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?
People don’t smoke in school anymore – at least they aren’t supposed to. My office is near an open campus high school, and I see a kid sneaking a cigarette from time to time. Nobody chews tobacco either, or (presumably) has a knife in their pocket. At my high school in south Georgia some kids had gun racks in their trucks, and they had real guns in them. One thing we lacked, unlike today, was a police presence in the school. Another was an alternative school.
A case that alleges chemical spray is overused in Birmingham, Ala., schools is headed to federal appeals court and will probably not re-emerge for at least a year. Attorneys for the school officials, resource officers and city police officers named as defendants have asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to hear two questions. First, if the case go forward as a class action; and second, if they have any official immunity. If the court decides to hear the questions, no ruling is likely for at least a year, said Ebony Howard, an attorney with the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center. She is lead attorney representing six youths who say officers on campus sprayed them with a chemical called Freeze+P for minor school-based infractions, including in one case, uncontrollable crying over being bullied.
The jail in Washington, D.C., recently began to allow family members to visit inmates by video conference. The problem is, in-person meetings are no longer permitted. The only way families can see each other now is by sitting in front of a computer screen several blocks apart. Correctional facilities in more than 20 states currently have or plan to have video technology in place, according to a report released by the research and advocacy organization The Sentencing Project. Video technology’s popularity in facilities is driven by a desire to cut staff costs, to reduce security risks created by in-person visits, and in some cases, to raise revenue.
On Election Day, in the final hours of a historic presidential race, Youth Today reporters spread out to polling stations across the nation and asked young voters what issues mattered most to them. To find out how they voted, check out the continuing updates to this real-time story at youthtoday.org.
As with most natural disasters, the attention of the media was initially centered on the havoc wrecked by Hurricane Sandy. We were drawn to its most dramatic images – the dangling crane at the construction site of a luxury high-rise in Midtown Manhattan; the New York City building whose façade collapsed, resembling the open side of a dollhouse; the half-submerged roller coaster, all that remained of an amusement park on the Jersey shore; the river of water running through the narrow streets of Hoboken; and the weeping mother who lost two toddlers amidst the flooding on Staten Island. We watched cable news. We texted REDCROSS to 90999. We donated canned goods and batteries. Yet, consistent with human nature, our interest soon faded.
New numbers released by the Criminal Justice Statistics Center indicate that last year, California posted its lowest number of juvenile arrests in more than half a century. The 2011 total of 149,563 juvenile arrests is the lowest annual tally since 1957; the first year statewide records were kept. Even when accounting for a larger youth population in the state, recent figures indicate California teens are less likely to be arrested for severe crimes, such as murder and rape, than young people 50 years ago. Since the 1970s, youth crime has been on a downward spiral in the Golden State, with the number of violent offenses perpetrated by juveniles plummeting by 50 percent over the last four decades. With reports from all 58 counties analyzed, researchers noted a 17 percent decrease in California juvenile arrests from 2010 to 2011, with violent and property offenses dropping by 16 percent, and status and misdemeanor offenses dropping by 21 percent.
Organizations that serve youth must overlap their defenses against sexual predators, say experts at a youth protection conference organized by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). “The first problem we have in the country is that most people most of the time won’t report abuse, no matter how clear the evidence is … even when they walk in on a child being sexually abused,” declared Victor Vieth, executive director of the National Child Protection Training Center at Minnesota’s Winona State University. “It’s not a close question,” he said, referring to decades of research. “People tell researchers, ‘I don’t report because I’m not quite sure.’”
In 2012 alone, personnel in the Roman Catholic Church, the BSA and Penn State University, to name a few big organizations, have all been accused or convicted of complicity in ignoring child sexual abuse, in some cases, for decades. That’s part of what’s fueled new public attention to child sex abuse in places where kids go to worship, learn and play. As a response, the BSA organized the two-day Atlanta conference, where some 40 leaders of youth-serving organizations, other non-profits, and advocates gathered to hear from leading child abuse prevention researchers.
