Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/juvenile-incarceration/page/2/)
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services wrongfully incarcerated hundreds of children in juvenile detention after a court ordered them to be released to their guardian, according to a class action lawsuit filed Thursday by Cook County's public guardian.
When her father, Almeer Nance, was 16, he was sentenced to a minimum of 51 years and, after that, another 25 years for abetting a robbery of a Knoxville Radio Shack and being an accomplice to the murder of store employee Joseph Ridings, 21. The shooter, then-19-year-old Robert Vincent Manning, was sentenced to life without parole.
Since 2007, 18 states have raised to 18 the age at which a person can be criminally charged as an adult, according to a 2021 report from The Sentencing Project. In a previous report, that organization concluded that 250,000 youth nationwide were being charged as adults annually in 2000. By 2019, that number was 53,000, an 80% drop.
Non-felony offenses accounted for two out of three arrests of juvenile girls in Florida, according to “The Justice for Girls Blueprint: The Way Forward for Florida,” recently released by the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center.
Two-thirds of the state's justice-involved girls but roughly one-third of boys — 66% versus 38% — were arrested for felony offenses. Two-thirds of girls and almost one-fifth of boys were incarcerated for non-felonies, according to the center's analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Dashboard, Department of Health Youth Substance Abuse Survey and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey...
Four years ago, a social worker from the Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Center asked English professor Alexandra Fields, of nearby Middlesex College, if she would be able to provide college programming for youth incarcerated at that New Jersey facility. Beyond helping them earn their high school diplomas, it offered nothing more educationally to those graduates. In mid-February 2022, 20 young men across eight of the facilities started working on an associate’s degree from Middlesex, becoming the first such cohort in New Jersey to be on a path toward a college degree.
Death rates were 5.9 times higher for previously incarcerated 11- to 21-year-olds in Ohio than in that state’s general population of youth enrolled in Medicaid health insurance for low-income people, according to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Open Network.
In a finding researchers said was especially startling, formerly incarcerated females died at nine times the rate of the general population.
“More than half of all deaths were among youths convicted of crimes against persons,” wrote the researchers, who examined 3,645 formerly incarcerated youth. “More deaths occurred in youths who were incarcerated for the first time and in youths who spent less than or equal to [one] year in custody.”
Surveillance video shows a Black 17-year-old struggling with staff at a Wichita juvenile center last fall before he died after he was restrained facedown for more than 30 minutes.
Sedgwick County released 18 video clips late Friday afternoon of what happened before Cedric Lofton was rushed to a hospital on Sept. 24. He died two days later.
The nation’s 1,772 juvenile facilities face many challenges caused by the pandemic, according to those working inside and monitoring them from the outside. So far, juvenile facilities — 789 of the 1,510 nationwide are detention centers or long-term secure facilities, the remainder are group homes, residential treatment centers, wilderness camps and such — and the organizations monitoring them have reported no young people dying from the disease.
The Louisiana inmate whose Supreme Court case was instrumental in extending the possibility of freedom to hundreds of people sentenced to life in prison without the opportunity for parole when they were juveniles was freed on parole Wednesday after spending nearly six decades behind bars.
Henry Montgomery, 75, was released from prison just hours after the parole board's decision and went to the offices of the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit which is supporting him after his release. There he was embraced by tearful staff and former juvenile lifers who were freed as a result of the court case that bears Montgomery's name.
A project aiming to grant more Black and brown youth entry to community-based programs that are an alternative to juvenile incarceration will be implemented in five upstate New York counties, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has announced.