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?
There is no recent official count of how many individuals have departed gang life. In 2012, the most recent year that the U.S. Department of Justice National Gang Center estimated the data, roughly 850,000 members were in some 30,700 youth gangs across the country. Those numbers decreased from 1996 through 2002, then increased steadily over the next decade. A 2014 study in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology found that 70% of gang members joined as adolescents and left before adulthood.
Why do young people join, why do they leave and how do they stay away?
Before Gisele Castro became executive director of Exalt, a New York nonprofit working to stem what she and others refer to as the school-to-prison pipeline, she spent 25 years at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Service. There, for adults convicted of crimes involving crack cocaine, she worked to arrange alternatives to incarceration. Read our interview with this "staunch supporter of New York state's 'raise-the-age' law."
Separate investigations by the federal Government Accountability Office and Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general that were launched in 2021, are the first inquiries of their kind in more than a dozen years. Those probes target farms, boot camps and similar residential programs whose proprietors claim are therapeutic. Critics call many of those business owners profiteers, operating under the guise of treating teens with mental and/or behavioral disorders and those at-risk for involvement in the juvenile justice system.
Pressured by Worth Rises and similar advocacy groups, the Federal Communication Commission last year imposed ceilings on the costs of interstate calls from convicted people in prisons and the mainly pre-trial detainees in jails. Before the FCC’s action, a handful but growing number of municipalities and states already were moving in that direction.
Most youth involved in the juvenile justice system between 2010 and 2019 in Harris County, Texas -- the nation's third-largest county -- a small fraction of youth with repeated run-ins with law enforcement accounted for the bulk of those who were in pre-trial detention, prosecuted, on probation or in post-conviction incarceration or some other restrictive placement, according to a recent Texas Policy Lab analysis.
Daily, an average of 17 U.S. veterans has resorted to suicide, taking their lives at a 52.3% greater rate than other Americans did in 2019, when 6,261 veterans died by suicide. Firearms were involved in 69.2% of those deaths. Veterans aged 34 and younger died at a higher rate than any other former service members.
As suicide rates for women veterans have increased, proportionately, more than male rates, an increasing number of those deaths involved firearms, according to the “National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report,” released in September 2021.
Almost 22,000 10- through 24-year-olds died of accidental drug overdoses in the United States between 2015 and 2019, according to a new study also finding that males accounted for 71.9% of those deaths and females for 28.1%. Of those 21,689 young people, 3,296 were aged 10 through 19.
