NEW YORK — In 2017, a disabled 8-year-old Latino boy was sitting at his school lunch table with other students. They were playing with a spork, poking each other. The boy, who was being excluded, decided to poke the other children anyway, causing school staff to take it away. The staff became frustrated and called in school safety agents to diffuse the situation. The agents were unable to calm the child down and instead called the police.
At a time when COVID-19 cases continue to rise at correctional facilities across the country, Deidra Bridgeforth considers herself lucky. Leading the juvenile detention system in Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes the city of Memphis, Bridgeforth seems almost surprised their detention system has been spared from the virus.
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When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke in New York City this spring, the most vulnerable populations were at the bottom of a long list of people who desperately needed help during the first few months of business and school closures, shortages of personal protective equipment, food and household necessities.
More than 40,000 K–12 public school students in Washington experienced homelessness in 2017–18, a number that has nearly doubled in the past decade and likely will continue to grow because of pandemic-driven job losses. For these youth, remote schooling might mean attending class in a shelter room they share with their mother and two siblings. It might mean missing classes due to glitchy Wi-Fi or insufficient cellphone data. And, especially for homeless youth who are on their own, it might mean not having an adult who can help them with assignments and prod them to stay on track.
JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Rosie Brooks has experienced both of a mother’s worst nightmares involving gun violence. Her son spent a decade behind bars for an accidental shooting in which a young woman was killed. Then, instead of a joyous reunion when he was released from prison in January 2018, it was a day of mourning. He went from behind bars to standing at his mother’s side at his sister’s funeral. Brooks’ daughter Sahara Barkley had been shot on New Year’s Day at a gas station.
Since 2016, Elder Yusef Qualls has been on a tireless campaign to have officials in Michigan revisit a criminal case that has kept his son incarcerated for over two decades.
A so-called “juvenile lifer,” Qualls’ son, also named Yusef Qualls, has lived within Michigan’s adult correctional system since 1997. At 17 Qualls was sentenced to life without parole after police linked him as an accomplice to the murder of a woman in Detroit. Elder Qualls has been a juvenile justice advocate since his son’s incarceration began. But the fight took a new turn when, in 2016, the Supreme Court retroactively banned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. That meant the courts had to revisit his son’s case.
NEW YORK — They all had disturbing stories, and they all had a familiar ring to them.
Yakov, who declined to give his last name, was waiting in line at the Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan waiting to take a leisurely ferry trip across the bay to Staten Island when he was told to get out by other passengers. He was wearing a mask, he said, but that didn’t matter as much as his conservative garb.
“They’re looking for an excuse to hate us, and they found it in the virus,” the 16-year-old said. “The pandemic has given them the freedom to say what they always have wanted.”
Yehuda Weinstock took his children upstate to go apple picking. “We were treated like we had the plague,” he said. ‘What do you say to your children?”
Coronavirus and the fear it has stoked across the city after bodies were piled up outside hospitals in the spring has led to the resurgence of a social virus. Scarred by daily experiences of anti-Semitism, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn fear the pandemic and the restrictions that come with it will incite hatred and violence toward them.
MACON, Georgia — Bibb County District Attorney David Cooke first heard about school-justice partnerships five years ago on the other side of the country, at a juvenile justice conference in Phoenix. But the successful program that inspired him started only 70 miles away from Macon, in Clayton County.
Nearly two decades ago, the chief judge of Clayton County’s juvenile court pioneered an approach aimed at keeping children out of the criminal justice system and in school. His strategy was to address misconduct within the school system and replace exclusionary discipline — like expulsions and suspensions — with services children needed. The model he devised, called a school-justice partnership, recognized that underlying many school disciplinary problems are histories of trauma and unmet mental health needs — and that responding to children’s disciplinary problems by involving them with the juvenile justice system only increases their risk for further justice system involvement. Under Cooke’s leadership, the Bibb County School District’s school-justice partnership had a successful start during the 2018-19 school year.
As David Reeve approached the picnic, he knew he was the odd one out. After all, it took some convincing for the group to make an exception for him. Unlike the men barbecuing and swapping prison stories, Reeve never spent time in California’s juvenile justice system or its infamous Youth Training School, which the men dubbed the “Gladiator School.”
“They called YTS a gladiator school because you are going to learn and harden yourself into becoming a gladiator,” Reeve said. “You are going to learn to fight, to make deals and negotiate for survival because many of them were headed towards adult prisons like San Quentin or other hardened prisons.”
Among the picnickers who gathered at Yucaipa Community Park in Yucaipa, California, for the reunion were John Berge. He spent 22 months at YTS before returning as an adult, working as a vocational instructor and later as an institutional gang investigator, Reeve said.
Torch has been on the street 11 years, he says. With no fixed address, he is a permanent resident of Little Five Points, a robust business district of mom and pop entrepreneurs in east Atlanta.
