An 11-year-old denied making a threat and was allowed to return to school. Tennessee police arrested him anyway.
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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 ...
A campus shooting spurred her political awakening. Her whole family followed.
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.
Justice organization announces new youth restorative justice partners
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.
A Louisiana law meant to fight teen violence is sweeping 17-year-olds arrested for lesser crimes into adult court
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?
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Texas prisons and jails are recruiting more teenagers to shore up guard shortage
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School violence: Mapping incidents in Georgia
On Independence Day, a Reminder That the People Still Have Power
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Connecticut just made a major policy change that will protect kids and reduce crime. You probably didn’t notice. That’s understandable. The Raise the Age campaign that pushed for this legislation didn’t run television commercials or send out mailers. We couldn’t afford them.
Facts American Adults Can Learn from Undocumented Kids
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Now that young illegal immigrants are an election-year football, Americans have an opportunity to learn a few things from the kids. A lot of adults profess some degree of sympathy for these young people, who were born in undocumented parents’ native countries, brought here as very young children, either illegally or on visas parents overstayed. They’ve grown up here, gone to school here, speak English and feel American but are undocumented “through no fault of their own,” as both President Obama and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney say. But why can’t they go back to where they were born, line up and become legal “the right way?" Young illegal immigrants have been asking the same sort of question for years, as demonstrated on forums started by so-called DREAMers.
The $1 Million TED Talk
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Bryan Stevenson didn’t want to go to TED, the genre-defying annual conference full of big thinkers and big ideas. He brushed it off, claimed he was too busy and, besides, he didn’t know anything about it. He was preparing for a big case that was just days away – one that could result in a total ban on juveniles being sentenced to life without parole. Winning the case is a cornerstone goal of a litigation campaign by Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the Alabama nonprofit Stevenson founded to fight discrimination and injustice in the legal system. “Well, I have to say I wasn’t really interested in going,” Stevenson said in a recent interview.
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This summer, the JJIE brings you The Chicago Project, a sometimes multimedia, sometimes straight news, sometimes long form and always objective effort to cover a broad variety of reporting on youth issues from that city. The Project is a collaboration between the JJIE and seasoned reporters and students and is led by Eric Ferkenhoff, a former criminal justice and education beat reporter with the Chicago Tribune who is currently a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. His creation, The Chicago Bureau is a platform that seeks, “through an objective and narrow lens, to make sense of macro issues.” Now, through the JJIE, that reporting, that exploration of the issues and the lives of young people, will reach a wider readership. The aim here is good, solid journalism, but this is also an effort to give voice to some of the nation’s most talented young journalists so they can give voice to other young people who have no voice at all.
Quinn, Hoping to Fill Huge Budget Hole, Sends Mixed Message to State’s Neediest
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By Eric Ferkenhoff and Maryam Jameel
Only hours before a Sunday deadline, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn inked a $33.7 billion budget Saturday, balancing the books but angering some education and child welfare experts and confounding political observers who said the Democrat may well have done more harm than good to the state’s neediest residents. Quinn, facing a $43.8 billion budget deficit – reportedly the nation’s worst — before the new fiscal year 2013 kicked in, took a budget that the General Assembly handed him on Friday, and cut it by $57 million. In doing so, Quinn said ”our priority should always be the safety and well-being of our children,” and promised to return some of the Illinois’ legislature’s planned $50 million in cuts to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS, the agency that handles most abuse and neglect cases and shelters the most at-risk. But critics said just the opposite could happen as Quinn, while saying he was protecting children and their education, cut $200 million in education funding and $85 million in child-welfare funding. Kent Redfield, an Illinois political expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said that while the cuts bring immediate savings, they could deepen problems, leading to bigger spending down the road.
Texting and Driving: A Dangerous Gamble
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In 2010 the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported that the typical teenager sends and receives about 50 texts per day or 1,500 per month. But with the rapid increase in the number of teens between the ages of 12 and 17 owning cell phones, the dangers of texting behavior increases exponentially. Despite the fact that texting while driving is illegal in many states, including in Georgia, where I live, I’m still seeing teens and adults juggling the difficult tasks of driving, texting and talking on cell phones. It’s difficult to find a driver that isn’t driving distracted. And many of them are teens.