Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/new-york-city/)
In 2019 on Halloween, my wife and our daughter had watched an NYPD officer drive the wrong way up a Brooklyn street and hit a Black teenager. When the boy rolled off the car and ran away, the officers turned their attention to other nearby Black boys. The police lined them against a wall, cuffed them and took them away.
There is no recent official count of how many individuals have departed gang life. In 2012, the most recent year that the U.S. Department of Justice National Gang Center estimated the data, roughly 850,000 members were in some 30,700 youth gangs across the country. Those numbers decreased from 1996 through 2002, then increased steadily over the next decade. A 2014 study in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology found that 70% of gang members joined as adolescents and left before adulthood.
Why do young people join, why do they leave and how do they stay away?
During the rollercoaster ride of a pandemic, it was Maxene Foster’s job to help make sure that cash-strapped Bronx residents got fed, were safely sheltered and so forth. For those efforts, the 20-year employee of Bronxworks, was tapped to represent the 900 staffers of that nonprofit agency during that rarest of Big Apple events: a ticker-tape parade. The ticker-tape, New York City parade celebrated youth probation officers, along with workers from nonprofit agencies, transit and other institutions deemed essential workplaces during the pandemic.
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.
As the pandemic raged, a Louisiana activist flashed back to the last time an outside menace threatened to invade detention facilities and kill those helplessly locked away.
As a global pandemic looms over New York City, one group in particular might be getting left behind, homeless youth — a vulnerable subset of the general homeless population made up of runaway youth, LGBTQ teens and other young people experiencing homelessness.
Chloe Rodriguez gazes down the sidewalk on East 150th Street. It’s dusk and she has shed her school uniform for a black hoodie. Her night shift, as a receptionist...
Leaders across the United States agonize over recent mass shootings as Americans fear more to come. Perhaps we can learn from youth in two mega-cities...
New York City teenagers who have been in trouble with the law are receiving help from some unlikely allies this summer — dogs.
Jabbar Washington wasn’t nervous. The crack cocaine found in the hallway of the Tilden Housing project wasn’t his and he was sure the police would believe him when he said as much. He was a good kid, with great parents, who had had a good childhood in the projects.