Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/ny-bureau/page/2/)
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.
Unless accused of criminally negligent homicide, no child younger than 12 could be legally arrested, detained or brought before a judge, according to legislation New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo appears poised to sign. Approved by the state’s legislature, the bill undoes a 1909 law allowing the arrests of kids as young as 7.
During the rollercoaster ride of a pandemic, it was Maxene Foster’s job to help make sure that cash-strapped Bronx residents got fed, were safely sheltered and so forth. For those efforts, the 20-year employee of Bronxworks, was tapped to represent the 900 staffers of that nonprofit agency during that rarest of Big Apple events: a ticker-tape parade. The ticker-tape, New York City parade celebrated youth probation officers, along with workers from nonprofit agencies, transit and other institutions deemed essential workplaces during the pandemic.
The new law is retroactive. It allows persons to have prior marijuana-related convictions for which, under the new rules, they would not be arrested, to be expunged from their record. Expungement of prior records was critical to ensuring fairer justice for communities disproportionately policed, arrested and affected by drug policies, said New York State Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes (D-Buffalo). “Black communities, brown communities, have always been the target of these laws,” Peoples-Stokes said. “If we’re going to take the market above ground, we have to remove those convictions.”
Though technically it was against the rules, a juvenile corrections officer had been watching and chuckling along as a group of girl detainees enjoyed riding a foam mattress down a flight of stairs at a Union, S.C. detention facility in November 2020. Declaring the scene a riot, the supervising officer ordered his underlings to search the girls. In front of male officers the girls were forced to strip down to their bras and panties.
As the pandemic raged across New York City in spring 2020, Jose Rivera trekked from the Bronx to Coney Island, Brooklyn to Far Rockaway, Queens, dropping off 100 computer tablets and dozens of food vouchers to public school students, including undocumented Yemenis and Bangladeshis and their families.
New York City must finish installing Wi-Fi in shelters for homeless families and domestic violence victims by Aug. 31, according to a settlement reached this week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The order will benefit more than 11,000 homeless children living in some of the 240 family shelters across the city’s five boroughs -- which count a total of 110,000 homeless students -- who’ve struggled with remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was the fall of 1988 when Rose Wilson, then 33, was given a life sentence for murder in South Carolina. Her daughter, Kasi, was only 8 months old. Like many children of incarcerated parents, Kasi was raised by relatives — in this case her grandparents — but her mother was always in her life. “We made constant visits. We would go see her once every three or four months or so,” Kasi Wilson said.
NEW YORK — K’Juan Lanclos was playing basketball in a park near the Butler Community Center in the Bronx when his friends suddenly fled. Looking up, the then-13-year-old saw a wall of cops running straight at him. Not knowing what else to do, he ran too.
When Michael Khanlarian began teaching incarcerated youth about the work of William Shakespeare, he never expected them to develop a rap about a 16th-century play. Using text from the play “Henry V,” a play about the titular British king and his rise to power, students created a cypher — a kind of freestyle rap battle — using Henry’s speeches.
A pregnant teenager stands alone in a cinder-block cell in one image. In another, a young body shivers, curled up in an oversized T-shirt huddled in the far corner of a cold cement room. The pictures are just a few of the thousands in a collection by Richard Ross, who uses his photography as a vehicle to highlight the needs of the estimated 48,000 children in custody each day. Ross has documented the lives of young people caught up in the juvenile justice system in Juvenile-in-Justice, a project he founded to connect human faces to a story often told in terms of cold statistics.
“My whole focus for the last 15 years has been interviewing these kids and being a co-conspirator with them in terms of trying to be the conduit for their voice,“ he said. Ross was one of three juvenile justice experts on a webinar hosted Tuesday by the Dui Hua Foundation as part of a series focused on unique issues girls face when they come into conflict with the legal system.