Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/page/349/)
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?
One afternoon, I was standing at a bus stop and I noticed an NYPD car driving slowly. As the officer approached, he slowed down. Bravely, he stared down each individual on the bus line. I caught his stare. He seemed just as suspicious of me as I was of him.
In a column posted on JJIE on March 7 and a data brief posted a few days earlier, Jeffrey Butts has provided an important caution to the juvenile justice reform community. Thrilled as we may be with the drop in youth incarceration over the past few years, we should not assume that it is the product of reform. As Jeff warned, “In claiming the recent trends as the effects of reform, we also risk complacency. If we think that we already ‘got this,’ we may miss a critical opportunity to lock down recent gains and create a permanently different way of thinking about youth justice.”
After issuing this timely warning, however, Jeff takes this argument a step further, positing that lower juvenile confinement rates are largely a function of falling juvenile arrests. “Incarceration numbers follow the crime rate,” he asserts – inviting readers to infer that incarceration rates would have declined irrespective of policy, practice and programmatic reforms that have taken root in many states and localities around the country.
I was looking for a pithy way to start my column about disproportionate minority contact and detention in the juvenile justice system. The obviousness of how unbalanced this aspect of our society’s approach to justice is rises, in my mind at least, to ludicrous heights. I thought I’d start with the history of the phrase, “Driving While Black”, and use that as an example most people would understand. The origins were a little elusive. It appears to have come into existence in the 1990s, although the practice of racial discrimination by law enforcement is of course much older.
Proposals for a juvenile code re-write were approved Wednesday by Georgia’s state Senate Judiciary Committee, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Last month, the state House passed House Bill 242 (HB 242) with unanimous approval. The proposed legislation would eliminate the jailing of juveniles for status offenses such as truancy, as well as re-categorize designated felonies into two classes, based on the severity of crimes committed by young people. Before approving HB 242, the committee altered elements of the bill, most significantly, changing a requirement that extended the timeframe for which detained status offenders were guaranteed hearings. Originally, the bill required hearings for status offenders within 24 hours of being detained; however, the committee revised the period to 72 hours, citing concerns for staffers who may not be able to provide services for young people over weekends or on holidays.
More than 900 documentary features were submitted to the 2013 South by Southwest Film Festival, with eight selected for competition. One of those eight is “12 O’Clock Boys,” a visually exhilarating film by first-time director Lotfy Nathan that opens a window on a distinctive urban subculture and the choices a young man faces as he grows from childhood to adolescence. The subject of “12 O’Clock Boys” is a group of men and boys in Baltimore who ride dirt bikes on public streets, defying the law and running the risk of serious injury or death, as well as endangering other drivers and pedestrians. They also like to do tricks on their bikes, the most prestigious of which is a vertical wheelie, with the top wheel in the 12 o’clock position, hence the film’s title. While the Baltimore police are not allowed to chase the bikers, for fear of endangering public safety, they do use helicopters as well as police cars to try to corral them, or track them to their homes, and then confiscate their bikes.
Oklahoma’s Commission on Children and Youth wants a Cleveland County program that assists non-violent offenders with re-entry implemented statewide, the Moore American reported. Introduced in 2009 by Sheriff Joe Lester, the Second Chance Act Program (S-CAP) offers services to women leaving the Cleveland County Detention Center. Since being implemented, the Bureau of Justice funded program has seen a staggering decrease in recidivism levels. Four years ago, 70 percent of women in the program were re-arrested; now, the rate of recidivism for S-CAP participants rests at just 10 percent. “We started this program because it is the right thing to do,” said Lester.
Having spent my entire professional career involved in the criminal and juvenile justice systems, I have had the opportunity to see tremendous changes in the fields. I began working as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in 1989, handling cases that ran the gamut from petit larceny all the way to murder. While I was never a prosecutor in juvenile court, I prosecuted hundreds of cases involving juvenile offenders. During my last three years in the DA's office, I served as the deputy bureau Chief of the Family Violence Unit and supervised the investigation and prosecution of all child abuse cases in Manhattan. As such, I saw way too many young people move from the child welfare to the juvenile justice system. After leaving Manhattan I served as a senior attorney for the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse for the National District Attorney’s Association and then as the director of the National Juvenile Justice Prosecution Center.
Sharletta Evans of Denver says it was her faith that motivated her to forgive the teens who killed her three-year-old son, Casson, during a drive-by shooting. When she did, Evans says, she could feel the hate evaporate from her body. She has since developed a relationship with one of the young men, whom she hopes to see released from prison. Minnesota’s Mary Johnson drew on her faith for the strength to meet with and forgive Oshea Israel, who was 16 when he killed Johnson’s 20-year-old son, Laramiun Byrd. Mary now considers Oshea, who lives next door to her, her spiritual son.