Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/juvenile-justice/page/4/)
To some in the audience, Jeremy White sounding like he was preaching.
“I was 19 years old when I got incarcerated. I was facing 120 years,” White, 42, said, his words deliberate, his cadence suited for a Sunday morning pulpit, his Tennessee drawl full on.
“ … [I began] remembering where I came from … ”
“That’s good, that’s good!” Vickie Woodard exclaimed.
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.
The number of children incarcerated in juvenile prisons across the United States fell to an all-time low in 2020, the latest year of available federal data about those facilities, fueling proponents’ hopes of entirely eliminating those detention centers.
The decline in incarcerations came as juvenile arrests have also dropped for most crimes except murder, which has been on the rise in recent years.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled that mandatory life sentences for youth are cruel and unusual punishment. According to that 3-to-2 vote by the court late last year, those convicted of murder as minors must be allowed a chance at parole after a minimum of 25 years in prison.
Along with New Jersey and California, Utah is among a growing number of states that are implementing postsecondary programming for incarcerated youth. Utah’s Higher Education for Incarcerated Youth program even goes beyond what’s offered to incarcerated adults in Utah: Most adults in Utah prisons do not have access to free college-level courses.
Originally, registries were conceived as a way to inform communities about convicted sexual predators living in their neighborhoods. But researchers, conducting several different studies over the years, have largely determined that putting minors on registries does not enhance community safety and reflects a miscarriage of justice that runs afoul of the juvenile justice system’s promise to help rehabilitate youth.
Connecticut has turned its troubled juvenile facilities into what federal officials have cited as exemplary national models. Staffing is up dramatically, in part because directors talked to employees about their worries and took steps to solve them. The strategy helped reduce confrontations and brought the Hartford center national recognition this year from Performance-based Standards, which works to improve juvenile justice outcomes and equity.
Madison is one of about 49 public school districts nationwide that, according to Education Week, have trimmed or eliminated school policing programs since 2020. While some districts that removed police officers have reported largely positive results, in Madison, some students, parents and educators are considering what they believe they’ve lost.
LaKeith Smith, under Alabama’s felony murder law allowing prosecutors to charge a person considered an accomplice to a crime, was faulted for his friend’s death. No evidence that the teen fired or possessed a gun was presented during the trial. Smith, now 23, should never have been in that group of boys, his mother said, making trouble with them. He also should not be serving a 55-year sentence in a maximum-security prison...
Students can be ticketed by school resource officers or by local police departments to whom school staff members refer students viewed as disruptive. From misdemeanor offenses to such potential felony offenses as gun possession or assault, students can be cited under local ordinances. There is no centralized database of how many school districts employ that kind of discipline.