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?
In the wake of highly publicized and tragic mass shootings at schools, jurisdictions across the country have responded with a flood of expanded school security policies. While much of this policymaking has echoed previous measures, like school hardening, surveillance and policing, some policymakers have focused on preventing targeted violence (where an attacker selects a particular target in advance) by identifying potentially violent actors and intervening to stop them before a violent act occurs. They label this threat assessment.
In December, President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Juvenile Justice Reform Act (JJRA) of 2018, which reauthorized the landmark Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act for the first time since 2002. Passage of the JJRA, which followed more than a decade of debate, will strengthen protections for youth in the justice system.
As a global pandemic looms over New York City, one group in particular might be getting left behind, homeless youth — a vulnerable subset of the general homeless population made up of runaway youth, LGBTQ teens and other young people experiencing homelessness.
Since its inception 10 years ago, the mission of the Center for Sustainable Journalism and its New York bureau has always been to go to the frontlines where the issues of justice, inequity and abuses of power of young people are impacting people’s lives the most.
As cases of COVID-19 spike across the country, advocates and lawyers for detained juveniles are pushing for changes in the facilities that hold an estimated 43,000 juveniles in custody across the nation.
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Concentrated gun violence results in lost population and economic power, increases trauma throughout communities and depresses school outcomes among students exposed to violence. Interventions deliberately designed to empower youth who are frequently exposed to community trauma are an important tool to break the cycle of violence that repeats far too frequently.
On a Friday night in Bloomfield, N.J., middle school children hang out at Foley Field to watch the high school football team play.
Officer Marvid Camacho provides security at the game. As the resource officer at Bloomfield Middle School, he knows all the kids in town.
Camacho is a new breed of cop. His role, as he sees it, is to prevent crimes, not just respond to them afterward. He tries to build a connection with kids and give them life lessons that will keep them out of the criminal justice system.
