Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/prominence/top-story/page/15/)
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About 25% of rural youth in a University of Washington analysis said they were as young as 12 when they began carrying handguns and 20% of the roughly 2,000 rural youth and young adults studied carried a handgun at least 40 times during the last 12 months that they self-reported that activity, according to research published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice announced Thursday that it will reform its beleaguered central prison for youths under a settlement agreement with the federal government.
On April 12, Georgia became the 22nd state allowing unlicensed gun-owners to carry a concealed weapon, one in a spate of so-called constitutional carry laws that have supporters and detractors, with the International Association of Police Chiefs among opponents.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Shortly after Riley Briones Jr. arrived in federal prison, he cut his long, braided hair in a symbolic death of his old self.
As a leader of a violent gang and just shy of 18, Briones drove the getaway car in a robbery turned deadly on the Salt River-Pima Maricopa Indian Community outside Phoenix in 1994. He was convicted of murder and given a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
Published today in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Trends in Drug Overdose Deaths Among US Adolescents, January 2010 to June 2021, noted an alarming increase in deaths driven by the widespread presence of illicit fentanyl in the drug supply, particularly in fake prescription opioid and benzodiazepine pills sold illegally. Researchers calculated the results by comparing overdose deaths per 100,000 for teenagers with US death records data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Within months of his release from a lifetime imprisonment sentence in Louisiana's 18,000-acre prison in Angola, La., Andrew Hundley, then 34, enrolled in junior college and founded the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and reentry for former juvenile lifers. Under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Hundley, who’d been sentenced in 1997, when he was 15, was released after serving 19 years at Angola. Hundley had the chance to start over, finish college and start a family. But many of the men and women he works with through the Parole Project are older and entered the Louisiana prison system at a time when there were no educational opportunities, especially for lifers.
Children’s books centered on characters involved in the justice system can support kids with incarcerated parents and offer a compassionate window into this experience for broad young audiences.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law on Monday that forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, a policy that has drawn intense national scrutiny from critics who argue it marginalizes LGBTQ people. The legislation has pushed Florida and DeSantis, an ascending Republican and potential 2024 presidential candidate, to the forefront of the country's culture wars.
The day they came face-to-face with the teen who accidentally shot and killed their son, Brad and Meagan Hulett confirmed, in their minds, that prison was the last place the shooter should end up.
Researchers found almost all of 112 Philadelphians who have been released from lifetime prison sentences said they participated in some form of prison programming, but 53 percent reported having been restricted from vocational programs such as barbering (Pennsylvania prioritizes people who have less than five years left on their sentences for vocational training). “A lot of these guys who did end up taking advantage of the college programming were able to enroll through their perseverance as opposed to these programs being allocated for them,” said study co-author Tarika Daftary-Kapur, professor of justice studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, which conducted the survey.