Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/gangs/page/3/)
Humans of Restorative Justice (HORJ) stories highlight the incredible individuals working to build and restore strong relationships in their communities. They are written and edited by David Levine based on interviews with real-world practitioners. This one is with Keyonn of New York, New York.
“Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth” sheds a critical light on the winding journeys into adulthood of 25 formerly incarcerated young adults ages 18 to 24 in Los Angeles County.
Since local violence peaked in the 1990s, the Compton neighborhood has battled gang culture and worked to lower its high crime rates. For 30 years one after-school program has found success keeping kids off the streets by putting them on horses.
Just as lightning flashes and dances across the sky, so too, does this life I live. In a world away, a jungle so thick that everything touches you, a war not of my making, took my father and sister in a cloud of thundering smoke.
When Carlos Jennings got out of prison in 2014, he wanted to kill the person who helped put him there.
“I wasn’t home seven days after doing 10 years in jail, and I’m in the car with somebody else, with a gun in my hand, trying to do something to somebody,” he said.
The big issue for young defendants are false confessions, since some research suggests that minors are more likely to tell interrogators what they want to hear or to brag about their gang exploits. The other concern is that youth are not equipped to adequately participate in their own defense.
On Friday, Manhattan Justice Edward McLaughlin sentenced Taylonn Murphy Jr. to 50 years to life for the 2011 murder of Walter Sumter. Murphy was also convicted of conspiracy, robbery and weapons charges.
Luis Zepeda, 19, has gone to juvenile camp three times. His most recent release was after Los Angeles began a new re-entry program designed to steer youths to resources.
“I didn’t get no resources,” Zepeda said. “It was always punish, punish, punish, punish.”
I knew I didn’t look good, but after a day of ice packs and Netflix, I was getting used to it. The curve of skin where my nose met my face had been cracked open. A bright purple crescent bloomed across my puffy cheek, swooping out from the inner corner of my right eye. “A girl did that to you?” my coworkers asked when I came back to the office, wincing at the sight. “Why?”
It was the same question I’d asked in the emergency room, waiting to find out if my nose was broken, and the same question I tried to answer a year later while reporting a story on girls in the juvenile justice system.
Originally appeared in The Chicago Bureau
CHICAGO - Violence stalks Chicago’s streets, but when faced with staunchly rising homicide rates that show no sign of ebbing, residents’ capacity to tolerate the state of crime drains by the day. After Hadiya Pendleton performed with her high school marching band during the presidential inauguration two weeks ago, the King College Prep teen became Chicago’s 42nd homicide victim of 2013 when she was gunned down on Chicago’s South Side – the unintended victim of a gang dispute. Her death added to a January homicide toll that was the bloodiest since 2002, according to Chicago Police reports, suggesting that despite wide attention to Chicago’s murder woes, shifts in policing strategy and big promises by powerful politicians, there will be no immediate respite to the escalating violence that claimed more than 500 in 2012. The ups and downs of Chicago’s homicide toll over the past six years/Graphic by Lynne Carty/The Chicago Bureau
Perhaps it’s because Pendleton performed for Obama, or maybe because she starred in an anti-gang public service announcement four years ago (Pendleton PSA) pleading for an end to the chaos, but the nation has embraced this 15-year-old as a symbol and not just another statistic. As for those who study crime, who write about it and opine about it in Chicago, the nation’s murder capital, the question remains whether it will really matter:
“There is action because of the attention but it is not clear that it will work,” said University of Illinois at Chicago’s Dick Simpson, a known political expert and former alderman who recently studied the nexus of drugs, gangs and police corruption.