Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/new-york/)
The first and only time Malik Rainey was arrested, he was 16 and charged, as an adult, with possession of a loaded firearm. But instead of serving what could have been up to 12 years in prison, he wound up in a court-mandated program that kept him out from behind bars as long as he stayed away from crime, and got an education and a job.
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.
Before Gisele Castro became executive director of Exalt, a New York nonprofit working to stem what she and others refer to as the school-to-prison pipeline, she spent 25 years at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Service. There, for adults convicted of crimes involving crack cocaine, she worked to arrange alternatives to incarceration. Read our interview with this "staunch supporter of New York state's 'raise-the-age' law."
While jailed on drug charges at New York City’s Rikers Island in 1994, Marilyn Reyes received medical treatment to curb her heroin addiction. But once Reyes, then in her 20s, was convicted and transferred to an upstate prison, she stopped getting the medications prescribed to help her overcome what's since been labeled as opioid use disorder. “It was the most traumatizing, horrible experience I ever had,” said Reyes, now co-director of Peer Network of New York, which provides, among other services, needle exchanges to reduce some of the health hazards of using illegal drugs.
For Madeline Borrelli, a special education teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., having NYPD-trained law enforcement officers in schools is a cut-and-dry issue: “School safety agents,” she said, using their official job title, “ … should not exist at all.”
Since Just Us launched in January, 25 youth have enrolled in a three-year pilot project that pays girls and queer youth involved in the criminal justice system, or who are at-risk for winding up there, to participate in projects aimed at keeping them out of detention facilities.
Run by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services and created by a Vera Institute of Justice task force, JustUs provides individual and group counseling; legal advocacy; employment workshops; and internships for Brooklyn youth. The program serves females who are lesbian, bisexual and straight and youth who are non-binary, trans or queer.
“A lot of times, people are looking for support and they want to be heard and seen,” said Helianis Quijada Salazar, director of JustUs. “We try to customize everything to meet the unique needs of a person.”
NEW YORK — K’Juan Lanclos was playing basketball in a park near the Butler Community Center in the Bronx when his friends suddenly fled. Looking up, the then-13-year-old saw a wall of cops running straight at him. Not knowing what else to do, he ran too.
NEW YORK — In 2017, a disabled 8-year-old Latino boy was sitting at his school lunch table with other students. They were playing with a spork, poking each other. The boy, who was being excluded, decided to poke the other children anyway, causing school staff to take it away. The staff became frustrated and called in school safety agents to diffuse the situation. The agents were unable to calm the child down and instead called the police.
(SLIDESHOW)
When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke in New York City this spring, the most vulnerable populations were at the bottom of a long list of people who desperately needed help during the first few months of business and school closures, shortages of personal protective equipment, food and household necessities.
NEW YORK — They all had disturbing stories, and they all had a familiar ring to them.
Yakov, who declined to give his last name, was waiting in line at the Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan waiting to take a leisurely ferry trip across the bay to Staten Island when he was told to get out by other passengers. He was wearing a mask, he said, but that didn’t matter as much as his conservative garb.
“They’re looking for an excuse to hate us, and they found it in the virus,” the 16-year-old said. “The pandemic has given them the freedom to say what they always have wanted.”
Yehuda Weinstock took his children upstate to go apple picking. “We were treated like we had the plague,” he said. ‘What do you say to your children?”
Coronavirus and the fear it has stoked across the city after bodies were piled up outside hospitals in the spring has led to the resurgence of a social virus. Scarred by daily experiences of anti-Semitism, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn fear the pandemic and the restrictions that come with it will incite hatred and violence toward them.