Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/pandemic/)
Parents in Boone County, Kentucky, were outraged this past January when a ninth grader who had been suspended a year earlier for threatening violence against his fellow students returned to class as soon as his punishment time was up.
“The kid had a ‘kill list’ which named students — friends he was going to kill,” said Republican state Rep. Steve Rawlings.
As kids' behavior reaches crisis points after the stress and isolation of pandemic shutdowns, many schools are facing pressure from critics to rethink their approaches to discipline — including policies intended to reduce suspensions and expulsions.
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.
Going on outdoor walks without a mask. Hopping on a Washington, D.C. Metro train without holding my breath. Meeting friends at restaurants and bars … Resuming those and other parts of my pre-pandemic life has been fun. It’s also been scary — and not for reasons related to COVID-19. I’m Asian American, which can make being in public dangerous.
The FBI reported that, in 2020, the number of hate crimes targeting Asian people rose from 158 to 274, a more than 70% increase.
This is how practitioners of restorative justice approach things: First, focus on building strong, authentic relationships in a community, including schools that now are reopening. Then, if and when community members or students make a mistake or cause harm, rather than simply looking at which rule was broken and which punishment should be prescribed, collaborate to help ensure that the erring individual has the space and support to hold herself or himself accountable.
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.
The tally of Black youth detained in juvenile facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic reached a record high last January, while the same count for white youth was the second lowest since the Annie E. Casey Foundation started tracking that data. The foundation’s most recent monthly analysis showed that, as of Feb. 1, whites had spent less time in detention than Blacks, who also were incarcerated for longer periods than they’d been detained before the pandemic started. Aimed at measuring the pandemic’s impact on 144 juvenile justice systems across 33 states, the Casey Foundation survey started in March 2020.
By its most recent count, during January 2021, there was a:
6% decline in the population of non-Latinx white youth in juvenile detention. 2% uptick in the population of Latinx youth in juvenile detention.
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.
It was the fall of 1988 when Rose Wilson, then 33, was given a life sentence for murder in South Carolina. Her daughter, Kasi, was only 8 months old. Like many children of incarcerated parents, Kasi was raised by relatives — in this case her grandparents — but her mother was always in her life. “We made constant visits. We would go see her once every three or four months or so,” Kasi Wilson said.