What to do with a Homeless Teenager

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One week back in February, I noticed something amiss at the Miller ranch when I came home from work. Our kid’s friend, Travis* was sitting on our couch enjoying Comedy Central. That wasn’t unusual, but after two weeks I came to the sneaking suspicion that Travis was actually living with us. After some investigation, we found he was spending his nights on a futon in our son’s room. When asked, our son said he felt sorry for him because he’d been kicked out of the Army, and then lost his job, which caused him to lose his car, which made him homeless because it was where he’d been living.

OJJDP Finds Information Gap in Juvenile Transfer Cases

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Since the 1980’s, nearly every state has passed or expanded juvenile transfer laws that allow kids to be tried as adults in some cases. But a recent report from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) found that only 13 states publicly report how many kids are transferred each year and even fewer report any details of those transfers. According to the report, in the states that publicly reported, 14,000 youth were transferred to criminal courts in 2007, the last year data was available. However, that number has declined sharply since 1994. Writing in the report, OJJDP Acting Administrator Jeff Slowikowski said, “To obtain the critical information that policymakers, planners, and other concerned citizens need to assess the impact of expanded transfer laws, we must extend our knowledge of the prosecution of juveniles in criminal courts.”

Young people accused of a crime are sent to juvenile or criminal court, in part, based on their age — 18 in most states, but as young as 16 in others, the report says.

Judge Rodatus

Proposed Revision of Georgia Juvenile Code is Flawed

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I would like to take a few minutes to state my thoughts on the status of Georgia’s juvenile code revision and the course of action I intend to follow. The short version is, I see no point in continuing with the “stakeholder meeting” approach to reaching a compromise on the proposed bill, HB641. I intend to work diligently to see this bill never sees the light of day. We have spent seven years trying to be heard about our serious reservations about the Proposed Model Code (PMC), and the document, now in its third iteration, still is flawed. Keep in mind we, as judges, special assistant attorney generals, CASA’s, guardians ad litems, district attorneys and public defenders had no input into the initial draft.

The Many Ironies of Juvenile Detention

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I have found over the years that many naysayers of detention alternatives for juvenile offenders are lacking in the body of research supporting alternatives to detention and are ignorant of the laws governing detention.

Some are politicians, victim advocates and even law-makers. I am more disturbed with the considerable number of prosecutors, defense attorneys and law enforcement unfamiliar with these restrictions -- and they are directly involved with kids in the system.

I have been doing some work in North Carolina on detention alternatives over the past few months. I am impressed with the leadership of the secretary of the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice Linda Hayes, her Chief of Staff Robin Jenkins and Deputy Secretary Mike Rieder. They are determined to do the right thing with kids despite the shoe-string budget.

They can showcase many outstanding outcomes from using evidence-based practices. Take for instance Union County, outside of Charlotte. They pursued and got a MacArthur Foundation Action Network grant to develop strategies to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the detention of kids. They have developed many tools that have produced outstanding results.

The coordinators of the effort in Union County are Karen Tucker and Becky Smith. They shared with me that early on in their effort they learned that law enforcement knew very little about the juvenile laws around detention. This frustrated police and sometimes made the relationship between the court and police difficult.

Tucker and Smith worked with law enforcement to introduce specialized training on juvenile laws -- especially detention. They found that whether law enforcement agreed philosophically or not with some of the prohibitions on detention for kids, police were less frustrated with the system knowing that the law is the law. This frustration is reduced more when the training also introduces the research in support of the legal prohibitions against detention in many circumstances.

The Real Consequences of Bullying

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Bullying is increasingly seen as a problem in the United States, and some research has started to prove that its consequences are real. Most adults can probably remember being bullied in school, and there is a tendency to think of it as a rite of passage or simply as a part of life that kids have to get used to. After all, we got through it OK, perhaps with the advice of “standing up” to the bully, or simply by enduring it until it went away. Consider a few statistics from James Burns, an educational speaker and trainer who runs Proactive Behavioral – Management:

Sixty percent of middle school students say they have been bullied, while 16 percent of staff believe that students are bullied. Thirty percent of students who reported they had been bullied said they had at times brought weapons to school.

