Poll Shows Young People Fear Country is on Wrong Track, But Still Support Obama by Wide Margin

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Only one in five young people believe the United States is heading in the right direction, yet more are still likely to vote for President Barack Obama in the next election, according to a recent poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics. The national poll of 3,096 millennials – the term sometimes used to refer to people between the ages of 18 and 29 – found that nearly twice as many young people thought the country is “on the wrong track” than those who said it is heading in the right direction, while 36 percent weren’t sure. But those figures don’t necessarily paint a positive picture for Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. Obama’s approval ratings among those polled improved to 52 percent, up six points from a previous low in late 2011, bringing his lead over Romney to a strong 17 percentage points. “Over the last several months, we have seen more of the millennial vote begin to solidify around President Obama and Democrats in Congress,” Harvard Institute of Politics Director Trey Grayson said in a press release.

Reducing Gang Violence and Saving Money

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Scott State Prison, in Milledgeville, Ga., was originally built as a hospital during the Great Depression. I was there for a few years, until it closed in 2004. One of the unique features of this place, for a prison anyway, was that it had porches attached to the dormitories. These made a nice spot to go hang out in the heat of summer, and they provided a place for smokers to light up. It helped make up a little for the run-down conditions.

School Discipline Debate Reignited by New Los Angeles Data

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This story originally appeared on iWatchnews.org by the Center for Public Integrity

As a national debate heats up over appropriate student discipline, new data from Los Angeles reveal that school police there issued more than 33,500 court summonses to youths between 10 and 18 in three years — with more than 40 percent of those tickets going to children 14 and younger. The data obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show that officers of the nation’s largest school police force issued the equivalent of 28 tickets every day to students during the 2011 calendar year. The Los Angeles Unified School District totals almost 680,000 pupils; the district’s police force has 340 sworn officers and support staff. Students ticketed in 2009 through 2011 were disproportionately Latino or African American. Last year, black students represented about 10 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District but 15 percent of those ticketed.

May 3 Webinar Tackles Media Depictions of African-American Men and Boys

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Last October, The Opportunity Agenda, a New York-based advocacy group, released a new report about the influence of media in regards to national perceptions of African-American men. The report, "Opportunity for Black Men and Boys: Public Opinion, Media Depictions, and Media Consumption," covered a decade’s worth of research, concluding that depictions of black males were frequently distorted and unrealistically presented in media compared to national data sets and statistics. The Opportunity Agenda Executive Director, Alan Jenkins, will join Dori J. Maynard, president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, for a webinar presentation next month to discuss the report’s findings. The one-hour web broadcast, scheduled for May 3 at 3 p.m., will examine how Americans’ attitudes towards African-American males are potentially shaped by media portrayals, including the depictions of black youth in news reports, advertising and entertainment. Additionally, Jenkins and Maynard are expected to discuss ways in which media outlets can change the way they present depictions of African-American youth.

Reform Justice System that Destroys Young Lives: Casey CEO

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Patrick McCarthy,President & CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, today called for transforming the juvenile justice in the United States into “a system that saves young lives rather than one destroying young lives. It will happen if the people working with youth “have the will, commitment and the courage” to make the changes needed. He made his remarks at the Casey Foundation hosted Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiatives conference in Houston. He added, "This moment in history is filled with opportunity to make a real difference, and to end forever the misuse of detention and the folly of the reformatory. If we miss this opportunity, this moment may not come again for many years.

Laws Sending Kids to Adult Court at Issue in New Jersey High Court

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Tuesday, the New Jersey Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the state’s so-called juvenile waiver laws – a series of rulings that effectively allow county persecutors, and not state judges, to determine whether juvenile cases should be moved to adult courts. Currently, minors as young as 16 accused of a violent offense, such as homicide or aggravated assault, can be transferred to adult court under the state’s waiver laws, according to New Jersey’s The Record. More than 20 local and national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the state’s Public Defender’s Office, have challenged New Jersey’s juvenile waiver laws, with many arguing that the regulations – which give judges limited ability to deny prosecutor requests for moving cases to adult courts – are unconstitutional. As the laws are written today, unless a defense attorney can demonstrate a prosecutor’s request that a juvenile be transferred to an adult court is a “patent abuse of discretion,” the presiding juvenile court judge is bound by law to grant the request, The Record reports. Tuesday’s hearing centers on a 2009 Middlesex County mugging involving several juveniles – a case in which the trial judge challenged the prosecuting attorney’s request to move the case to adult court.

Bart Lubow: Cutting Youth Incarceration Doesn’t Cut Public Safety

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Bart Lubow, who has been working for more than 20 years to reduce the number of youth being sent to detention centers, told a gathering of approximately 700 conference attendees this morning that now “may prove to be a unique moment in juvenile justice history, a time when, as a nation, we shed some of the system’s worst baggage—including our unnecessary and often inappropriate reliance on secure confinement” of youth. The conference attendees are in Houston for the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative conference, which as its name implies is working to reduce the number of youth sent into detention and instead aims to provide community-centered alternatives. The conference is hosted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Apparently the 19-year quest is working. Lubow, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Casey Foundation, told the gathering that “JDAI sites have reduced reliance on secure detention overall by 42 percent, with numerous jurisdictions posting reductions in excess of 50 percent.” All of this happening without compromising public safety, he said.