Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/from-the-bureaus/page/12/)
Of all the threads of injustice, trauma is the common theme that contributes to a culture of gun violence for black youth in the U.S. and around the globe, says a Canadian researcher and professor.
A Bronx nonprofit will receive a $1 million grant from The Rockefeller Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to research, document and expand its youth violence prevention and alternative-to-incarceration programming to another U.S. city. Supporters of the model hope it will set a new standard for the rest of the nation.
On Sept. 27, 1994, Nicholas Heyward Sr.’s life changed. His 13-year-old son, Nicholas Naquan Heyward Jr., was playing cops-and-robbers with a toy gun in the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn when he was shot and killed by Brian George, a New York Police Department housing authority officer.
More than a week since Christmas, Donna Carter-Heyward’s Brooklyn apartment still had the cozy warm atmosphere of the holidays.
When Ron started working at Horizon Detention Center in early October, he expected the Bronx facility to be full of “ra-ra, rowdy” teens. To his surprise, the residents were calm, even respectful, and the bright, clean halls reminded him of a dormitory.
Since President Donald Trump appointed her to head the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Administrator Caren Harp has begun reshaping the office with a goal in mind: deregulation.
As the first step in New York’s raise the age law, all 16- and 17-year-olds were moved off New York City’s notorious Rikers Island and into more appropriate juvenile facilities by the Monday deadline, according to an announcement by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The children who gathered around the pictures of the dead were curious.
Right next to them a man was twisting balloons into funny shapes beneath the basketball hoop, and on their other side a woman set up a chair to do face paintings of rainbows and animals.
At Crossroads Juvenile Detention Center in Brooklyn, barbed wire and tall unclimbable fences enclose the housing building, basketball courts and outdoor areas, like in every jail or prison. Detention hardware and security cameras are all over the place, like in every jail or prison.
By the time she was posing for pictures on the stage of a Hyatt Regency Washington ballroom just blocks from the Capitol with two teenagers with oversized black hoodies that had the words “We Are Not Gang Members” emblazoned on them, the Trump appointee to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention had done a lot of explaining.