Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/ost-reporting-project/)
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.
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.
Christian Picciolini, 14, was hanging out one day in an alley near the intersection of Union and Division streets in Chicago.
An older man with cropped hair and big shiny boots drove up.
He was warm and friendly, and he offered fatherly advice: Don’t smoke marijuana, he told Picciolini. “That’s what the Communists and Jews want you to do,” he said. He told Picciolini to be proud of his Roman warrior ancestors: They were a superior race, he said. The man was Clark Martell, a violent neo-Nazi who was later sentenced to prison for assault and robbery. But Picciolini was hungry for attention and he saw Martell as heroic.