Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/COVID-19/page/5/)
As protests erupt in cities across the nation following George Floyd’s death in police custody, youth-serving agencies appear to have a similar view of their role. Their job is to support young people, provide safe space for them and, in many cases, bring their voices and experiences into the public realm to solve public problems.
In North Carolina, adult prisoners will build a new confinement facility for juvenile offenders, officials announced. After expanding its juvenile system’s jurisdiction to include 16- and 17-year-olds, the state anticipates a need for more beds for youth who have been adjudicated.
As COVID-19 made shared transportation a potential enabler of disease transmission, it became clear that the introduction of videoconferencing equipment couldn’t have come at a more auspicious time for courthouses and juvenile detention centers across North Carolina.
Teens On Target (TNT) is a leadership development program at Youth ALIVE!, Oakland, Calif.’s anchor agency for violence prevention, intervention and healing. Through TNT, teens from two high schools in the Oakland neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence teach student-designed violence prevention workshops at middle schools across the city.
It started with a simple question two months ago: Who are the youth in detention who are particularly susceptible to the coronavirus, and what is being done to get them out?
As the coronavirus began spreading in the United States, and grassroots youth activists got wind of the enormous risks as well as the precautions needed to protect people — social distancing, masks, frequent cleansing — they began to take action.
The fast-moving COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the vulnerability of youth in our nation’s approximately 2,000 juvenile correctional facilities who face daily threats to their safety and well-being.
As North Carolina began to send 16- and 17-year-olds to its juvenile justice system for the first time, year one was meant to be instructive.
In January, Sharral Dean, a therapist at the Family Counseling Center of Central Georgia, was seeing about 30 young clients a week. At any given time, five to seven of them were what Dean calls “at risk” — more likely to experience violence at home, at higher risk for depression, anxiety, fighting in school and entering the juvenile justice system.
Two months ago, her son, now 20, had spent the weekend on furlough, being a regular kid instead of a youth locked up in one of Louisiana’s juvenile detention centers. While an ankle monitor measured his compliance with orders to stay at home, he’d found joy for three days in simple activities like mowing the yard and eating boiled crawfish. He was able to take a shower and use the restroom without asking permission first. But his time was cut short. Though he had been scheduled to stay a long weekend, through Tuesday, his family was instructed to return him to the Bridge City Center for Youth in Bridge City a day early.