Is Juvenile Justice the Missing Link in Georgia Corrections Reform?

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Golfers love being on the leader board. Corrections officials, not so much as there is nothing to celebrate about Georgia being the national leader with the highest percentage of its adults under corrections system supervision. The ratio is 1-in-13 and it is the worst in the country.

Not only does it cost lots of money -– more than $1 billion per year in state dollars to run prisons -– but lofty incarceration, probation and parole statistics send the wrong message nationally and internationally when Georgia tries to market itself as a leading edge economy and destination.

Over the next several months you will hear extensive discussion about adult corrections system reform. A commission created by the 2011 General Assembly was told to develop proposals to streamline Georgia corrections without an adverse impact on public safety. The report is due to Gov. Nathan Deal in seven weeks, with legislation possible next year.

Not much of the process is being conducted in public -– there have been just three public meetings -– and the process does not include a juvenile justice system review. That is an unfortunate and perhaps costly oversight. Doesn’t it make sense that a high percentage of adults who commit felonies and fill our prisons began their criminal careers as troubled youths?

“It seems to me that if we were to concentrate a lot of our efforts more in the juvenile justice arena then we might have greater success later in terms of reducing the crime rate,” said Judge Cynthia Wright, chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court. Wright appeared on a public safety panel hosted by Women in Leadership last week at The Commerce Club in Atlanta.

Prison and the Crucial Role of Nonviolent Communication

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I saw a lot of violence during my years in prison in Georgia. Most of the time, however, this violence happened because of miscommunication. Rumors about what one guy had said about another, or allegations of some misconduct such as stealing, would lead to a confrontation. The accused would feel trapped into responding with violence. The culture was attuned to respect, and instances of disrespect were seen as reasonable grounds for hitting someone, or at least threatening them.

Guilty After Proven Innocent

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Late one night, one of my sons was picked up by police in the parking lot at a Wal-Mart in downtown Atlanta. Video cameras showed he was with a group of young people who “forgot” to pay as they strolled out of the store with a cart full of camping equipment. He was waiting at the car for his friends to finish shopping and claimed he had no idea they didn’t intend to pay for their goods. Police arrested the entire group, leaving it up to the courts to sort the innocent from the guilty. After a frantic middle of the night phone call where he INSISTED he was innocent of shoplifting, we bailed him out of jail with $1,500 in cash, and about a month later the case was heard by a judge and the charges against him were dismissed.

Longest Serving Juvenile Court Judge Steps Down at age 95

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About the only time Judge Aaron Cohn left the familiar confines of his native Georgia and his hometown of Columbus, was to fight with General George Patton’s 3rd Cavalry during major campaigns in Europe during the Second World War. Judge Cohn, it seems, likes things the way they are, enjoys his Georgia, his Columbus and, since 1965, his bench on the juvenile court in that west Georgia city up against the Chattahoochee River. This week Judge Cohn has done something surprising. He is stepping down, in itself not remarkable occurrence, until you understand that he is the nation’s longest serving juvenile court judge, and that he does so at the age of 95. He will, he said, retire at the end of September.

Commissioner Amy Howell DJJ GJSA

Georgia’s Commissioner of Department of Juvenile Justice Talks about Her Kids, All 22,000 of Them

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Georgia’s Department of Juvenile Justice Commissioner Amy Howell isn’t ashamed to admit she was a bit of a snotty teen. She had a mean eye-roll and attitude to boot, she has said, and really didn’t see a life past the age of 25. That is until until those in her life who cared about her most, finally got through to her.

When it comes to juvenile justice and heading the DJJ, Howell takes a similar approach. For her it’s personal.

“The goal has to be on the lasting success for young people,” she said. “If we want to make sure they don’t recidivate we need to make sure we’re giving them, and setting them up in the community with, the opportunities for that lasting success.”

Howell recently told a contingent of Georgia YDC Directors that while she considers the juvenile facilities are ‘their house,’ the kids incarcerated are her kids – and she expects them to be taken care of while there.

“My Kids.”

That’s how Howell refers to all of the some 22,000 ‘and two’ kids that are overseen by Georgia’s DJJ: 20,000 kids under community supervision, 2,000 in incarceration and the two in her own home.