Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/juvenile-justice/page/37/)
The Ronald McDonald House Charities try to improve the health and well being of children directly. The charity takes a holistic, family-centered approach to helping bring kids care. The Ronald McDonald House Charity hopes to partner with organizations that take an innovative approach to addressing the health needs of the population of kids. The deadline for this grant is November 13, 2011.
Who hasn’t been part of, or witness to, an ugly incident on the playground? You know the scene. Recess is going well, everyone is having great fun, then a disagreement ensues, over who knows what. Before you know it, there’s a torrent of threatening words, a flurry of shoves and finally a knee to the gut or a punch in the face. It can be a rough place, the playground.
The general adolescent population is estimated to have a rate of 9 percent to 21 percent in occurrence of diagnosable psychiatric disorders. In comparison, researchers have established that the juvenile offender population has a disproportionately high rate of mental health problems, with estimates suggesting it is as high as 50 percent to 70 percent. Additionally, a majority of the diagnosable youth in the juvenile system have a co-occurring substance-use disorder. Many initiatives dealing with mental health problems in juvenile offenders have treated them as a criminogenic risk factor; positing that, if these problems are addressed, youth’s risk for repeat offenses will decrease and their involvement in pro-social activity will increase. It is important that mental health problems be addressed for these youth, but we require a better understanding of the role mental health problems play for offending to better inform program development.
I'm from a small town in Missouri. It all started when I was 13. I started rebelling, and I ended up stealing my dad's car. I then got put in juvenile. Two weeks after being on probation for that, I stole another car...
Regular JJIE contributor Judge Steve Teske was recently featured in The Washington Post for his crusade to end the school-to-prison-pipeline. The Post examines how Teske’s work to reduce schools’ referrals to juvenile court has gained a national audience.
Teske says zero tolerance policies have resulted in too many kids entering the juvenile justice system. In Teske’s opinion, “zero tolerance often means overpunishment for low-level misdeeds,” according to The Post. Because of that, he helped bring reforms to his home community of Clayton County, Ga., where Teske is chief juvenile judge. Since implementing the changes, juvenile crime has dropped, recidivism is down and graduation rates are up.
Teske, the story says, remains tough on crimes involving guns and drugs.
“The cases we have in court now are the burglars, the robbers — the kids who scare you, not the kids who make you mad,” Teske told The Post.
As Teske travels the country speaking about the need for reform, the success of Clayton County, The Post notes, is now inspiring communities in Connecticut, Indiana and Kansas, among others, to implement similar reforms.
And Teske is quick to point out his own teenage lapse in judgment, a school prank that today would have landed him in juvenile court. At 13, he pulled his school's fire alarm but his principal insisted the school handle Teske's punishment.
“Would I even be a judge today had I gone to jail that day?” he asked in The Post.
A majority of Americans favor rehabilitation and treatment of youth over incarceration, new national poll found. The survey, commissioned by the Campaign for Youth Justice (CFYJ), also found most Americans, 76 percent, believe youth should not automatically be sent to adult court. The poll was given to 1,000 U.S. adults.
"This public opinion research demonstrates Americans’ strong support for rehabilitation and treatment for court-involved youth, over incarceration and automatic prosecution in adult criminal court," stated CFYJ’s President and CEO Liz Ryan in a press release. "In light of this research, it is urgent that state officials accelerate youth justice reforms to reduce the incarceration of youth and prosecution in adult criminal court, and that Congress and the Administration reject deep cuts to juvenile justice funding."
Other highlights from the poll include:
A large majority of the public, 89 percent, would prefer youth to receive treatment, counseling and education.
Family is an important component in the juvenile justice system. Eighty-six percent of Americans favor involving the youth’s family in treatment while ensuring youth remains connected to their families.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe children should not be placed in adult prisons and jails.
Many Americans, 71 percent, favor providing more funds to public defenders to represent youth in court.
Eighty-one percent of Americans trust judges over prosecutors when determining if a child should be tried as an adult.
