Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/page/4/)
When Heather Martin was a senior in high school, she survived the Columbine High School shooting that killed 12 students and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado. Even as she tried to move on with her life, she carried the trauma of that day inside her — often in ways that surprised her.
The following year, during a community college class, she burst into tears during a routine fire drill, confused and embarrassed by her emotional reaction.
“I hadn’t remembered, until that very moment, that the fire alarm had been going off while I was barricaded for three hours before the SWAT team came,” she said.
She also struggled with panic attacks, an eating disorder, and insensitive comments from instructors. Eventually, Martin dropped out of college.
Today, Martin is a high school English teacher who prioritizes making her students feel safe and giving them the tools to understand and cope with trauma. She’s also the executive director of The Rebels Project, a nonprofit that supports survivors of mass tragedy.
The Los Angeles school district’s decade-old ban on suspensions for ‘willful defiance’ has benefited students — but also required a major investment in less punitive discipline methods.
In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.
A Hechinger Report investigation reveals the national picture on suspension that is quite different.. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.
As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.
In separate trials earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents in U.S. history to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter for a mass shooting committed by their child.
On Tuesday, they were each sentenced to 10–15 years in prison, the maximum penalty for the crime. Prosecutors argued the Crumbleys ignored urgent warning signs that their son Ethan was having violent thoughts, and that the parents provided access to the gun he used to kill four classmates and injure seven other people at his school in November 2021.
When Yusef Qualls-El was 17, a judge sentenced him to life behind bars. It was the mid-1990s, an era when the U.S. prison population exploded.
Thousands of minors like Qualls-El received sentences of life without parole and entered prison at an age when their peers were going to college or starting their careers. But inside, education is often reserved for those who will soon return to society. As a result, those who were seen as the least likely to get out had the fewest opportunities.
To Syrita Steib, the University of New Orleans denied her first application for admission in what seemed like lightning speed. With equal speed, though, the university accepted her second application. The difference? The second time around, Steib didn’t disclose her criminal history.
After transferring juvenile detention and rehabilitation from the state’s hands to that of California’s counties, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Katherine Lucero, a former San Jose judge, as the first director of the new Office of Youth and Community Restoration in 2021.
Read the individual stories of Xochtil Larios, youth justice coordinator, Jacob Jackson, a community organizer, and Israel Villa, mentor to many juvenile justice-involved youth, about how personal experiences in the juvenile justice system shape their individuals' advocacy of justice reform.
In the months leading up to the June 30 shutdown of California’s more than 100-year-old lockups for juveniles, teenagers through 25-year-olds convicted of crimes such as robbery, rape and murder were transferred to county-run juvenile detention facilities nearer to their homes.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention last month introduced a volunteer internship program specifically designed for law students interested in pursuing careers in the youth justice and child welfare fields. The program will accept applications for semester-long positions starting in spring and summer 2024. During their internships, participants will engage in tasks such as legal research and analysis, and gain insights into federal, state, local and Tribal work encompassing prevention, intervention, and system involvement. Students may work remotely.
At the heart of this issue is whether it is appropriate to sentence children to die in prison, with no chance of being considered for release. Half a century ago, offenders in the U.S. of any age were rarely sentenced to life without parole, and it was not until 1978 that states began trying youths as adults. Between 1985 and 2001, however, youths convicted of murder were actually more likely to enter prison with a life sentence than adults convicted of the same crime.
BALTIMORE (AP) — A block party in Baltimore killed two people, wounded 28 others and prompted one resident to jump into action when she found a wounded teenage girl on her doorstep. Police identified the deceased as 18-year-old Aaliyah Gonzalez and 20-year-old Kylis Fagbemi. The 28 injured victims ranged in age from 13 to 32, with more than half younger than 18, officials said.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The first of two Iowa teenagers who pleaded guilty to beating their high school Spanish teacher to death with a baseball bat was sentenced Thursday to life with a possibility of parole after 35 years in prison.