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 mammoth 85% decline in arrest rates of youths in California since 1995, along with the current coronavirus pandemic, have emptied California’s juvenile facilities. As of Aug. 8, just 2,800 people were incarcerated in state and local juvenile facilities, down from over 20,000 in 1995. As the state moves forward, we can continue spending vast amounts on incarceration and probation. Or, as outlined previously, California can use this unique opportunity to reshape its juvenile justice system.
The U.S. Department of Justice recently released two statistical reports that appear to stand in contrast. A report released in June of this year states that in 2018, law enforcement agencies made the fewest number of arrests of juveniles in almost 40 years. But a different report, released in April, shows that juvenile homicide cases spiked by 35% between 2014 and 2018, which overlaps with the period of the June report.
The ostensible discrepancy between these two reports, if viewed without sufficient context, can potentially lead to some misinterpretations and misunderstandings. In particular, given what is occurring currently with regards to the Black Lives Matter movement and heightened tensions surrounding police-community relations, caution should be used when these statistics are directly cited in relation to cases involving Black residents in urban communities.
Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has previously pointed out the problematic nature of centering the statistical rise in homicides around a narrative about tensions between the police and Black communities. This idea, pushed by some commentators in the popular media, that the increase in homicides was attributed to law enforcement agencies reducing their policing in Black neighborhoods as a result of police-community tensions, is often referred to as the Ferguson Effect.
Looking back at my youth and trying to pinpoint where did I go wrong and how did I go wrong, I realized that the whole time I was trying to get my basic needs met. Needs such as love and a sense of belonging, survival and freedom. My earliest memory was around the age of 5 that I realized that we didn’t have enough food in our home. My daily meal was a small bowl of dirty brown rice with maybe a small chunk of pork fat because we could not afford meat. Pork fat was cheaper than red meat.
“Juvenile justice is a gender-specific system, one that reflects and operates on assumptions about gender and reflects masculine [and feminine] norms.” —Law professor Nancy Dowd
As Nancy Dowd notes, juvenile justice systems tend to be highly gendered and gendering environments, ones that anticipate, reward and even punish specific sorts of masculinity in boys and femininity in girls.
However, because it simply assumes that boys will be manly and girls feminine juvenile justice systems are largely unaware of their own gender assumptions and thus unable to question or change them. Perhaps the main area where juvenile justice does explicitly address gender norms is programming for LGBTQ+ youth (which addresses issues of gender nonconformity). This is not to say that most girls won’t want to be feminine and boys masculine; of course they will. It’s about what kinds of manhood and womanhood we want them learning.
For instance, being manly can mean learning to keep a stiff upper lip, protect the weak and put women and children first. It can also mean getting lots of girls pregnant and beating up queers.
Both of these are definitions of masculinity that circulate in different subcultures in different places.
This summer Kennesaw State University hired Gary Green as executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism, publisher of JJIE.org. Green joined the CSJ from the University of Florida where he served since 2014 as digital director of the Innovation News Center and deputy news director for WUFT News, the NPR and PBS affiliates for north-central Florida. During his tenure at UF, he managed award-winning coverage — breaking news, daily and enterprise stories, investigative and long-form projects — across TV (PBS), radio (NPR), web and social media platforms. He co-founded Fresh Take Florida, UF’s state government news service, and led collaborations between the First Amendment Foundation, the National Freedom of Information Coalition and statewide news organizations. His leadership extended beyond UF, across the state as the university’s designate for the Florida Climate Reporting Network and as board trustee for six years at the First Amendment Foundation; most recently he served as vice chair of the board. “As we enter the latter half of what has been an extraordinary year with challenges many of us could never have imagined, the Center for Sustainable Journalism remains as dedicated as ever to lifting the voice of our country’s most vulnerable youth and reporting on the systemic injustices that plague their lives and prevent them from realizing their dreams,” Green said, “and while doing so, providing Kennesaw State University students experiential learning opportunities for professional development through the CSJ.”
“I am privileged that KSU offered me this opportunity to serve our students, our local community and national audiences to fulfill the mission of the university and CSJ.
(Series: Part 6 of 7)
Part 1: How Do We Make Youth Homelessness Effort Bipartisan? Part 2: America’s Biases Marginalize Youth, Drive Them to Homelessness
Part 3: Collective Decision-making Can Neutralize Politics of Fear
Part 4: So, How Does This Collective Decision-making Work? Part 5: Youth Homelessness Is a Symptom, Not a Cause
Generating alternatives is key to effective decision-making because it provides the decision-makers in a collective body with an array of choices from which to choose. The more alternatives, the better the odds of identifying the solution best suited to resolve the problem. Decision theorist Robin Hogarth describes this process as follows:
Imagination and creativity play key roles in judgement and choice.
Mark Trammell hadn't been a free man since he was a teenager, but this year he hoped that was about to change.
Set for parole in February, Trammell was ready to go home to see his family. After more than 40 years for voluntary manslaughter and kidnapping in South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) facilities, he wanted his last moments to be outside prison walls. His stage 4 liver cancer, the result of untreated hepatitis, would make him particularly vulnerable to diseases like COVID-19. Not only would he be denied parole, but by June 6 he would die in a Columbia, South Carolina hospital from COVID-19. Though initially his death was erroneously reported to his family as related to his cancer, Trammell would be one of the first reported COVID-19 deaths at an SCDC facility.
As a society, we owe a special commitment to youth in custody. Incarceration of any kind causes very real trauma and doing so at a time when young people are growing and learning only compounds the trauma. Our juvenile justice system must seek not to punish, but to support these children’s social, emotional and educational development.
In normal circumstances, our national juvenile justice system does not always serve these children properly. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we are failing our community’s children. With the current health restrictions around the pandemic, youth in custody have extremely limited or no in-person visitation from family and friends.
