Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/page/332/)
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?
The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a new report detailing rates of sexual victimization in the nation’s juvenile facilities.
The report, incorporating data from the 2012 National Survey of Youth in Custody, found that nearly one in 10 young people in state-operated or state-contracted juvenile facilities reported at least one sexual victimization incident last year.
Humans naturally form groups, and the way we treat those inside our groups is different, usually radically so, from the way we treat outsiders. One cause of this is moral exclusion, “excluding other individuals or groups from one’s own moral community; i.e. viewing others as lying beyond the boundary within which moral values and rules of justice and fairness apply.”
Those within our group are part of our “scope of justice.” Those outside are treated to varying degrees of fairness. This is why people in churches, normally peaceful places, cheered when Osama Bin Laden was killed. This is why Americans in general are horrified by Newtown and indifferent to children who are casualties of drone strikes in Pakistan. One of the most glaring examples of moral exclusion and the limited scope of justice in the United States occurs in youth detention.
In order for 18-year-old Ashley Carroll to turn her prison cell resolution into a reality she had the help of a transition program that helps children in the city’s juvenile system.
A new law in a Wisconsin town will force the parents of bullies to pony up for their children’s taunting and teasing.
State legislation proposing to cut the number of juvenile judges from six to four was narrowly defeated Tuesday in a committee vote.
Photographer Richard Ross knows the juvenile justice system well. For his "Juvenile In Justice" project, he scoured the United States, interviewing thousands of detained young people in hundreds of facilities across the nation. And in May, he took his project to the next level, when he spent an entire 24 hours in lockup at a juvenile detention center in the Midwest. With a digital camera set-up, he photographed himself in an isolation cell, once every seven seconds; recently, photographs from the experiment were published on Wired.com.
See more of Richard's work from the Juvenile In Justice series on Bokeh, here: Richard Ross: Juvenile In Justice
My son is 25 years old. He has spent the majority of the last 15 years in detention centers, youth prisons, county jails and state prisons.
Most young people placed in detention have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime, according to a new report from the OJJDP.