Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/1-priority/page/21/)
On a cold, rainy early spring night in 2014, I attended the private meeting of a tragic club nobody wants to join. It was a gathering of parents whose children had been killed as the result of gun violence.
Los Angeles County’s newly chosen chief probation officer and her new second in command, who will both take over in January, are entering LA’s troubled probation department at a pivotal moment.
The surveillance video is stark and violent.
An inmate in a red jumpsuit, hands cuffed behind his back, is led from his cell by a corrections officer.
Seventeen-year-old Ryan Lo sat in a courtroom for the hearing where a judge would decide whether he would be tried as an adult on charges of first-degree murder.
Near a wooden “Death Row” signpost towering in an orange-lit fog, 25 young people huddled together, smiling and laughing.
Alex Sanchez knows the temptations of joining gangs for young Central American immigrants.
“They can walk through the building a thousand times, but when they walk through it with somebody that had to live here, that was incarcerated here, it’s a different vibe,” Cheryl Wilkins said, adding that an advisory committee comprised of formerly incarcerated women regularly meets with NoVo Foundation representatives to plan for the building’s future.
Author and reporter Maia Szalavitz, who writes about substance use and related issues recently spoke with Youth Today and JJIE about her experience and her newest book: “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction,” released in April. Here’s Szalavitz’s take on addiction and its complexities, from her own experience and in her own words.
When she was a young mother of two, Tammy Cheney worked double shifts six days a week in order to survive. When her younger children, including Alexus, now 17, and A.J., now 5, came along, she vowed to spend more time with them.
I am writing this from inside a jail cell. I was put here for doing an unremarkable, routine bit of journalism, covering a sentencing in a murder.