Georgia Bill Would Make Smuggling Cell Phones, Cigarettes Into Youth Detention Centers a Felony

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Smuggling cellphones or cigarettes into a Georgia youth prison would become a felony under a bill approved without opposition Thursday by the Georgia Senate. It's already a crime to provide weapons, drugs or alcoholic beverages to youths in the custody of the state Department of Juvenile Justice. Senate Bill 366, sponsored by Sen. Johnny Grant (R-Milledgeville), expands that ban to other items that have turned up in quantity recently as investigators made surprise visits to each of the state's 26 youth detention centers. Authorities showed off a large box of confiscated cellphones next to tobacco products, handmade weapons and other contraband at the most recent meeting of the board of the state Department of Juvenile Justice. Also on display was what appeared to be a youth's handwritten business plan calculating the sums of money that could be made selling cigarettes and amphetamines to other offenders.

In Massachusetts, Teen Killers Get Inconsistent Sentences

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Editor's Note: This story was produced by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Shrewsbury, Mass., teen Valerie N. Hall pushed her mother down a flight of stairs in 2000, smashed her head in with a hammer and left Kathleen Thompsen Hall to die while she went for a ride with her boyfriend. For her mother's murder, Hall, a depressed and suicidal 16-year-old at the time, served nine years in prison. Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School student John Odgren, who suffers from depression and other mental ailments, fatally stabbed schoolmate James Alenson in the boy's bathroom in 2007 when he was 16, and after realizing what he had done, tried to get help. Odgren is serving life without the possibility of parole at a state Hospital.

Los Angeles to Vote Feb. 22 on Ending $250 Truancy Fines

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This story was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity

In a policy debate watched nationally, the city of Los Angeles came closer Monday to getting rid of most — but not all — controversial monetary fines for students who are tardy or truant from school. For several years, students in Los Angeles have complained about hefty $250-plus fines for being tardy, and about police officers who staked out schools to catch students sometimes only minutes late. The ticketing also requires students to go to court, with parents, during school hours, so they miss more class time and parents miss work. On Monday, the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee voted to set limits on how police enforce the city’s 1995 daytime curfew law and to stop imposing the $250 fines, which, once fees and court costs are added on, can rise to $400 or more for one violation. The curfew amendments — if they get full city council approval on Feb.

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New Georgia Juvenile Code Advancing in State Legislature

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A long-planned overhaul of Georgia's juvenile justice code got its first official nod of approval Wednesday, but backers still haven't figured out how to pay for it. An estimated $15 million price tag is attached to the proposed Child Protection and Public Safety Act, sponsored by state Senate Judiciary Chairman Bill Hamrick (R-Carrollton), whose committee gave the bill a "do-pass" without dissent. Gov. Nathan Deal did not include that cost in the coming year's budget so, Hamrick said, supporters pushed the effective date of the bill back a year -- to July 2013 -- to buy the time to find funding for it. "We have got to work on that with the House and the governor," Hamrick said. Some government agencies were objecting to taking on new programs that they couldn't pay for, he said, "so now it really seems to be how are we going to fund it."

No Remorse? One Law Professor Studies the Impact of Emotion in the Juvenile Justice System

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Sitting behind her strikingly barren desk, with the bright, mid-winter sunlight breaking through the trees and streaming through her office windows, Martha Grace Duncan, a professor at the Emory University School of Law, in Atlanta recounts the case of nine-year-old Cameron Kocher. As she speaks her small, compact frame remains nearly motionless, betraying no emotion. But her eyes tell the story, portraying the internal mix-up of sadness, passion and nerdy intensity that she feels about the topic. Duncan may not wear her heart on her sleeve, but if you pay attention it’s not hard to find. In March 1989, on a cold, snowy day in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, Kocher fatally shot a seven-year-old playmate with a high-powered hunting rifle.

A Look at Youth-Related Spending in Obama’s 2013 Budget

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This story originally appeared on YouthToday. President Barack Obama unveiled his 2013 budget proposal today, which calls for $3.8 trillion in spending and projects a $901 billion deficit for the year. It was quickly met with resistance from Republican leadership. “The President’s budget falls exceptionally short in many critical areas – including a lack of any substantive proposal for mandatory and entitlement spending reform,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), in a statement issued this morning. Rogers promised to “go line by line through the President’s budget, prioritize programs, and make decisions on the appropriate investment of discretionary funds.”

Juvenile Justice

The president would fund the Office of Justice Programs at $1.7 billion in 2013, down from $2.7 billion in 2011 and $2 billion in 2012.

Controlling Parents More Likely to Have Delinquent Children, Study Finds

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Demanding, highly controlling, authoritarian parents are more likely to have delinquent, disrespectful children than parents who are seen by their children as legitimate authority figures, according to research from the University of New Hampshire (UNH). Relying on data from the New Hampshire Youth Study, a longitudinal survey of middle and high school children, researchers identified three distinct parenting styles — authoritative, authoritarian and permissive and looked at whether those styles influenced children’s beliefs about the legitimacy of their parents’ authority, according to a press release from UNH. “The style that parents used to rear their children had a direct influence on whether those children perceived their parents as legitimate authority figures,” said Rick Trinkner, a doctoral candidate at UNH and the lead researcher. “Adolescents who perceived parents as legitimate were then less likely to engage in delinquent behavior.”

Authoritative parents, who are demanding and controlling but also warm and receptive, are more likely to raise children who view their parents as having legitimate authority. Children of authoritarian parents, on the other hand, perceived their parents as the least legitimate, according to the study.

New Report Uncovers “Alarming” Rate of Child Hospitalization Due to Abuse

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The March 2012 issue of Pediatrics will contain the first quantified findings detailing the hospitalization rates of children due to serious physical abuse in the United States. The report, released by the Yale School of Medicine, uncovered 4,569 instances of children being hospitalized due to serious abuse in 2006, with approximately 300 cases in which the children died as a result of serious injuries. According to the findings, children were at their highest likelihood for serious injury within the first 12 months of life, with a projected 58.2 per 100,000 children within the age group being hospitalized for abuse. Researchers at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital used data from the Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID) to estimate the number of incidences in which children younger than 18-years-old were hospitalized due to serious physical abuse in 2006. The Kids’ Inpatient Database was prepared by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, under the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Mom, Teen Daughter Claim Guards Complicit in Attack at Georgia Detention Center

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Haley Bonds says she did everything she could think of to protect her 16-year-old daughter from the beatdown she was expecting at a youth jail in Northwest Georgia. Yet, just 20 minutes after a supervisor assured her her daughter would be safe, another called to say her daughter was "bleeding out" and being rushed to the emergency room. At the hospital, Bonds said, doctors told her daughter's nose had been "crushed" and she would need corrective surgery and dental work. The daughter had just told a supervisor that two guards had bribed her and another girl to attack a third girl the night before, according to a written record of the complaint obtained by JJIE. The guards, she charged, threatened to "put out a hit on her" if she told anyone about it.

Los Angeles Moves Haltingly Toward Ending Truancy Fines

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This story was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity

 

Juvenile judge tries to alter failed policy with "rationality." LOS ANGELES — Fifteen-year-old Juan Carlos Amezcua was just five minutes late for school, and already at the corner by Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles when a police cruiser’s siren went off last Nov. 16. The consequences of what happened next — handcuffing, allegations of rough treatment and a $250 daytime curfew ticket — are still resonating here. In January, Amezcua and his cousin, who was also stopped by police en route to school, saw their tickets dismissed in juvenile court.