Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/justice/)
“I want everyone to hear me and hear me clearly,” Mayor Brandon Scott said during a press conference regarding youth-on-youth gun violence. “We are going back to the old days. We will be enforcing a youth curfew as we move into the latter spring and summer months.”
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.
March 7, 2012 my oldest brother was killed. He was killed by the NOPD (New Orleans Police Department). Coming home from school March 7, 2012, my oldest brother and his friend was sitting outside. They were just chilling and talking. Once he saw my siblings and I get off the school bus, he told us not to come outside until we finished our homework.
An imperfect film reminds Americans of chilling crime and those wrongfully convicted
It’s often said that the more you know about something, the less you are apt to like a film about it. So let me state up front that I was living in New York City (in a single room occupancy hotel not far from Central Park, in fact — I went running in the park almost every day), in 1989, so I remember the Central Park jogger case quite well. In fact, if you lived in the city at the time, it was almost impossible not to hear about the case, including the controversy over the treatment of the young men arrested and later convicted of this crime. The case also received nationwide coverage, as did the fact that someone else later confessed to the crime, and that the Five’s convictions were overturned in 2002. Apparently most Americans don’t know much about this case, however, and they may be better served than I was by The Central Park Five, a new documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon.
Sometimes I forget I was in prison, even though I spent nearly a quarter century there. Maybe, I just get caught up in the day-to-day concerns of my life out here in the “free world.”
I am a student in a fast-paced master’s program, so I am studying, reading, writing and attending 13 hours of class every other weekend. I write for two websites. I have an internship. When I can fit it in, I have the rest of my life to focus on, with a girlfriend, a house, pets, cooking and the other details of living an ordinary life. Maybe it’s not these things that cause me to forget my past though.
TED2012 helped Bryan Stevenson raise more than $1 million following his impassioned plea for justice at the California conference last week. Stevenson, a human rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, spoke about the role of race in today's justice system, including juvenile justice. You can watch his talk below.
“All of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone,” said Bryan Stevenson Thursday at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach California. Stevenson is an attorney and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that litigates on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders and others whose trials are marked by racism and misconduct. Stevenson spoke passionately about how the American justice system is distorted around race and poverty. Our prisons are overflowing and the U.S. is still the only industrialized nation in the world that will sentence juveniles to life in prison. Following his talk, $1 million was raised for a campaign run by Stevenson that ends excessive sentencing of children and stops the practice of putting kids in adult jails and prisons.
Our Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, JJIE.org, has its roots in part in The Race Beat, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book co-written by Hank Klibanoff, former managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I was taken by how important it was for the press to shine a spotlight on the injustices taking place in the South before and during the Civil Rights era. Today that same kind of spotlight must be shone on the juvenile justice system, which, with its share of injustices, remains in the shadows of the collective American consciousness. When John Fleming came our way as the prospective editor of the JJIE.org, I knew he was a kindred spirit who cares deeply about high quality, ethically sound journalism and equal justice for all. That dual commitment is illustrated in his just published essay in the Nieman Reports entitled: Compelled to Remember What Others Want to Forget.
