Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/prominence/homepage-featured/page/25/)
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An often overlooked but major injustice is how our juvenile justice system impacts Black and Hispanic youth and their families, limiting their ability to reach their full potential and thrive in their communities. In fact, the disparities are so bad that a recent Marshall Project article noted that “though the racial inequality in youth detention has long been stark, it's wider than ever.”
Youth arrest rates have plummeted over the past several decades, falling nearly 70% nationwide since 2000, including a 54% reduction in violent offense arrests. There are now fewer youth in juvenile halls or courtrooms and far smaller probation caseloads. Yet state and local governments continue to invest heavily in juvenile justice, shoring up systems that are known to cause harm.
Amid the current economic crisis, maintaining overbuilt juvenile facilities and bloated probation budgets squanders resources that schools, health systems and community-based service providers desperately need. Moreover, funding excessive facility space can needlessly sweep youth into a system bent on self-preservation. In California, like much of the country, juvenile justice systems have experienced significant population reductions.
The well-established finding that a majority of youth in the juvenile justice system have been exposed to trauma has led to a clarion call for the implementation of trauma-informed practices.
However, to date, less attention has been paid to the importance of providing juvenile justice staff with the tools needed to carry out trauma-informed practices in ways that protect them from the potential risks associated with this work. In fact, recognition of such risks is relatively new; only in 2013 did the official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress first recognize that secondary exposure to another person’s trauma is a bona fide type of traumatic experience. Such secondary traumatic stress (STS) — also termed vicarious trauma or compassion fatigue — has mostly been the focus of attention among mental health professionals and first responders.
But well known in the juvenile justice community — even if not well recognized outside of it — is that working with traumatized youth and families, reading their extensive trauma histories, performing trauma screenings and delivering trauma-informed programming all bring us into contact with thoughts, feelings and images that can be difficult to put aside at the end of the day. What can be done? Self-care: strengths and limitations
To date, most of the strategies designed to prevent or intervene with STS have been focused on self-care and wellness promotion, which are certainly of value.
There are thousands of years’ worth of documented history and stories of our connection with each other. There are millions of love stories and historical accounts of all kinds of relationships interpreted in books, movies and even sketched onto buildings and structures that speaks to our powerful bond.
Could this be the answer to the age-old question — what is the purpose of life? Science tells us it is. We are programmed to connect, not to self-destruct. If this is so, then why is it that we are suffering through a suicide crisis?
A crisis is when a non-common negative occurrence increases in trend and frequency.
NEW YORK — K’Juan Lanclos was playing basketball in a park near the Butler Community Center in the Bronx when his friends suddenly fled. Looking up, the then-13-year-old saw a wall of cops running straight at him. Not knowing what else to do, he ran too.
Christian Picciolini, 14, was hanging out one day in an alley near the intersection of Union and Division streets in Chicago.
An older man with cropped hair and big shiny boots drove up.
He was warm and friendly, and he offered fatherly advice: Don’t smoke marijuana, he told Picciolini. “That’s what the Communists and Jews want you to do,” he said. He told Picciolini to be proud of his Roman warrior ancestors: They were a superior race, he said. The man was Clark Martell, a violent neo-Nazi who was later sentenced to prison for assault and robbery. But Picciolini was hungry for attention and he saw Martell as heroic.
What do you do if you find racist graffiti on a wall near your school or youth program? Or come across neo-Nazi flyers in the area? Or read white nationalist comments on an online platform used by your program? A toolkit, “Confronting White Nationalism in Schools,” can help adults who work with youth choose specific responses. It was created by the Western States Center, a Portland, Oregon, nonprofit whose mission is to strengthen inclusive democracy and respond to bigotry and intolerance.
Nora Flanagan’s first brush with hate group recruiting took place when she was 15 and living in Beverly, a southwest Chicago neighborhood. Her older brother brought home a couple of his friends. To Flanagan’s dismay, they’d shaved their heads and wore Confederate flags on their jackets. It signaled they were part of the burgeoning skinhead movement in Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s, led by a teen named Christian Picciolini. “And they had been recruited and they were running around with this guy terrorizing the South Side.
“I'm learning to ‘master self’ while rising from the ashes of madness.” ―Stanley “Tookie” Williams, “Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir”
The day that Stanley “Tookie” Williams was executed, I was working in the library at a juvenile court school in California. The students and I had talked this over for several months before the scheduled execution. Some of us felt a huge loss at the impending death of Tookie, as he was often called.
The day after he died, the library was filled with grieving students. Many saw Tookie as a hero for making such huge changes during his prison term on death row. We had a service of sorts in the library to commemorate his life and his achievements that brought more peace to this world.
“Caution, Sir! I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice!” —John Brown
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” —Abraham Lincoln
March on Washington, August 1963, 250,000 people.