Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/ny-bureau/page/16/)
Juvenile justice is a complex issue — one that affects communities in different ways. The New York Metro Bureau contributes in-depth reporting of national interest and provides exclusive coverage for the JJIE from all five boroughs, as well as much of Connecticut and New Jersey.
At the midpoint of the 180-mile March for Justice, its organizer, Soffiyah Elijah, was overwhelmed. She was simultaneously trying to find the proper turn on a back road in a Hudson Valley town, coordinate with the caretaker of a 105-year-old woman who wanted to join the march and figure out where to find a laundromat that would stay open late.
After a 180-mile hike that began in Harlem in Manhattan on Aug. 26, the March for Justice arrived in Albany, New York, this morning.
When she was in the sixth grade, when she still wanted to be a pediatrician and not a lawyer for revolutionaries, Soffiyah Elijah entered her first integrated school in Hempstead, Long Island. She remembers that in response to integration the administration of the school then segregated the classrooms. So she spent her first day in an integrated school among all black students.
The civil rights marchers had gone about a mile and change into Wappinger Falls, a quaint village in Dutchess County, New York, when it was time for a bathroom break.
With her 2-year-old son perched on her shoulders, Tomiqua Williams, 30, carefully guided her 5-year-old daughter’s wheelchair to the edge of the sidewalk...
When Carlos Jennings got out of prison in 2014, he wanted to kill the person who helped put him there.
“I wasn’t home seven days after doing 10 years in jail, and I’m in the car with somebody else, with a gun in my hand, trying to do something to somebody,” he said.
Leyla Martinez didn’t expect to be accepted to Columbia University. She applied to demonstrate a lesson — not to limit himself — to her then-16-year-old son. She was 40, a single mother and formerly incarcerated, not the typical Columbia applicant.
The mother never wanted to talk in public about what happened to her son.
For 24 years — since her then-17-year-old son Ronald was pulled off a bus in Washington, D.C., charged and eventually convicted of murder — Donna Heyward always avoided recounting the pain of losing her oldest child to the criminal justice system.
Karen Savage, a recent New York-based reporter for JJIE and Youth Today, has received The Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Social Justice Reporting.
After missing a Saturday deadline in part due to disagreement over proposed raise the age legislation, New York legislators signed bills submitted by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to approve a 2018 State Budget Extender and avoid a government shut-down.