Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/prominence/homepage-featured/page/39/)
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As protests erupt in cities across the nation following George Floyd’s death in police custody, youth-serving agencies appear to have a similar view of their role. Their job is to support young people, provide safe space for them and, in many cases, bring their voices and experiences into the public realm to solve public problems.
In North Carolina, adult prisoners will build a new confinement facility for juvenile offenders, officials announced. After expanding its juvenile system’s jurisdiction to include 16- and 17-year-olds, the state anticipates a need for more beds for youth who have been adjudicated.
As COVID-19 made shared transportation a potential enabler of disease transmission, it became clear that the introduction of videoconferencing equipment couldn’t have come at a more auspicious time for courthouses and juvenile detention centers across North Carolina.
The young girl is weeping and terrified, surrounded by members of the New York Police Department, her hands cuffed behind her back while outraged protesters shout a mix of pleas and threats to let her go. The chaotic scene was captured on a 21-second snippet of video that was deleted from Twitter about 10 minutes after being posted.
Teens On Target (TNT) is a leadership development program at Youth ALIVE!, Oakland, Calif.’s anchor agency for violence prevention, intervention and healing. Through TNT, teens from two high schools in the Oakland neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence teach student-designed violence prevention workshops at middle schools across the city.
Today, Synthia Roy works at a tattoo parlor in Jacksonville, Fla., she does set design and makeup for horror films and recently produced her second movie.
It started with a simple question two months ago: Who are the youth in detention who are particularly susceptible to the coronavirus, and what is being done to get them out?
From the time she adopted Anthony, at age 4, Wendy Tonker knew he was special.
He was special because he was diagnosed with autism, ADHD and an intellectual disability.
Anthony, now 21, has been enrolled in Durham Public Schools’ (DPS) Exceptional Children Services (EC) program since elementary school. “I have been fighting with DPS EC for a decade now,” Tonker said. “They have horrifically underserved my son.”
Not all students process information identically, respond to their environments the same way or can control their behavior with the same restraint. Yet they are held to the same standard punishment system in school. “Someone who might have an attention deficit disorder and can’t stay still is standing up in class, walking around and is distracting the teacher; that person could be charged with disorderly conduct at school just from the definition of the law,” said Eric Zogry, with the North Carolina Office of the Juvenile Defender.
As the coronavirus began spreading in the United States, and grassroots youth activists got wind of the enormous risks as well as the precautions needed to protect people — social distancing, masks, frequent cleansing — they began to take action.
The fast-moving COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the vulnerability of youth in our nation’s approximately 2,000 juvenile correctional facilities who face daily threats to their safety and well-being.