Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/from-the-bureaus/page/27/)
NEW YORK — Sending people to prison punishes not only criminals but their families, especially their children, participants in a program on prison photography say.
“It’s not just about offenders and victims,” said documentary photographer Gabriela Bulisova during the Thursday panel discussion hosted by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Department of Visual Journalism. “Many of the people affected are children.”
At the age of 16, he came under suspicion for the brutal rape and murder of his high school classmate. After being held in an interrogation room for about eight hours with no parent or attorney present, he confessed to the crime.
He was innocent.
Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets trains teens to be leaders and organizers in their neighborhood and mentors them on how to reverse trends in gun violence.
When high school sophomore Mykia Moore got into an argument with her best friend over a boy last year at Augustus Hawkins High School in South Los Angeles, the dispute quickly escalated into a physical fight.
NEW YORK — Jason Pedreros is considered an adult in the eyes of the law. But at 18, he is still a teenager who, as a volunteer on a judicial panel, is deciding the fate of fellow youths in the New Jersey county where he lives.
Pedreros serves on the Juvenile Conference Committees (JCC) in Hudson County that review charges against underage New Jersey residents and make punitive and rehabilitative recommendations to the court. There are six- to nine-member committees in each of New Jersey’s 21 counties. In addition, many municipalities have their own. His handles north Bergen, west New York and Jersey City.
Charges are first reviewed by a juvenile intake probation officer and a Hudson County prosecutor, who decides which cases get sent to committees. First- or second-time minor offenses are eligible.
Just as the “superpredator” label had unfairly distorted perceptions of her young newspaper staff, writer Nell Bernstein said, youth incarceration as a whole is “a system custom-designed to erode humanity.”
“Once you put someone in an orange jumpsuit and put a label like ‘offender’ or ‘delinquent’ on him or her, it’s very easy to start thinking of that person as a different kind of child,” she said.
“My guys don’t really have a space to process complex emotions,” Kirby said. “When someone acts out, a lot of times, there is some unrecognized trauma.”
NEW YORK — The filmmaker could not get the number out of his head. Even while he was traveling the country to discuss “Shell Shocked” — a movie about children killing children with machine guns in the streets of his hometown New Orleans — it was a number that kept John Richie up at night.
After a classroom of children were found in a lifeless pile, shot to death by Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook, Conn., with an assortment of guns including a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle, the country was awash in research and polling and charts about Americans and their guns.
Gang activity continues to course through the Internet, to the point where Rogers Park Police Cmdr. Thomas Waldera called the online interactions “technological kerosene.”
NEW YORK — The image and words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could be seen and heard everywhere the Dream4Justice march went, from Harlem to Midtown, Monday afternoon. But as the marchers walked a slow and peaceful four miles over as many hours, King’s voice mixed with the protesters’ now familiar chants: “I have a dream” alongside “I can’t breathe” and “No justice, no peace.”
King’s memory brought organizers and protesters together but the marchers’ demands came from more recent deaths. In memory of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others who had been killed by police, the march ended near the United Nations to bring attention to police brutality as a human rights issue. Marchers called for immediate policy change at the city and state levels in keeping with King’s philosophy. “We are non-violent but we are not peaceful,” said Tamika Mallory, an organizer and board member of The Gathering for Justice.