Children in Rutherford County, have been arrested and jailed at rates unparalleled in the state. This story reports on an investigation of why that is happening — and other ways the justice system there singles out children.
A bill that would strengthen oversight of Tennessee’s juvenile detention centers has failed, despite a concerted push for reform after multiple county-run facilities were found to be locking children alone in cells.
The bill was introduced in the state legislature in January after a WPLN and ProPublica investigation last year reported that seclusion was used as punishment for minor rule infractions like laughing during meals or talking during class. One facility, the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville, was particularly reliant on seclusion, in violation of state laws and standards that banned the practice as a form of discipline.
Usually in Tennessee, that would be a recipe for a bill to become a law. But the legislation was sent to what is called “summer study,” a maneuver that allows lawmakers to continue working on the legislation but is typically used to effectively kill a bill. Its sponsors and child welfare advocates are baffled as to why.
When Heather Martin was a senior in high school, she survived the 1999 Columbine High School shooting that killed 12 students and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado. Even as she tried to move on with her life, she carried the trauma of that day inside her — often in ways that surprised her. In junior college she struggled with panic attacks and an eating disorder. Eventually, Martin dropped out of college. Today, Martin is a high school English teacher who prioritizes making her students feel safe and giving them the tools to understand and cope with trauma. She’s also the executive director of The Rebels Project, a nonprofit that supports survivors of mass tragedy.
The Los Angeles school district’s decade-old ban on suspensions for ‘willful defiance’ has benefited students — but also required a major investment in less punitive discipline methods. The district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.
In separate trials earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents in U.S. history to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter for a mass shooting committed by their child. They were each sentenced to 10–15 years in prison, the maximum penalty for the crime. Prosecutors argued the Crumbleys ignored urgent warning signs that their son Ethan was having violent thoughts, and that the parents provided access to the gun he used to kill four classmates and injure seven other people at his school in November 2021.
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Research revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in a May 2022 survey did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had been trained, many received such instruction only once in their careers.
Just three days before her 15-year-old son carried out a mass shooting at his Michigan high school in 2021, Jennifer Crumbley was captured on security camera leaving a shooting range with the handgun in tow. She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”
Recently, at one of the writing workshops that I teach at three juvenile lockups in and around my hometown of St. Louis, one of my students posed a provocative question: “Why should I write about changing the world when the world doesn’t care about me?”
The roundtable discussion focused on the importance and effectiveness of mentoring and encouraged participation in mentorship opportunities for Florida’s youth.
In 2019 on Halloween, my wife and our daughter had watched an NYPD officer drive the wrong way up a Brooklyn street and hit a Black teenager. When the boy rolled off the car and ran away, the officers turned their attention to other nearby Black boys. The police lined them against a wall, cuffed them and took them away.
When you say the names of the Chicago communities where I grew up, they may evoke negative images. Both are neighborhoods with some of the city’s highest rates of gun violence. I grew up in North Lawndale and have lost friends and family on its streets. In the spring of ninth grade, one of these murders changed my life.
The judge responsible for the administration of a troubled juvenile detention center in rural southern Illinois abruptly moved to close it as of Dec. 31, citing staffing shortages that made it difficult to meet new state standards governing the treatment of youth in custody.
A 65% reduction in youth incarceration between 2005 and 2021 and the closing of two youth prisons during that time are among the great strides of Redeploy Illinois, an innovative Cook County program allowing communities to tailor state-funded juvenile treatment services to meet their particular characteristics and needs.