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?
How big a difference can new evidence-based treatment methods make in the cases of juvenile offenders with mental health problems? In Cook County, Illinois, juvenile court leaders decided to find out. Specifically, they agreed to participate in a randomized controlled experiment to test the impact of Multisystemic Therapy (MST) – a prominent new treatment methodology – against the court’s usual services for youth accused or adjudicated for juvenile sex offenses. The study, published in 2009, involved 127 youth accused of sex offenses and ordered by the court to attend sex offender treatment. Sixty-seven were assigned to MST, and 60 were assigned to Cook County probation department’s existing juvenile sex offender unit and required to take part in weekly sex offender treatment groups.
Mental health is one important issue in a bundle of issues affecting public understanding of juvenile crime and juvenile justice. Others in the same bundle include substance abuse, family violence, head injuries and various forms of trauma. Together, these influence juvenile justice policy and practice in profound ways. They are also easily misunderstood. Psychologist Gail Wasserman and her colleagues at Columbia University published a study in 2010 showing that mental health disorders are found in larger numbers as researchers look more deeply into the justice system.
It presents one of the most vexing challenges facing our nation’s juvenile courts and corrections systems: how to treat, supervise, punish or just plain cope with troubled teens whose delinquent behaviors are connected to or caused by emotional disturbances and mental health problems. In a continuing series, the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange explores these challenges and issues.
Although fewer numbers of low-level offenders are being sent to Ohio Department of Youth Services (DYS) centers, a Correctional Institution Inspection Committee report released last week found that personnel use of force to restrain adolescents and teens in the state’s facilities increased in 2012. Last year, an estimated 4.69 “use of force” incidents per youth were tallied up by the Committee. Three years earlier, the estimates were just 3.74 incidents per detained juvenile. One facility -- Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility -- was found to have a “use of force” rate that averaged 7.31 incidents per inmate. While the average rate of per capita “use of force” incidents has increased over a four-year period, the total number of “use of force” incidents in Ohio has dropped off considerably, however.
ATLANTA -- During the men’s NCAA Final Four basketball tournament weekend in early April here, the FBI arrested four people on child sex exploitation charges and rescued seven minor females. The sex trade is always more active during large events, as is its sinister little sister, child sex trafficking. But for those minors trapped in the sex trade, where they’re found in the United States has a lot to do with how they will be treated by the law. In part, that’s because “there’s always some discussion of what fits” the definition of child sexual exploitation, said Francine Sherman, a professor at Boston College Law School and a defense attorney. She was leading an April 18 workshop on the topic at the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 3-day Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative conference in Atlanta.
Two recent stories on the JJIE show the contrasting approaches that states have taken to address last year’s Miller vs. Alabama decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. If you aren’t familiar with the decision, the justices found that juvenile offenders, in part because of their lack of brain development, and thus decision making powers, are not eligible for mandatory life without parole sentences. The first article was about Connecticut, where the joint judiciary committee approved a bill granting reviews to those who receive a sentence greater than 10 years and were under the age of 18 when the crime was committed. The second, from Florida, takes a very different tack.
Arresting young people too often turns them in to adults who get arrested, creating a so-called school-to-prison pipeline, say some juvenile justice experts. One way to break that cycle is to intervene early, but it takes a lot of community partners. “Not every kid who does something needs to go to juvenile court. That’s what we try to get across to our administrators,” said John Hall, from the Memphis, Tenn. school system’s School House Adjustment Program Enterprise at an Atlanta conference on Thursday.
UPDATE: The Illinois House approved has signed off on a bill that would place more 17-year-olds in the state’s juvenile courts – steering more youth away from the adult system. As it is in Illinois, youth under 17 that are, in most cases, charged with felonies are tried as adults. Under the bill, which now goes to the Senate after an 89-26 House vote, 17-year-olds charged with “lesser felonies” would have their cases heard in juvenile courts. Offenders 17-year-old and younger charged with more serious offenses – among them murder, aggravated sexual assault and armed robbery – would still face an automatic transfer to adult court. The idea behind the bill mirrors a national trend toward easing punishment and consequences for juveniles and greater emphasis on rehabilitation with nod to science and court rulings that minors’ brains have not matured to a level that they should face adult sanctions for crimes committed while still young.
