Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/page/212/)
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?
Many addicts, when they get thrown a rope, say, “Great, pull me up.”
No, Strode tells them. Pull yourself up. Here, take this real rope and fasten it to the real harness we gave you and start climbing up the wall of this cliff — a real cliff with jagged rocks that can scrape skin and draw real blood.
In the past two decades, the proportion of detained girls has increased at a rate four times as fast as the number of detained boys. And racial and ethnic disparities among justice-involved girls remain stark: Girls of color are detained, committed and sent to residential placements at rates significantly higher than their Caucasian counterparts.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is throwing new weight into its campaign to close state juvenile correctional centers nationwide, saying they’ve effectively become “youth prisons” where teens are prone to being abused.
“I wasn’t fighting with the insurance company” over the 30-day limit for her son's treatment, Missy Owen says. “We were following what they told us to do. … I was a very young addict’s mother. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. … When they told me my kid was good to go in 21 days, I was like, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ I had no idea.”
NEW YORK — This isn’t your typical prison photography. But it isn’t supposed to be.
As part of his Windows from Prison workshop, Mark Strandquist asks incarcerated individuals a simple question: “If you could have a window in your cell, what place from your past would it look out to?”
NEW YORK — Hunting curbside metal trash at dawn, brothers Luqman and Aje Stroud creep down the streets of eastern Brooklyn in a banged-up white van they call the White Ghost. Now in their mid-20s, they have been at this since they were in grade school.
It could be a family business if the city didn’t say it was against the law.
Youth Today spoke to six young people July 2 at the 2015 International Convention of Alcoholics Anonymous in Atlanta.
I will never forget when the steel cell door slammed shut behind me. I stood in the darkness trying to fix my eyes and readjust the thoughts that were telling me this was not home. That this tiny space would not, could not be where I would spend a nickel of my life.