Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/from-the-bureaus/page/5/)
Juvenile justice is a complex issue – one that affects communities in different ways. Understanding this, JJIE is creating a network of news bureaus across the country, extending its coverage to a local level. The Chicago Bureau and The New York Metro Bureau are the first of these. Each has and will be contributing in-depth local reporting of national interest.
Aphexlee / Flikr
They're usually associated with Bob Marley and the island culture of Trinidad and Tobago, but the calypso sounds emanating from a classroom at The Hamilton-Madison House are made by Asian hands. Hamilton-Madison is nestled within the Gov. Alfred E. Smith Houses in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan. For more than six years, the House ran a music school offering affordable private violin and piano lessons to the residents of the community. For those years, the Asian community overwhelmingly used the music school. Hoping to reach more black and Latino budding-musicians -- who make up almost 56 percent of the community -- the executive director suggested introducing a steel pan class.
Christine Streich / Youth Today
NEW YORK -- A shabby community center on the first floor of one of the 12 buildings that make up the vastGov. Alfred E. Smith public houses is where social workers and teachers are hoping music can break down cultural barriers. Melodies drift from the classroom in the tiny Two Bridges neighborhood of lower Manhattan, six days a week. It is in need of fresh paint. Mismatched desks are scattered amidst tables and other pieces of furniture. Remnants of English language lessons line the walls on yellowing easel paper.
NEW YORK -- Last year, the after-school program at P.S. 102 in Elmhurst, Queens shut down due to funding cuts. Without the program, 11-year-old Savannah Colon thought she’d have to ride a city bus back and forth for three hours each day with her 6-year-old sister, until her mother finished work. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Savannah’s mother found a city-funded program called Beacon at I.S. 5, just a couple blocks away. “My mom was really frustrated,” Savannah said.
NEW YORK -- Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June in the Miller v. Alabama case, John Blume, a professor at Cornell Law School, started worrying about his home state of South Carolina. Blume knew the Miller decision -- which ruled that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment -- would create a great need for legal work in South Carolina. The legal limbo created by the Miller decision is not unique to South Carolina, however. Advocates for juvenile sentencing reform estimate there are 2,500 prisoners in nearly 30 states across the country who are serving life sentences without parole, including some 2,100 who were given mandatory sentences. In fact, other states across the country contending with the same confusion have more inmates than the 36 Blume and his team found in need of new remedies to meet the standards of the Miller decision.
NEW YORK --By the early 1990s, the crack era that devoured New York City in the 1980s was on the decline and crime rates were similarly falling. But Randol Contreras saw something different on the streets in the South Bronx neighborhood where he grew up. His drug dealer friends, no longer making the same money selling crack, were turning to robbing drug dealers for an increasingly dwindling share of the market. One vice traded for another, more violent one. His book "Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence and the American Dream," published by the University of California Press last month, chronicles the downfall of the drug trade and the young Dominican men from his childhood neighborhood that tried to make an often dangerous living in it.
NEW YORK -- It’s a frigid morning on Staten Island’s South Shore, with the temperature struggling to crack 20 degrees as a stiff wind buffets the Eltingville neighborhood. The elementary school students showing up at P.S. 55 are cocooned in puffy jackets, gloves and hats as they jump out of warm cars and onto the sidewalk towing large backpacks, some adorned with the face of Justin Bieber, others with the logo of the New York Giants. Amidst an ongoing school bus strike, it’s a fairly orderly scene on this Tuesday. Parents drive up to the curb, let their children out and move on to the rest of the day. Directing traffic, and gently scolding the occasional parent who pulls a U-turn on Koch Boulevard, is Mike Reilly, a former New York City police lieutenant who is a few days shy of his 40th birthday.
NEW YORK - Photographer Richard Ross can’t pin down the moment he found his calling. It could have been on the concrete floor of the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Miss., where he sat photographing a 12-year-old inmate in a yellow prison jumpsuit as he gazed at graffiti of spaceships and aliens scribbled on the wall of his tiny, decrepit cell. Maybe it was the young inmates trying to sleep on the floor of the intake room of a Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. Or the facility for young female offenders in California where the administrator told him all 88 residents were victims of sexual abuse. It could have been his visit with Ronald Franklin, who ran away from home at 13 after his mother tried to kill him, got involved in an armed carjacking and ended up in a Miami juvenile detention center where he waited four years without a trial.
There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.
There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.