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Just months after an unprecedented parental conviction in Michigan, Georgia prosecutors allege a father’s actions led to a mass school shooting. Colin Gray never pulled a trigger at Apalachee High School — where a mass shooting this week left two 14-year-old students and two math teachers dead — but he could still spend the rest of his life behind bars for murder.
Most school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere – there are typically warning signs. This past September 4, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly opening fire in his Georgia high school math class – killing two teachers and two students. Only a year ago, authorities visited his home to investigate several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting. What went wrong in Georgia and how can we prevent this from happening in the future?
In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court banned from courtroom evidence most results from lie-detector tests because those polygraph exams are scientifically flawed and unreliable, a ruling the American Psychological Association concurred with. However, in juvenile courts, where judges still have the discretion to allow or ban such so-called evidence, polygraphs have been used to coerce some juvenile sex offenders into making what researchers concluded were false confessions. The misuse doesn’t end there.
A 65% reduction in youth incarceration between 2005 and 2021 and the closing of two youth prisons during that time are among the great strides of Redeploy Illinois, an innovative Cook County program allowing communities to tailor state-funded juvenile treatment services to meet their particular characteristics and needs.
To hear the state of Tennessee tell it, Knoxville’s Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center has shown “significant and consistent improvement.” It no longer illegally locks kids up alone in cells, as an investigation by ProPublica and WPLN exposed last month.
But a closer look at the facility’s most recent inspection by the state Department of Children’s Services tells a different story. Instead of secluding children against their will, the facility claims that kids are voluntarily agreeing to be locked up alone.
CHICAGO (AP) — Children as young as 11 are confined alone to cells the size of parking spaces up to 23 hours a day at a juvenile detention center in Southern Illinois, according to a lawsuit filed by ACLU of Illinois. Young people at the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center in Benton must ask staff permission to flush the toilet, and they can go days or weeks without access to schoolwork. Black mold grows on the walls, according to the lawsuit filed Friday, and there are no mental health professionals employed at the facility.
“A lot of people think when you get shot you go to the hospital, they fix you up, you go home and you’re OK,” she said. “That’s really not the case. Trauma is a roller coaster.” There’s the immediate physical injury and mental and emotional trauma of being shot. But also there are long-haul effects.
A new study that finds handgun carriage by adolescents has gone up significantly over the past two decades. The jump — 41% — was especially pronounced among rural, white, and higher-income adolescents, according to the study, which was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
While male teens are still more likely to carry handguns than females, the rate at which girls and young women are carrying handguns is rising more quickly, a study published earlier this year in the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests.
“This is probably the newest trend,” said the Rev. Kenny Irby, community intervention director for the St. Petersburg Police Department.
Students can be ticketed by school resource officers or by local police departments to whom school staff members refer students viewed as disruptive. From misdemeanor offenses to such potential felony offenses as gun possession or assault, students can be cited under local ordinances. There is no centralized database of how many school districts employ that kind of discipline.