Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/new-york-bureau/)
As the pandemic raged across New York City in spring 2020, Jose Rivera trekked from the Bronx to Coney Island, Brooklyn to Far Rockaway, Queens, dropping off 100 computer tablets and dozens of food vouchers to public school students, including undocumented Yemenis and Bangladeshis and their families.
New York City must finish installing Wi-Fi in shelters for homeless families and domestic violence victims by Aug. 31, according to a settlement reached this week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The order will benefit more than 11,000 homeless children living in some of the 240 family shelters across the city’s five boroughs -- which count a total of 110,000 homeless students -- who’ve struggled with remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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.
A pregnant teenager stands alone in a cinder-block cell in one image. In another, a young body shivers, curled up in an oversized T-shirt huddled in the far corner of a cold cement room. The pictures are just a few of the thousands in a collection by Richard Ross, who uses his photography as a vehicle to highlight the needs of the estimated 48,000 children in custody each day. Ross has documented the lives of young people caught up in the juvenile justice system in Juvenile-in-Justice, a project he founded to connect human faces to a story often told in terms of cold statistics.
“My whole focus for the last 15 years has been interviewing these kids and being a co-conspirator with them in terms of trying to be the conduit for their voice,“ he said. Ross was one of three juvenile justice experts on a webinar hosted Tuesday by the Dui Hua Foundation as part of a series focused on unique issues girls face when they come into conflict with the legal system.
(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.
Since 2016, Elder Yusef Qualls has been on a tireless campaign to have officials in Michigan revisit a criminal case that has kept his son incarcerated for over two decades.
A so-called “juvenile lifer,” Qualls’ son, also named Yusef Qualls, has lived within Michigan’s adult correctional system since 1997. At 17 Qualls was sentenced to life without parole after police linked him as an accomplice to the murder of a woman in Detroit. Elder Qualls has been a juvenile justice advocate since his son’s incarceration began. But the fight took a new turn when, in 2016, the Supreme Court retroactively banned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. That meant the courts had to revisit his son’s case.
AUBURN, New York — On the day she would see her father for the first time in nearly five months as he bounced among three maximum-security prisons, Julianna Bundschuh, 5, hung on the metal fence of Auburn Correctional Facility as if it were at a playground. Near her stood Kristina Abell, who arrived first at 7 a.m. Wednesday with eight boxes of food for her son. Behind Abell was a woman named Courtney who didn’t want to give her last name. She came to see her fiance and was wondering how long these visits would last. None had seen their loved ones since mid-March, when state-run prisons across New York suspended visitation due to coronavirus.
NEW YORK — The Alliance of Families for Justice revealed a yearlong project on Wednesday, aimed at educating those who are incarcerated or have incarcerated family members on the importance of voting. Over the last year, the organization partnered with The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)’s Making Policy Public project to create a large foldout poster.
“When you receive our poster, you'll see that we focus on all aspects of the elimination of felony disenfranchisement so that someone's engagement with the criminal justice system should have no bearing on whether or not they get to exercise the franchise,” said Alliance Executive Director Soffiya Elijah.
The Alliance of Families for Justice (AFJ), which works to end human rights violations inside prisons and jails and build communities and families who are affected, worked with graphic designers Tahnee Pantig and her teammate to create the poster.
The poster’s design is intentionally different from the way anti-mass incarceration and social justice work are usually shown, Pantig said. “Like a lot of the images that we see, representing these communities are often shown from a light that can be very dark, very oppressive, and also one-sided, and we thought it was really important to demonstrate the resiliency, the agency, the activeness of these communities, that is already there,” she said. The designers also wanted the communities to see themselves in the illustrations.
Elijah said the organization made 20,000 posters and hopes to share them across the state.
AFJ has a multilayered plan to challenge felony disenfranchisement, she said, beginning with getting family members impacted by disenfranchisement registered to vote. Parolees in New York state, through an executive order by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, can now register and vote.
NEW YORK — After a viral video surfaced showing plainclothes NYPD detectives forcing an anti-police protester into an unmarked police van, questions remain about why they were allowed to make the arrest. The protester, Nikki Stone, 18, was arrested and given a summons early Wednesday morning after New York Police Department officials alleged she damaged five police cameras at City Hall during demonstrations over the last several weeks.
An NYPD spokesperson also said Stone and others allegedly threw rocks and bottles at police during the arrest, though this was not immediately evident from video at the scene. The warrant squad who arrested Stone is supposed to only respond when an individual has active bench warrants against them for incidents like missing a court date. In this case it remains unclear whether Stone had active warrants. The squad has reportedly targeted protesters in the past, and those most intimately familiar with their tactics said the Stone arrest marks a frightening turning point for detectives.
NEW YORK — Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate, announced his proposal for curbing gun violence in the five boroughs after a week of at least 64 shootings. Only 20 were reported for the same week in 2019. Williams unveiled his ideas in a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea on Friday. Putting into place CompStat, the New York Police Department’s statistical data tool and a new “Advance Peace” crisis management system were at the top of his list. He also called for changes to the police department’s responses right away but the timeline was unclear.