Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/youth-in-prison/)
Despite a large drop in youth arrests, probation caseloads and confinement of young people in detention centers and youth prisons over the past 20 years, the punitive mindset in our justice system remains stuck in place. We’re spinning our wheels when court is our primary response to youth misbehavior.
For a chance to earn a college degree while he’s incarcerated, Quantae has traded the matching color scheme and single-person cells of Lee’s young adult unit for concrete-gray quarters the size of a small bathroom that he now shares with another man at Ridgeland Correctional Institution. There he’s been able to enroll at Clafin University, the only college in our state currently using federal Pell Grants for prison education. He had to leave behind the supportive community he’d been a part of at Lee.