Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/prominence/homepage-featured/page/17/)
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Pressured by Worth Rises and similar advocacy groups, the Federal Communication Commission last year imposed ceilings on the costs of interstate calls from convicted people in prisons and the mainly pre-trial detainees in jails. Before the FCC’s action, a handful but growing number of municipalities and states already were moving in that direction.
Most youth involved in the juvenile justice system between 2010 and 2019 in Harris County, Texas -- the nation's third-largest county -- a small fraction of youth with repeated run-ins with law enforcement accounted for the bulk of those who were in pre-trial detention, prosecuted, on probation or in post-conviction incarceration or some other restrictive placement, according to a recent Texas Policy Lab analysis.
Daily, an average of 17 U.S. veterans has resorted to suicide, taking their lives at a 52.3% greater rate than other Americans did in 2019, when 6,261 veterans died by suicide. Firearms were involved in 69.2% of those deaths. Veterans aged 34 and younger died at a higher rate than any other former service members.
As suicide rates for women veterans have increased, proportionately, more than male rates, an increasing number of those deaths involved firearms, according to the “National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report,” released in September 2021.
Almost 22,000 10- through 24-year-olds died of accidental drug overdoses in the United States between 2015 and 2019, according to a new study also finding that males accounted for 71.9% of those deaths and females for 28.1%. Of those 21,689 young people, 3,296 were aged 10 through 19.
Death rates were 5.9 times higher for previously incarcerated 11- to 21-year-olds in Ohio than in that state’s general population of youth enrolled in Medicaid health insurance for low-income people, according to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Open Network.
In a finding researchers said was especially startling, formerly incarcerated females died at nine times the rate of the general population.
“More than half of all deaths were among youths convicted of crimes against persons,” wrote the researchers, who examined 3,645 formerly incarcerated youth. “More deaths occurred in youths who were incarcerated for the first time and in youths who spent less than or equal to [one] year in custody.”
Surveillance video shows a Black 17-year-old struggling with staff at a Wichita juvenile center last fall before he died after he was restrained facedown for more than 30 minutes.
Sedgwick County released 18 video clips late Friday afternoon of what happened before Cedric Lofton was rushed to a hospital on Sept. 24. He died two days later.
Black men who were incarcerated between the ages of 15 and 22, and tracked for roughly 40 years ending in 2018, had a significantly lower life expectancy after their release from prison than non-Blacks, according to a recently released Boston Medical Center-based study.
Recent surges in homicides and shootings have prompted some who are opposed to juvenile justice reforms to call for a return to tough-on-crime policies. Those approaches did not make the public safer. They did result in needlessly high incarceration rates for young people, particularly for Black and brown youth. Now is not the time to abandon smart-on-crime justice reforms of the last 20 years as part of yet another race to prove who can be the toughest. We should, instead, be doubling down on those smart reforms.
Since 2000, Judge Donna Scott Davenport has overseen the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, where the county jailed kids in 48% of the cases referred to juvenile court — compared with the statewide average of 5%. Now, state Sen. Heidi Campbell and state Rep. Gloria Johnson have said they are proposing legislation that could result in Davenport’s ouster. A bill starting the process was filed in the state Senate Friday.