NEW YORK — In 2017, a disabled 8-year-old Latino boy was sitting at his school lunch table with other students. They were playing with a spork, poking each other. The boy, who was being excluded, decided to poke the other children anyway, causing school staff to take it away. The staff became frustrated and called in school safety agents to diffuse the situation. The agents were unable to calm the child down and instead called the police.
At a time when COVID-19 cases continue to rise at correctional facilities across the country, Deidra Bridgeforth considers herself lucky. Leading the juvenile detention system in Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes the city of Memphis, Bridgeforth seems almost surprised their detention system has been spared from the virus.
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When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke in New York City this spring, the most vulnerable populations were at the bottom of a long list of people who desperately needed help during the first few months of business and school closures, shortages of personal protective equipment, food and household necessities.
Since 2016, Elder Yusef Qualls has been on a tireless campaign to have officials in Michigan revisit a criminal case that has kept his son incarcerated for over two decades.
A so-called “juvenile lifer,” Qualls’ son, also named Yusef Qualls, has lived within Michigan’s adult correctional system since 1997. At 17 Qualls was sentenced to life without parole after police linked him as an accomplice to the murder of a woman in Detroit. Elder Qualls has been a juvenile justice advocate since his son’s incarceration began. But the fight took a new turn when, in 2016, the Supreme Court retroactively banned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. That meant the courts had to revisit his son’s case.
NEW YORK — They all had disturbing stories, and they all had a familiar ring to them.
Yakov, who declined to give his last name, was waiting in line at the Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan waiting to take a leisurely ferry trip across the bay to Staten Island when he was told to get out by other passengers. He was wearing a mask, he said, but that didn’t matter as much as his conservative garb.
“They’re looking for an excuse to hate us, and they found it in the virus,” the 16-year-old said. “The pandemic has given them the freedom to say what they always have wanted.”
Yehuda Weinstock took his children upstate to go apple picking. “We were treated like we had the plague,” he said. ‘What do you say to your children?”
Coronavirus and the fear it has stoked across the city after bodies were piled up outside hospitals in the spring has led to the resurgence of a social virus. Scarred by daily experiences of anti-Semitism, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn fear the pandemic and the restrictions that come with it will incite hatred and violence toward them.
As David Reeve approached the picnic, he knew he was the odd one out. After all, it took some convincing for the group to make an exception for him. Unlike the men barbecuing and swapping prison stories, Reeve never spent time in California’s juvenile justice system or its infamous Youth Training School, which the men dubbed the “Gladiator School.”
“They called YTS a gladiator school because you are going to learn and harden yourself into becoming a gladiator,” Reeve said. “You are going to learn to fight, to make deals and negotiate for survival because many of them were headed towards adult prisons like San Quentin or other hardened prisons.”
Among the picnickers who gathered at Yucaipa Community Park in Yucaipa, California, for the reunion were John Berge. He spent 22 months at YTS before returning as an adult, working as a vocational instructor and later as an institutional gang investigator, Reeve said.
Mark Trammell hadn't been a free man since he was a teenager, but this year he hoped that was about to change.
Set for parole in February, Trammell was ready to go home to see his family. After more than 40 years for voluntary manslaughter and kidnapping in South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) facilities, he wanted his last moments to be outside prison walls. His stage 4 liver cancer, the result of untreated hepatitis, would make him particularly vulnerable to diseases like COVID-19. Not only would he be denied parole, but by June 6 he would die in a Columbia, South Carolina hospital from COVID-19. Though initially his death was erroneously reported to his family as related to his cancer, Trammell would be one of the first reported COVID-19 deaths at an SCDC facility.
Editor's note: Several of the seven people now incarcerated at Auburn Correctional Facility who were interviewed requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation. Several family members requested anonymity as well. AUBURN, N.Y. — In late May came the news from Albany: The first day of family visits — suspended due to COVID-19 — would be pushed to August. Cliff Graham, an inmate at Auburn Correctional Facility, an all-men’s maximum security prison, saw the memo, typed a message on his tablet and waited in his cell for his 15 daily minutes of Wi-Fi.
For two months he had been confined to a cell for at least 22 hours a day. There were no more Alcoholics Anonymous courses.
Youth in Minnesota who commit sexual offenses can be held on a registry for, at a minimum, 10 years. In nearby North Dakota, the minimum is 15 years. In South Dakota it’s five years.
What qualifies a young person for a sex offense registry varies in those states too, according to a report released today. In Minnesota “all sexual offenses” mean mandatory registration. In North Dakota it’s mandatory for felony sexual offenses and discretionary for juvenile misdeameanor sex offenses.
AUBURN, New York — On the day she would see her father for the first time in nearly five months as he bounced among three maximum-security prisons, Julianna Bundschuh, 5, hung on the metal fence of Auburn Correctional Facility as if it were at a playground. Near her stood Kristina Abell, who arrived first at 7 a.m. Wednesday with eight boxes of food for her son. Behind Abell was a woman named Courtney who didn’t want to give her last name. She came to see her fiance and was wondering how long these visits would last. None had seen their loved ones since mid-March, when state-run prisons across New York suspended visitation due to coronavirus.