Newly appointed executive director Katie Jo Ballard will be the first to tell you that the Georgia Office of Children and Families (GOCF) has a heck of a job. Since 2008 the organization has been charged with implementing “a spectrum of prevention, intervention, and treatment services for all children” in Georgia.
That means identifying effective programs and delivering funding across four areas of service: youth development, family violence, juvenile justice, and prevention programs.
“We’re looking for people that can provide 360 kinds of care for a family,” says Ballard. “Like really wrap themselves around a family and support them in every aspect.”
The GOCF doesn’t deliver any services directly. Rather, the organization distributes a combination of federal and state funds to community-based programs through a competitive grant process.
Since taking office in mid-August, Ballard has been trying to wrap her head around everything the organization does. The agency offers so many grants in so many areas, and some of those grantees offer sub-grants, she says, so there’s a lot to take in.
“I’m a very visual person, so I’m actually going out there and trying to visit sites so I can see what they do,” she says. “That’s what’s been the most rewarding to me, actually meeting a survivor of domestic violence, meeting a child that survived sexual exploitation, hearing those stories and how our programs have helped them… That’s the best part, but it’s also the hardest.”
Richard Ross is a busy guy. Catch him, if you can, dashing to, through or from, an airport. He’s always on the go.
But then again, if you plan on visiting 300 youth detention facilities across the nation, taking photos of more than 1,000 young people and administrators, then you don’t really have time to stand around and chat, for long anyhow.
One’s photography does not appear in more publications than you can shake a Canon 5D at -- from Harpers to Architectural Digest -- by being lazy. You don’t sit on your butt on the way to having your photos shown at galleries from The Tate Modern in London, to the High Museum in Atlanta. You don’t loaf around and end up publishing books, such as the Architecture of Authority and Waiting for the End of the World and get them introduced by the likes of John MacArthur and Sarah Vowell, by slacking.
And in between, if you are Ross, well you don’t really have down time, because there’s that class you have to teach at U.C. Santa Barbara.
It’s a good thing he approaches his work with the energy of a teenager, but it’s a better thing that he does it with the practiced eye and maturity of his 64 years. With that combination, comes not only care for his art and what’s in it, but the subjects and subject beyond the images. See it across his body of work.
His latest, and the object of his profound care for the past five years, is a project he calls Juvenile-In-Justice. This is what has taken him to those many detention centers scattered across 30 states. After 40 years of working in photography, he’s turning his attention, and his lens, he says, to the juvenile justice system.
The point of this exercise? He does not even attempt to blur his motivation. It is, quite simply, to “instigate policy reform.”
With his stunning photos it is hard to see how he will fail:
Ross’ work begins appearing this week on this page as well as our new arts page, Bokeh. Twice a week, you’ll see new images of his work on the JJIE site, where a link will take you to a larger body of his work on the Bokeh site. The images, all of youth inside detention centers, will include cutlines telling you enough about the teen for you to get a feel of their, and Ross’, humanity.
It's time to get real about kids and detention. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "All great truths begin as blasphemies." Well, here are my blaspheming thoughts. I am tired of those with the "lock ‘em all up" attitudes critical of alternatives to detention. They talk off the top of their heads and spew opinionated garbage from their mouths with nothing to show in support of their "get tough" attitude but anecdotes.
Christopher Terrance Middleton was 14 when he committed several serious crimes in the course of one event in 1997, including kidnapping, aggravated assault, armed robbery and theft by taking. He was sentenced to serve a total of 30 years without the possibility of parole. According to his attorney, McNeil Stokes, Christopher had agreed to plead guilty to a 20-year sentence, but during the sentencing phase the victim testified she would be afraid if he got out before he was 45. Both Stokes and Middleton’s mother have written about his case on JJIE. His mother advocates for the repeal of mandatory sentencing laws for juveniles, and Stokes has filed an appeal challenging the constitutionality of such sentences.