Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/crime/)
The backstories of Sakran and Pep couldn’t be more different. But their survivor stories drive their activism about the public health threat that gun violence poses and prove what some of the most alarming news headlines increasingly suggest: Almost anybody, almost anywhere, is a potential victim of gun violence.
Juvenile offenses involving property, drug and public order offenses, combined, declined in 2019 to their lowest levels since 2005, according to recently released National Center on Juvenile Justice data also showing that probation, rather than detention, increasingly was assigned in five categories of juvenile crime.
They panic if a balloon pops. They hold dying family members. They push their wounded bodies to heal and scroll longingly through photos and videos of their lost loved ones. Behind the statistics and the political blame game over rising gun violence are the victims. The spike plaguing many American cities this year has lawmakers reeling and police scrambling, though homicide rates are not rising as high as the double-digit jumps seen in 2020. Still, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 316 people are shot every day in the U.S. and 106 of them die.
In my 15 years of working with youth who cycle through the criminal justice system — initially as a social worker and, now, as a lawyer — I’ve represented exactly two white clients. Mainly, my clients have been Latinx kids and Black kids like that one whose tragic story I’ve partly shared. Too often, Black and Latinx kids aren’t granted the same allowances, including diversion from incarceration, that are given to white youth deemed guilty of the very same infractions.
Part of the solution lies in projects such as Ambassadors for Racial Justice, which trains juvenile defenders across the nation on how to combat systemic racism through case advocacy, community activism and legislation. Georgetown Law Professor Kristin Henning launched the program and National Juvenile Defender Center Executive Director Mary Ann Scali has been a driving force in its development; both of have been battling racial inequities in the juvenile legal system for more than 25 years.
In 2018, about 6 out of 10 youth found guilty of an offense – more than 130,000 young people nationally — were placed on probation. Black youth have continued to be overrepresented among youth on probation, and at every point in the justice system. Structural racism drives harsher treatment of Black youth, who are more likely than white youth to be arrested, incarcerated, placed on probation and, when they don’t meet the terms of probation, plunged deeper into the criminal justice system. What’s the result? Black youth comprised just 14 percent of the general population, but 36 percent of youth on probation and 41 percent of incarcerated youth.
To help probation departments reduce the scope of probation, especially for Black youth, we just released a new, research-informed framework.
As Latinx and Black Americans experience highly disproportionate rates of coronavirus infections, mainstream and progressive commentators correctly conclude that conditions of poverty, including cramped living and working spaces, forced returns to work and less access to quality health care, are responsible for higher case counts in communities of color. When new infections shifted strongly from racially diverse, Democrat-voting to mostly white, Republican-voting states this summer, commentators issued political criticisms but refrained from suggesting innate cognitive or moral problems, even as media reports showed unmasked crowds flouting public health standards. For more information on JJIE Hub Newly Added Resources, go to JJIE Resource Hub | Newly Added Resources
Contrast that restraint with the mass blame game that ensued when coronavirus cases rose among young people. Commentators as diverse as California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, MSNBC host Chris Hayes, Dr. Irwin Redlener, New York Times reporters and scores of others hurled epithets such as “selfish,” “reckless,” “partying” and delusional “invincibility” at teenagers and college-age adults to charge them with moral and cognitive defects.
Why the abrupt, often angry change in tone when those infected were young rather than black, brown or older white adults? After all, many of the same challenging conditions apply to young people that apply to people of color.
Young people’s risks for certain behaviors derive from their much higher poverty rates compared to older Americans, not innate recklessness.
I am a former gang member, who took the wrong course of action in joining a gang and decided to live a life of crime. My poor decisions consequently led me to commit a senseless murder and attempted murder on two innocent human beings. As a result of my actions and poor choices I am currently serving a life sentence in prison, as I am under the authority of California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation.
I write you this letter in the hope that it will shed some light into the dark and hidden dangers of gangs and the negative consequences of committing crime.
Being a part of a gang is serious and dangerous matters that have dire consequences. It’s like a deadly tornado that destroys everything and kills anyone who stands in its path.
The violent gang culture destroys countless innocent lives and creates a constant fear and intimidates the neighborhood. It also damages several families and communities in the most destructive ways.
For decades, New York City was besieged by violent crime, peaking in 1990 when the city was ravaged by an estimated 2,245 murders. But then something remarkable happened, according to Greg Berman, author of the recent report “A Thousand Small Sanities: Crime Control Lessons from New York.” Over the last two decades, New York City experienced an unprecedented turnaround in violent crime. In 2009, there were 461 murders in the city, a 79 percent drop from 20 years earlier. Other crimes drastically declined as well, with the city seeing significant decreases in rapes, robberies and car thefts. Berman quotes Frank Zimring, author of the book “The City That Became Safe,” who called the crime rate reduction in New York City “the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world.”
The report, released by the Centre for Justice Innovation, explores the possibility of applying the policies and practices implemented in New York City to communities in the United Kingdom - where in the 2009-2010 fiscal year, London’s Metropolitan Police tallied more than 170,000 instances of violent crime, including 113 murders and more than 2,800 rapes.
A friend of mine called me last week from prison. We hadn’t spoken in a few months, so we did a lot of catching up, mostly talking about how things were at the prison, friends, and the many turns my own life has taken. I told him that a mutual friend of ours was at the new private prison in Milledgeville, Ga., a place called Riverbend Correctional Facility. He groaned and told me he had heard only bad things about the place. Dozens of the most troublesome inmates at his prison had been sent to Milledgeville to populate the 1,500-bed facility run by the GEO group.
NEW YORK – The John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice is holding a two-day conference for journalists on its campus in New York Monday and Tuesday. While the conference, Kids Behind Bars, Where’s the Justice in America’s Juvenile Justice System?, is primarily meant for journalists, many of the topics will be of interest not only to those in the field, but the general public as well. JJIE/Youth Today’s John Fleming and Clay Duda are attending the conference and continue their reporting today. For Day One coverage head over to our post here. DAY TWO
Panel One:
Mike Bocian, provided the keynote address Tuesday morning.