Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/advocacy/)
“Caution, Sir! I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice!” —John Brown
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” —Abraham Lincoln
March on Washington, August 1963, 250,000 people.
Leaders. Advocates. Crusaders for juvenile justice. Two women, both intent on “changing the system,” have been honored by the National Juvenile Justice Network.
Utah attorney Nubia Peña has won the National Juvenile Justice Network’s (NJJN) 2019 Youth Justice Emerging Leader Award. Each year, the NJJN honors a person who is dedicated to reforming the youth justice system by advocating for the fair treatment of young people, promoting racial equity and actively working towards the use of community-based alternatives to incarcerating kids.
I vividly remember the Maryland State Senate hearings on Feb. 1, 2018. I was hardly three weeks into my first legislative session, preparing to give my first-ever testimony against a bill egregious to youth justice reform, while simultaneously teaching myself how one even becomes an “Annapolis advocate.”
In my last column about Ahmed Hassan, a teenager born in New Jersey who was held in an Egyptian jail for a crime he did not commit, I primarily discussed the problems surrounding reentry after a prolonged jail sentence. Ahmed’s alleged “crime” was being an American citizen.
I’m writing this for the benefit of families who may have a family member trapped in a foreign prison, for other advocates and for my own closure. What I have learned could fill volumes.
Early this week, I was having Thanksgiving dinner with my fiancée. She is on her way home for the holiday, and I am staying in Georgia to work on my final paper for school and take care of a few other tasks, so we shared the meal a few days early. Before we began to eat, we took a few moments to talk about what we have been grateful for this past year. It was a pretty long list for both of us, and touched on our relationships, our work, good health, and many other things. It seems that gratitude has been coming up a lot in my life lately, in discussions with friends and online.
Schools cannot put children in seclusion rooms as a form of punishment anymore, and must limit the use of physical and chemical restraints. The State Board of Education approved new rules Thursday for handcuffing children, controlling them with prone restraint tactics, and giving them prescription drugs to control their behavior. These measures are now limited to situations where students are an immediate danger to themselves or others, or when calming techniques don’t work. Parents of 13-year old Jonathon King of Gainesville pushed for changes after their son hanged himself in a seclusion room in 2004. Jonathan was a student in the Alpine Program, a public school in Gainesville, Ga.