Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/latest/page/9/)
On the first day of Zoom classes, my professor went straight into content that I’m all too familiar with: the school-to-prison pipeline. Every day as a certified peer support specialist at a maximum security prison, I see the long-term impacts of poverty and a broken K-12 system in marginalized communities. I’m taking the class on a contraband cell phone. Now, I’m connected to the world.
Will Keeps was a 15-year-old member of a Chicago gang when he witnessed rival members kill his friend. He escaped the streets and moved to Iowa to help other young people from troubled backgrounds. Now, Keeps is hospitalized and in serious condition following just the sort of violence he has devoted his life to stopping: a shooting that killed two teenagers at the Starts Right Here education program he founded in Des Moines.
As kids' behavior reaches crisis points after the stress and isolation of pandemic shutdowns, many schools are facing pressure from critics to rethink their approaches to discipline — including policies intended to reduce suspensions and expulsions.
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services wrongfully incarcerated hundreds of children in juvenile detention after a court ordered them to be released to their guardian, according to a class action lawsuit filed Thursday by Cook County's public guardian.
To some in the audience, Jeremy White sounding like he was preaching.
“I was 19 years old when I got incarcerated. I was facing 120 years,” White, 42, said, his words deliberate, his cadence suited for a Sunday morning pulpit, his Tennessee drawl full on.
“ … [I began] remembering where I came from … ”
“That’s good, that’s good!” Vickie Woodard exclaimed.
When her father, Almeer Nance, was 16, he was sentenced to a minimum of 51 years and, after that, another 25 years for abetting a robbery of a Knoxville Radio Shack and being an accomplice to the murder of store employee Joseph Ridings, 21. The shooter, then-19-year-old Robert Vincent Manning, was sentenced to life without parole.
The number of children incarcerated in juvenile prisons across the United States fell to an all-time low in 2020, the latest year of available federal data about those facilities, fueling proponents’ hopes of entirely eliminating those detention centers.
The decline in incarcerations came as juvenile arrests have also dropped for most crimes except murder, which has been on the rise in recent years.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled that mandatory life sentences for youth are cruel and unusual punishment. According to that 3-to-2 vote by the court late last year, those convicted of murder as minors must be allowed a chance at parole after a minimum of 25 years in prison.
A new study that finds handgun carriage by adolescents has gone up significantly over the past two decades. The jump — 41% — was especially pronounced among rural, white, and higher-income adolescents, according to the study, which was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
While male teens are still more likely to carry handguns than females, the rate at which girls and young women are carrying handguns is rising more quickly, a study published earlier this year in the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests.
“This is probably the newest trend,” said the Rev. Kenny Irby, community intervention director for the St. Petersburg Police Department.