Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/juvenile-justice/page/23/)
We sat in blue plastic school desks. The room was all white, with gray metal cabinets. It was comfortably air conditioned, which was a nice break from the summer heat. There were 20 or so prisoners of different ages, in various states of boredom. The teacher, a counselor, was droning on about the “disease model” of drug addiction, trying to explain some outdated research and half-baked ideas about addiction.
After the loss of key federal funding and the end of a stopgap measure, state lawmakers in Utah are cutting the budgets of agencies providing crucial services to juvenile services. After a federal decision to suspend funding of non-medical expenditures associated with residential care was made two years ago, Utah legislators provided its state agencies - such as Juvenile Justice Services (JJS) and Division of Child and Family Services (DFCS) - with emergency stopgap funds. This legislative session, however, stopgap funding for juvenile services programs ceased, with state legislators issuing an additional $3.2 million in budget cuts. The impact of the federal decision on Utah was severe, costing the state an estimated $27 million in Medicaid funding. In the process, Utah’s JJS ended up losing an estimated $9 million per year, with the state DFCS agency losing an estimated $18 million annually.
After more than five years of drafting, a comprehensive juvenile justice reform bill is expected to appear in the Georgia General Assembly in January, which would give children in the court system access to updated intervention and rehabilitation. A juvenile justice subcommittee will be formed soon out of the Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Gov. Nathan Deal to study adult and child justice codes. The full committee held its first meeting July16, where it heard a background briefing from the Pew Center on the States about juvenile justice in other states. The subcommittee will build on at least five years of work that ended in House Bill 641, a bill that died in the legislature in March. “We hope to find things to make improvements to the current 641,” said bill author state Rep. Wendell Willard (R-Sandy Springs). When it died in March, the 246-page bill brought the state’s juvenile justice code up to date with best practices about how to treat juveniles in the court system, whether as defendants, abuse victims or both. It also created a category of juveniles called “children in need of services,” who do things considered unruly, but not quite criminal, such as skipping school, running away from home, or breaking curfew.
Youth advocates are ringing the alarm bells at Congress’s proposed levels of funding for state programs that would prevent young people from being locked up for skipping school, keep young offenders from being held in adult prisons and reduce the disproportionate numbers of minority youth in jail. Since 2002, the funds available for states to implement Title II of the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act have been slashed by more than half from $88.8 million, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which brings together citizens and public officials who work on juvenile justice issues in every state. Current funding levels for Title II -- whose four core requirements aim to protect young people from being unfairly confined in prison -- are at $40 million, according to figures released by the Coalition for Juvenile Justice in April. The White House requested $70 million for the 2013 budgetary year, an amount unlikely to pass Congress. If federal funds shrink further, states will have little incentive to meet federal guidelines for keeping juveniles out of the adult prison system, said Liz Ryan, president of the D.C.-based advocacy organization Campaign for Youth Justice.
For some time I have read about the “school to prison pipeline,” an idea that links zero tolerance policies, school policing, disproportionate minority contact with disciplinary processes, and other factors to the increased incarceration of minority youth. The basic idea is that the system formed by these practices and structures contributes to putting more kids in prison. Lately, I have come across a similar term, the cradle to prison pipeline. This is the phrase trademarked by the Children's Defense Fund (CDF). It is daunting to consider that societal structures and policies can have such an affect on a newborn.
By Eric Ferkenhoff and Maryam Jameel
Tallying Chicago’s violence during the first half of 2012, including a 39 percent jump in murders, it can be difficult to get what criminologist Tracy Siska is talking about. True, the streets are bloodied by gang warfare, said Siska, head of the Chicago Justice Project, an independent, non-profit research group that analyzes criminal justice data. The numbers don’t lie; there had been 260-plus murders through the end of June, up 72 over the same period last year. And overnight Tuesday, two girls 12, and 13, became the latest child victims of the gunfire here. Neither were thought to be intended targets, but rather were victims of errant gunfire just days after the release of a University of California Davis study showing the prevalence of stray-bullet victims.
But Siska has argued much of the media is playing the hype game, skewing reality for Chicagoans or observers by screaming with headlines about more city children getting murdered this public school year than any year since 2008 – the first full year of the recession – and countless stories of overnight mayhem suffered in many Chicago neighborhoods. There has been a parade of stories – ones Siska would agree should and must be told.
The W. Haywood Burns Institute (BI) would like to congratulate our colleague Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative and the legions of lawyers, advocates and families on their victory in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama.
This decision will impact more than 2,000 young people of which 75 percent are youth of color. The decision specifically holds that young people convicted of homicide cannot mandatorily be sentenced to life without possibility of parole. While some headlines scream that “murderers” will go free, for those of us that live and work in communities of color, this decision is impactful and important. In some communities of concentrated poverty across the country, the line between perpetrator and victim is easily traversed. Families of victims and convicted perpetrators are coming to grips with the facts of the new decision.
It was an isolation cell at a youthful offender prison where I spent a lot of time, a place called Alto, in north Georgia. It was used to break young men down, and it was often where punishment beatings took place as well. Even men who weren’t beaten would eventually begin to crumble. The isolation proved too much for even the toughest of us. Sometimes when the guards opened the door to deliver food you could hear the prisoners screaming, usually begging to be let out, with promises that they would behave.
At the first-ever congressional hearing on the subject of solitary confinement, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois recently observed that it’s not always “the worst of the worst” who are subjected to the practice. Mentally-ill inmates, immigrants and juvenile offenders are put in solitary as well. And perhaps, said a series of witnesses at the hearing, the time has come to rethink the issue.
Connecticut just made a major policy change that will protect kids and reduce crime. You probably didn’t notice. That’s understandable. The Raise the Age campaign that pushed for this legislation didn’t run television commercials or send out mailers. We couldn’t afford them.