Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/youth/page/4/)
I grew up in a small town in South Carolina called Georgetown, 36 miles from Myrtle Beach. When I was 4 or 5 months old, my father passed, leaving my mother a single parent. It was me and my big brother, who is two years older.
Sending kids who habitually miss school to court under the state’s 20-year truancy law hasn’t helped them stay in school. But a school-court-community effort in Spokane County is having impressive success.
Originally appeared in The Chicago Bureau
CHICAGO - Violence stalks Chicago’s streets, but when faced with staunchly rising homicide rates that show no sign of ebbing, residents’ capacity to tolerate the state of crime drains by the day. After Hadiya Pendleton performed with her high school marching band during the presidential inauguration two weeks ago, the King College Prep teen became Chicago’s 42nd homicide victim of 2013 when she was gunned down on Chicago’s South Side – the unintended victim of a gang dispute. Her death added to a January homicide toll that was the bloodiest since 2002, according to Chicago Police reports, suggesting that despite wide attention to Chicago’s murder woes, shifts in policing strategy and big promises by powerful politicians, there will be no immediate respite to the escalating violence that claimed more than 500 in 2012. The ups and downs of Chicago’s homicide toll over the past six years/Graphic by Lynne Carty/The Chicago Bureau
Perhaps it’s because Pendleton performed for Obama, or maybe because she starred in an anti-gang public service announcement four years ago (Pendleton PSA) pleading for an end to the chaos, but the nation has embraced this 15-year-old as a symbol and not just another statistic. As for those who study crime, who write about it and opine about it in Chicago, the nation’s murder capital, the question remains whether it will really matter:
“There is action because of the attention but it is not clear that it will work,” said University of Illinois at Chicago’s Dick Simpson, a known political expert and former alderman who recently studied the nexus of drugs, gangs and police corruption.
LAS VEGAS -- When the National Partnership for Juvenile Services annual symposium opened, Jason Bowser, a youth service director from Columbus, Ind., told an executive committee that one of the standing committees was focusing on the question of “What is a juvenile?”
It might seem an odd question for a gathering of folks who specialize in working with youth in the juvenile justice system, but really the question, even when not spoken, would be present in training sessions across the three-day symposium held here this week. Nor is it just a hypothetical question because nearly 250,000 young people under the age of 18 end up in the adult criminal justice system every year, according to the National Institute of Corrections report, “You’re an Adult Now: Youth in Adult Criminal Justice Systems.”
Liz Ryan, president and CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice -- in a session reflecting the “Adult Now” theme -- reminded everyone that New York and North Carolina still consider juveniles to be adults at the ages of 16 or 17 in criminal proceedings, whereas in the rest of the states it’s 18. Ryan said a new report shows that each year 100,000 young people get sent to an adult facility and on any given day approximately 10,000 of them are in an adult facility. Once there, the correction system managers do have rules that treat the juvenile differently from the mainstream adult population. At times that means putting the kids into isolation.
Given the high rate of torment suffered by LGBT youth in custody, activists applauded last week’s finalizing of a landmark law that took nine years to get from adoption to implementation. Last Monday, the federal Department of Justice finalized a set of guidelines under the Prison Rape Elimination Act that could help stem the risks of the already at-risk LGBT population that is incarcerated, including minors. “We were already working on this issue while PREA was being passed, but this raises awareness,” said Sarah Schriber, senior policy analyst with the Chicago-based Health and Medicine Policy Research group and community convener for the Illinois Court Involved LGBTQ Youth Task Force. According to Schriber, few juvenile detention center personnel even knew what the existing anti-harassment rules were. “A much harder part is making those policies meaningful on the ground,” she said.
On September 12, the National Center for Youth in Custody (NC4YC) - launched by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) in 2010 - will host a webinar titled Creating and Sustaining Improved Conditions for Youth in Custody: Beyond the Initial External Influence. The webinar, the first in a series that will explore and address sustainable and comprehensive means of improving confinement conditions for detained youth, focuses on ways for facility managers to create safer, more secure and more therapeutic environments for juveniles in custody. The event will be moderated by Dr. David Roush of the National Center for Youth in Custody, and scheduled panelists include Department of Justice representative Josh Delaney; Youth Law Center Executive Director Jennifer Rodriguez; Martinez-Tjaden, LLP, founder and senior partner Orlando Martinez; and Teresa Abreu, interim director of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Illinois. The webinar is scheduled for 90 minutes, and will begin at 2 p.m. EST. Attendees can register for the free event at the following website: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/307620422
The controversial A&E Network series “Beyond Scared Straight” returns August 20 for a third season. If this 30-second teaser from A&E is any indication, viewers can expect more episodes filled with inmates and prison guards yelling at, verbally abusing and intimidating at-risk teens.
NEW YORK -- As Ara Oshagan rocked his first-born son to sleep he prepared to meet monsters. While he bounced and cooed his boy, Sebouh, to sleep to the achingly plaintive melody of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata he was the image of a doting father, but in his mind he was quietly bracing himself to meet some of what many considered to be California’s youngest and most dangerous criminals. The geo-physicist turned documentary photographer had never been behind the walls of the juvenile detention facilities that dot the outskirts of Los Angeles along the spine of Interstate 5 in the Central Valley, but the following morning he was going to take his camera, walk in, and take pictures of killers and gangsters. “I expected the worst,” he said. “The worst of the worst; The ones glaring at you in those orange jumpsuits.
Via a popular online service, cocaine, prescription pills and heroin may just be a mouse click away from reaching your child
There is a scene in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic in which a teenage girl says something that has become, for the most part, a generally recognized truth about high school. “For someone my age,” the character says, “it’s a lot easier to get drugs than it is to get alcohol.”
Indeed, typing the term “easier to get drugs than alcohol” into a Google search box returns more than 12,000 pages, with thousands upon thousands of Internet users stating what many parents fear - that for their children, obtaining illegal drugs is anything but a challenge. What most parents are unaware of, however, is how the Internet is potentially making it even easier for youth to obtain drugs. In the 21st century, teens do not necessarily have to seek out dealers to procure marijuana or cocaine; in fact, scoring illicit substances these days could be as simple as turning on a monitor and making a few mouse clicks. At first glance, the Silk Road - a popular online marketplace - looks like any other website; just passing by, one likely wouldn’t be able to distinguish the service from eBay, Craigslist or any of the myriad other electronic bazaars on the Internet.
Traditionally, juvenile courts have protected children from lasting stigma and emotional trauma through aggressive secrecy, in contrast to their adult counterparts. But the anonymity provided by the juvenile system is a direct impediment to journalists and others charged with delivering information to the public. But a powerful new tool, published this month by the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), provides a state-by-state breakdown of access to juvenile courts. The report, funded by a grant from the McCormick Foundation, appears in the Spring 2012 issue of RCFP’s quarterly publication, The News Media & The Law. Each state is profiled in detail, describing which juvenile proceedings and records are available to the public and which require special permission.