Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/reentry/)
The graduates lined up, brushing off their gowns and adjusting classmates' tassels and stoles. As the graduation march played, the 85 men appeared to hoots and cheers from their families. They marched to the stage – one surrounded by barbed wire fence and constructed by fellow prisoners
Tailor-made services are important for many justice-involved LGBTQ youth and young adults their advocates contend, because those individuals’ encounters with law enforcement, courts, correctional and other agencies often are in stark contrast to how their heterosexual peers navigate the justice system and society in general.
Within months of his release from a lifetime imprisonment sentence in Louisiana's 18,000-acre prison in Angola, La., Andrew Hundley, then 34, enrolled in junior college and founded the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and reentry for former juvenile lifers. Under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Hundley, who’d been sentenced in 1997, when he was 15, was released after serving 19 years at Angola. Hundley had the chance to start over, finish college and start a family. But many of the men and women he works with through the Parole Project are older and entered the Louisiana prison system at a time when there were no educational opportunities, especially for lifers.
Researchers found almost all of 112 Philadelphians who have been released from lifetime prison sentences said they participated in some form of prison programming, but 53 percent reported having been restricted from vocational programs such as barbering (Pennsylvania prioritizes people who have less than five years left on their sentences for vocational training). “A lot of these guys who did end up taking advantage of the college programming were able to enroll through their perseverance as opposed to these programs being allocated for them,” said study co-author Tarika Daftary-Kapur, professor of justice studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, which conducted the survey.
Caliph Muab-El entered the prison system at 15 as the youngest person in Wisconsin to be tried as an adult after being convicted of a shooting. He walked out 15 years later with nowhere to go and no guidance on how to acclimate back into his community.
At the moment, the only experience that seems harder than serving seven years in prison is being free. Yes, you read that correctly. Make no mistake, “gratitude” doesn’t even begin to describe how it feels to be home, reunited with my family. I can finally eat, sleep and bathe when I want.
When we began our journey to rebuild broken urban communities in our city, Jacksonville, Fla., 20 years ago, little did we know that we would become an important part of a powerful national movement — reframing how we look at crime, incarceration and poverty.
The Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention reports that an average of 55% of youth released from incarceration are rearrested within one year of release while reincarceration and reconfinement rates during the same time frame averaged 24%. Juvenile reentry, which is also referred to as aftercare, is defined as the reintegrative services that prepare youth in out-of-home placements for their return home by establishing the necessary collaboration with the community and its resources to ensure the delivery of needed services and supervision.
The transition out of the juvenile justice system has considerable consequences for the transitioning youth, for the neighborhood into which the youth is transitioning and for society more broadly. For youth experiencing homelessness and insecure housing, that transition is particularly challenging. A recent study from Chapin Hall showed that nearly half the nation’s youth who have experienced homelessness have been involved in the justice system and that those without stable housing upon release are more likely to be rearrested.
Each year, thousands of young adults filter through the criminal justice system in Charlotte, N.C. While a lot of attention is given to finding...