Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/1-priority/)
By September 2020, 11 new unarmed public safety support specialists, many with law enforcement-related backgrounds, were in place and on the Minneapolis Public Schools payroll. Two years and one pandemic later, initial data and interviews with students and staff suggest that fewer Minneapolis students are being punished and, consequently, missing class for suspensions or other punishment.
There is no recent official count of how many individuals have departed gang life. In 2012, the most recent year that the U.S. Department of Justice National Gang Center estimated the data, roughly 850,000 members were in some 30,700 youth gangs across the country. Those numbers decreased from 1996 through 2002, then increased steadily over the next decade. A 2014 study in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology found that 70% of gang members joined as adolescents and left before adulthood.
Why do young people join, why do they leave and how do they stay away?
Traumatic brain injury among juvenile offenders will be assessed as part of a three-year research project that’s slated to enroll the first of roughly 110 youth and young adult study participants in Florida as early as late January. Ultimately, the study aims to determine which TBI treatments might help keep those youth from cycling in and out of detention, complete their education and succeed at work.
Launched in summer 2021 as an expansion of the incarceration-diversion program, Long Island, N.Y.'s ConcepTS also stands for “collaboration, oversight, nurturing, community, engagement, participation and treatment services.” It’s the brainchild of Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Fernando Camacho, who says he has a heart for young people and a love of the law. The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange’s Micah Danney interviewed Camacho about what diversion programs mean for juvenile offenders and the juvenile justice system he helps to oversee.
While jailed on drug charges at New York City’s Rikers Island in 1994, Marilyn Reyes received medical treatment to curb her heroin addiction. But once Reyes, then in her 20s, was convicted and transferred to an upstate prison, she stopped getting the medications prescribed to help her overcome what's since been labeled as opioid use disorder. “It was the most traumatizing, horrible experience I ever had,” said Reyes, now co-director of Peer Network of New York, which provides, among other services, needle exchanges to reduce some of the health hazards of using illegal drugs.
Headquartered in the upper rooms of a church on 124th Street, Living Redemption is one five such hubs that, in 2017, received $45.9 million of $250 million that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office seized from a drug-money laundering European bank. Decade-old Living Redemption got $10.3 million. The windfall expanded the program — even providing providing a paycheck for those mentoring messengers.
Defendants who are 18 years old and younger will have the same access to legal counsel as adults in Washington, starting next January. That new law trails another juvenile justice reform, which took effect on July 25, aimed at trimming the number of youth in foster care who wind up in juvenile detention. The latter aims to expand the number of community-based endeavors offering trauma-informed rehabilitative care that is culturally competent and focused on racial equity among youth in the justice system. Currently those less restrictive, community placements are available to 25% of juveniles in the state, according to legislators who drafted the measure. The initiative expanding juveniles’ access to lawyers mandates that juveniles can phone, videoconference or talk in person with a lawyer before waiving any constitutional rights, if a law enforcement officer, among other things:
Questions a youth after advising that person of rights granted under the landmark Miranda ruling.
For Madeline Borrelli, a special education teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., having NYPD-trained law enforcement officers in schools is a cut-and-dry issue: “School safety agents,” she said, using their official job title, “ … should not exist at all.”
Since Just Us launched in January, 25 youth have enrolled in a three-year pilot project that pays girls and queer youth involved in the criminal justice system, or who are at-risk for winding up there, to participate in projects aimed at keeping them out of detention facilities.
Run by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services and created by a Vera Institute of Justice task force, JustUs provides individual and group counseling; legal advocacy; employment workshops; and internships for Brooklyn youth. The program serves females who are lesbian, bisexual and straight and youth who are non-binary, trans or queer.
“A lot of times, people are looking for support and they want to be heard and seen,” said Helianis Quijada Salazar, director of JustUs. “We try to customize everything to meet the unique needs of a person.”
Since being released from New York City’s Rikers Island jail — where he’d been sentenced to four months for not being where his parole officer expected him to be on a certain day and time — Dakem Roberts has been living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter.
It was his latest incarceration since, in the late 1970s, when he was 16, he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. He’d been arrested for his involvement in a robbery whose victim died the next day of heart failure, he said.