (a pseudonym) had lived in two dozen homes by the time he moved out.
NEW YORK — K’Juan Lanclos was playing basketball in a park near the Butler Community Center in the Bronx when his friends suddenly fled. Looking up, the then-13-year-old saw a wall of cops running straight at him. Not knowing what else to do, he ran too.
Christian Picciolini, 14, was hanging out one day in an alley near the intersection of Union and Division streets in Chicago.
An older man with cropped hair and big shiny boots drove up.
He was warm and friendly, and he offered fatherly advice: Don’t smoke marijuana, he told Picciolini. “That’s what the Communists and Jews want you to do,” he said. He told Picciolini to be proud of his Roman warrior ancestors: They were a superior race, he said. The man was Clark Martell, a violent neo-Nazi who was later sentenced to prison for assault and robbery. But Picciolini was hungry for attention and he saw Martell as heroic.
What do you do if you find racist graffiti on a wall near your school or youth program? Or come across neo-Nazi flyers in the area? Or read white nationalist comments on an online platform used by your program? A toolkit, “Confronting White Nationalism in Schools,” can help adults who work with youth choose specific responses. It was created by the Western States Center, a Portland, Oregon, nonprofit whose mission is to strengthen inclusive democracy and respond to bigotry and intolerance.
Nora Flanagan’s first brush with hate group recruiting took place when she was 15 and living in Beverly, a southwest Chicago neighborhood. Her older brother brought home a couple of his friends. To Flanagan’s dismay, they’d shaved their heads and wore Confederate flags on their jackets. It signaled they were part of the burgeoning skinhead movement in Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s, led by a teen named Christian Picciolini. “And they had been recruited and they were running around with this guy terrorizing the South Side.
When Michael Khanlarian began teaching incarcerated youth about the work of William Shakespeare, he never expected them to develop a rap about a 16th-century play. Using text from the play “Henry V,” a play about the titular British king and his rise to power, students created a cypher — a kind of freestyle rap battle — using Henry’s speeches.
A pregnant teenager stands alone in a cinder-block cell in one image. In another, a young body shivers, curled up in an oversized T-shirt huddled in the far corner of a cold cement room. The pictures are just a few of the thousands in a collection by Richard Ross, who uses his photography as a vehicle to highlight the needs of the estimated 48,000 children in custody each day. Ross has documented the lives of young people caught up in the juvenile justice system in Juvenile-in-Justice, a project he founded to connect human faces to a story often told in terms of cold statistics.
“My whole focus for the last 15 years has been interviewing these kids and being a co-conspirator with them in terms of trying to be the conduit for their voice,“ he said. Ross was one of three juvenile justice experts on a webinar hosted Tuesday by the Dui Hua Foundation as part of a series focused on unique issues girls face when they come into conflict with the legal system.