Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/rehabilitation/)
Lawmakers in the Georgia House voted Monday to raise the age limit to 17 for prosecuting young defendants in juvenile court. House Bill 462 was approved on a vote of 145-22, sending it to the state Senate for further debate.
Connecticut has turned its troubled juvenile facilities into what federal officials have cited as exemplary national models. Staffing is up dramatically, in part because directors talked to employees about their worries and took steps to solve them. The strategy helped reduce confrontations and brought the Hartford center national recognition this year from Performance-based Standards, which works to improve juvenile justice outcomes and equity.
Scrambling to respond to a wave of violence and escapes from other juvenile detention facilities, Louisiana state officials quietly opened the high-security lockup last summer to regain control of the most troubled teens in their care. Instead, they created a powder keg, according to dozens of interviews, photo and video footage and hundreds of pages of incident reports, emergency response logs, emails and education records.
Five years ago, I was an ordinary mom and like most people I knew nothing about the criminal justice system and quite honestly, like most, I didn’t care. It didn’t affect me.
San Francisco could be the first urban area in California to eliminate its county-run juvenile hall. This month, San Francisco supervisors introduced legislation that would outline the timeline for the facility’s closure.
Although the stated objective of juvenile justice in Arkansas is rehabilitation, until very recently almost all our juvenile courts followed a cookie-cutter approach in adjudicating cases.
“Terrence was 16 when he and three other teens attempted to rob a barbeque restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. Though they left with no money and no one was injured, Terrence was sentenced to die in prison for his involvement in that crime.” —Cara H. Drinan, “The War on Kids”
Four months after he was released from prison, Steven Cave, 36, sat between the couple he calls his parents in Bloomsburg, Pa., and explained how their kindness showed him how to end a lifetime of chaos.
In 2012, the U.S. Attorney General appointed a national task force on children exposed to violence that concluded, “Nowhere is the impact of incarceration on vulnerable children more obvious than when it involves solitary confinement.” This statement still holds true and solitary confinement bears an even heavier impact on incarcerated youth today.
Ronald Reagan didn’t start the war on drugs but he did his best to finish it. Law enforcement budgets soared, the jails were packed and the war was carried as far afield as Latin America and Afghanistan.
So it might count as one of history’s minor ironies that here in Dixon, just a few blocks from Reagan’s boyhood home, the local police have called a ceasefire in the war on drugs.