Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/drugs/)
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.
In 2000, I was 14 years old, in Los Angeles' Skid Row. You wouldn't believe such a Third World slum existed within history's richest country; oh, but it did. It does. A section of one of the world's most glamorous cities set aside to hide thousands of homeless people, to hide America's unwillingness to deal with poverty, mental health, drug addiction and homelessness. It’s all swept under the rug, or under the shadow of downtown's skyscrapers from the top of the world, down to a grimy, violent underworld, where you had to fight just to eat and humanity was perverted into its most animalistic tendencies.
Sandra Lawson was only months away from graduating high school when she found out her grandfather had died.
Chloe Rodriguez gazes down the sidewalk on East 150th Street. It’s dusk and she has shed her school uniform for a black hoodie. Her night shift, as a receptionist...
Florida currently spends $2.4 billion annually on its criminal justice system. With the state’s criminal justice system operations being the third largest in the country, there are more than 96,000 Floridians in state prisons and another 166,000 under community supervision. We saw a 9% reduction in crime rates statewide in 2018, which is in line with Florida’s 48-year trend.
Ten years ago I met my wife. We were high school sweethearts. We fell in love fast. Our love was like electricity. We were together every day. Things between us were great. She was the best friend I had always wanted. We stayed together all through high school, graduated together and moved into a home together.
I am 38 years old. I have been incarcerated almost 15 years now. I have a sentence of LWOP (life without parole) plus 25 to life for a first-degree murder with drive-by enhancement. I was raised in the Bay Area on the Oakland side of the water. My family was big. Dad’s side was Mexican, mom’s side was white.
Author and reporter Maia Szalavitz, who writes about substance use and related issues recently spoke with Youth Today and JJIE about her experience and her newest book: “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction,” released in April. Here’s Szalavitz’s take on addiction and its complexities, from her own experience and in her own words.
Two mothers and a father talk about what it's like to be the parent of a substance user in this affecting piece about frustration and loss.
The state defied an Office of Open Records ruling and took the matter to court to conceal the names of doctors prescribing to kids confined in its six correctional facilities.
The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services insisted the physicians who care for and prescribe to the state’s most chronic or violent youth offenders would be endangered if their names were made public.