In late September, Torri was driving down the highway with her 11-year-old son Junior in the back seat when her phone started ringing.
It was the Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy who worked at Junior’s middle school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Deputy Arthur Richardson asked Torri where she was. She told him she was on the way to a family birthday dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse.
“He said, ‘Is Junior with you?’” Torri recalled.
Earlier that day, Junior had been accused by other students of making a threat against the school. When Torri had come to pick him up, she’d spoken with Richardson and with administrators, who’d told her he was allowed to return to class the next day. The principal had said she would carry out an investigation then. ProPublica and WPLN are using a nickname for Junior and not including Torri’s last name at the family’s request, to prevent him from being identifiable.
When Richardson called her in the car, Torri immediately felt uneasy. He didn’t say much before hanging up, and she thought about turning around to go home. But she kept driving. When they walked into the restaurant, Torri watched as Junior happily greeted his family.
Soon her phone rang again. It was the deputy. He said he was outside in the strip mall’s parking lot and needed to talk to Junior. Torri called Junior’s stepdad, Kevin Boyer, for extra support, putting him on speaker as she went outside to talk to Richardson. She left Junior with the family, wanting to protect her son for as long as she could ...
TUCSON, Arizona — Adriana Grijalva was getting ready to head to class at the University of Arizona in the fall of 2022 when she got a text message from her cousin telling her to stay put. The cousin, who works in maintenance at the university, had watched law enforcement descend on campus and reached out to make sure she was safe. A former student had just shot a professor 11 times, killing him.
Equal Justice USA (EJUSA) announced October 8 that it will partner with four new communities to build new restorative youth justice diversion programs. Restorative justice includes an accountability process that identifies root causes of youth criminal actions, while providing an opportunity for healing both for the person harmed and the person who has caused harm.
Louisiana is the only state to pass and then reverse Raise the Age legislation. Louisiana’s criminal justice system now treats all 17-year-olds as adults. Is reversing Raise the Age making a difference in the number of violent crimes by 18-year-olds?
For a chance to earn a college degree while he’s incarcerated, Quantae has traded the matching color scheme and single-person cells of Lee’s young adult unit for concrete-gray quarters the size of a small bathroom that he now shares with another man at Ridgeland Correctional Institution. There he’s been able to enroll at Clafin University, the only college in our state currently using federal Pell Grants for prison education. He had to leave behind the supportive community he’d been a part of at Lee.
After running toward the sound of a gunshot that still haunts her, Marentha Sargent watched her 14-year-old, Adrienne Lambert, bleeding from the chest as she collapsed. Moments earlier, the 14-year-old son of Gene Roessler, Sargent’s friend, had ejected the magazine from Roessler’s gun, pointed its barrel at Adrienne and pulled the trigger. The boy didn’t realize, according to police records, there was a bullet in the chamber of his father’s handgun, which he’d grabbed from the kitchen table of their suburban Houston home while the adults were in the garage watching football on TV.
Unspent American Rescue Plan funds to lower the number of students who wind up in the juvenile justice system. The impact of racial disparities resulting from handling children through the adult criminal justice system. Innovative law school partnerships to aid youth simultaneously in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. How children without lawyers fare in immigration proceedings... Juvenile Justice Resource Hub curates those and other analyses, reviews and research on juvenile justice policy, practice, reform and programs.
How one prisoner, sentenced as a teen, sees spending millions on new juvenile jail:
For almost 25 years, I’ve been on North Carolina’s death row. The people on death row who have signed onto my letter protesting that new jail – and more than 40 other men on death row who wanted to sign but were physically unable to position themselves to do so – were confined as children to boot camps, reformatories, detention centers and youth prisons.
Some juvenile and criminal justice reform advocates laud restorative justice — it requires those who commit crimes to make amends, rather than merely face a prison sentence — as a potent solution to curbing crime. This model presumes that the wrongdoing is corrected when a defendant’s apology and efforts to take accountability somehow satisfy the victim. Restitution is measured by the defendant engaging in dialogue with the victim, alongside a neutral third-party, for months, if not years.
For more than 40 years, teen courts across the 50 states have proven their success at letting high school students — serving as lawyers, jurors, bailiffs and judges — determine the real-life sentences of alleged juvenile offenders who are their peers.
Such programs can double as a pre-law apprenticeships for high school students, while also aiming to divert juvenile offenders from incarceration.
Between Jan. 1, 2022 and April 25, 2022, Little Rock, Ark. — the 24th most violent of 65 cities, according to the FBI's most recent data — counted 24 homicides. That compared to 21 homicides during the same period in 2021, according to the Little Rock Police Department’s most recent count. A disproportionate number of those murders involved guns, continuing a trend. Blacks — mainly males — accounted for all homicide victims under 30 years old in Little Rock.
ByMichelle Liu, Associated Press/Report for America |
Several civil rights groups are suing South Carolina over conditions at its juvenile lockups, alleging that children in state custody are subject to violence and isolation while deprived of educational or rehabilitative programs.
