Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/juvenile-justice/page/7/)
A significant shift away from the "get tough" philosophy of the 1980s and '90s for youth offenders, has resulted in far fewer children being prosecuted in U.S. adult courts. That has meant second chances for untold thousands of youths.
Unspent American Rescue Plan funds to lower the number of students who wind up in the juvenile justice system. The impact of racial disparities resulting from handling children through the adult criminal justice system. Innovative law school partnerships to aid youth simultaneously in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. How children without lawyers fare in immigration proceedings... Juvenile Justice Resource Hub curates those and other analyses, reviews and research on juvenile justice policy, practice, reform and programs.
How one prisoner, sentenced as a teen, sees spending millions on new juvenile jail:
For almost 25 years, I’ve been on North Carolina’s death row. The people on death row who have signed onto my letter protesting that new jail – and more than 40 other men on death row who wanted to sign but were physically unable to position themselves to do so – were confined as children to boot camps, reformatories, detention centers and youth prisons.
A stolen bike. A schoolyard tussle complete with shiners. A neighbor’s garage door graffitied. These seemingly minor incidents can start a young person down the road to delinquency. And once down that road, some young people will find themselves in the juvenile justice system.
"The United States incarcerates an alarming number of children and adolescents every year. Disproportionately, they are youth of color.
Given the short- and long-term damages stemming from youth out of home placement, it is vital to understand its true scope. In 2019, there were more than 240,000 instances of a young person detained, committed, or both in the juvenile justice system. However, youth incarceration is typically measured via a one-day count taken in late October. This metric vastly understates its footprint: at least 80% of incarcerated youth are excluded from the one-day count..."
Scrambling to respond to a wave of violence and escapes from other juvenile detention facilities, Louisiana state officials quietly opened the high-security lockup last summer to regain control of the most troubled teens in their care. Instead, they created a powder keg, according to dozens of interviews, photo and video footage and hundreds of pages of incident reports, emergency response logs, emails and education records.
The past couple of years have been some of the deadliest for many major U.S. cities. Murder rates have spiked and gun sales have surged.
We want the violence to stop. However, our chosen means of addressing violence prevention are shaped by who's leading that conversation. Too often, the results of those discussions have tended to be punitive in nature, resulting in over-policing and mass incarceration.
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.