Juvenile Justice Reform

Tonight, PBS Newshour is taking a look inside the juvenile justice system with photographer Richard Ross. Over the past five years, Ross traveled to 30 states and interviewed over 1,000 youth in 300 juvenile detention centers. The kids ranged in age from 7 to 24 years old, because states decide how long an adolescent can legally be determined an adolescent.

While in detention, many of the kids spend 6.5 hours in school, where, as Ross explains, the teachers are prepared for at-risk and troubled students. They aren't able to ditch class and are often able to learn. 

Arizona’s Legislature recently passed a law charging prison visitors a onetime $25 fee as a way to help close the state’s $1.6 billion budget deficit. Middle Ground Prison Reform, a prison advocacy group, challenged the law in court as a discriminatory tax, but a county judge upheld its constitutionality.
Fees like that, slapped on prisoners and their families, couldn’t be more counterintuitive. But then again, so many of our criminal justice policies are just that. Since it is mostly the poor, the desperately poor who fill U.S. prisons, the $25 fee is one more economic hardship offenders’ families have to struggle with. It becomes another bill they have to scramble to pay — that is if they can.
These kinds of charges (and Arizona isn’t the only jurisdiction trying to shift the cost of incarceration to the poor) have even graver consequences. When a family can’t pay the fee, their contact with their loved one is limited, essentially cutting an offender off from the only supports he or she has in the outside world.
Psychologists have long known how central it is for an individual to have nurturing people in his or her life in order to develop emotionally, psychologically and socially. This need for a supportive network is even more essential when we talk about the young people who are locked away from family and loved ones in our nation’s prisons and detention centers.
As anyone who has worked with kids in the penal system knows on a gut level, it is crucial to have families and other supportive community members involved in young offenders’ lives as they serve their time. Now, that commonsense intuition has been given empirical strength by studies done by such juvenile justice groups as the Vera Institute of Justice which have demonstrated that maintaining young people’s connection to families is a major factor in helping kids stay out of jail once they are released.
But it’s easy to question whether these families are really such a positive influence. After all, if they were doing such a great job what are their kids doing in jail?

Juveniles transferred to adult corrections systems reoffend at a higher rate than those who stay in the juvenile justice system, according to a new report from the National Institute of Corrections (NIC). The report also found insufficient evidence that trying youths as adults acts as a crime deterrent.
Entitled “You’re an Adult Now,” the report published in December 2011 is based on the findings of three-dozen juvenile justice and adult corrections experts convened by the NIC in 2010 to identify challenges when youth are transferred to adult court.
Highlighted in the report, written by Jason Ziedenberg, director of juvenile justice at M+R Strategic Services, was research by the Centers for Disease Control that found youth transferred to the adult system are 34 percent more likely than youth who remain in the juvenile justice system to be re-arrested for violent or other crimes.
The safety of juveniles in adult prisons is also a serious concern, according to the report, which cites a Bureau of Justice Statistics study that found, 21 percent of the victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence in jails in 2005 were under the age of 18. The same study reported 13 percent were victims in 2006. However, the report notes only one percent of inmates are younger than 18.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Federal ruling: Youth sex offenders must report for 25 years
  San Francisco Chronicle:
  Juveniles convicted of serious sex crimes in federal court can be required to register as sex offenders for at least 25 years, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

• DOJ, MacArthur Foundation provide $2 million for juvenile justice reform
  OJJDP and the MacArthur Foundation each will provide a total of $1 million over two years to four organizations who will in turn offer states and local governments training and technical assistance to improve mental health services for youth, reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system and better coordinate treatment and services for youth involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

• Juvenile violence in Baltimore continues to decline
  Baltimore Sun:
  Violence against juveniles has declined significantly in Baltimore in recent years as juvenile arrests have dropped and student graduations increased — a trend that the city schools chief said stills lags behind perceptions of the city's young people.

• Police to get access to juvenile probation records
  Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: 
  Milwaukee police officers will now be able to quickly find out if a juvenile they are stopping is on probation under a new agreement between the city and Milwaukee County.

• Paying a price, long after the crime
  New York Times:
  In 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.

• Local Boys & Girls Clubs receive $600k to help juvenile offenders
  Ventura County Star:
  The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Oxnard and Port Hueneme aims to reduce repeat crimes among juvenile offenders in Ventura County by merging two pilot projects into a new program. The nonprofit received $609,232 from the Department of Justice to create RAMP, a Reentry Aftercare Mentoring Program, which will provide mentoring to incarcerated teens in the group’s Juvenile Justice Facility program so they are prepared to reenter the community and avoid committing further crimes.

• Kansas juvenile inmates lack vocational training
  The Topeka Capital-Journal:
  A joint legislative committee recommended expansion of vocational training for juveniles in state custody and action to prevent mixing violent and nonviolent offenders in community residential facilities.

• Black males need school to stay out of jail
  Hartford Courant:
  A few years ago, the national dropout rate for African American males was 70 percent. Today, the high school graduation rate for black boys is about 50 percent. Stan Simpson says, "It is no urban legend that many for-profit prison systems base their population projections on third- and fourth-grade reading scores."

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Bath salts linked to child abuse
  Midland Daily News: 
  The latest Kids Count in Michigan report shows a strong link between the number of child abuse and neglect cases and poverty, and a local judge points to another local factor not uncovered in the study -- the designer drug called bath salts.

Feel good story of the day: incarcerated teens in South Carolina recently partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build a house for a family in need. The kicker? They actually built it in a juvenile detention center and had it transferred out by a huge crane. 

Margaret Barber, the director of South Carolina's Department of Juvenile Justice, explained, "we want [the houses] to be built behind this razor wire, we want this message to continuously get out, that we build back, not just tear down."

Juvenile Justice Reform

• New juvenile court guidelines to help struggling students
  The San Fernando Valley Sun:
  Los Angeles' Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash has issued new guidelines to eliminate fines and unnecessary court time for students who were late to school and for other minor offenses. The court will also direct students who miss school to seek out school- and community-based resources that are shown to improve academic achievement and get struggling students back on track.
• Report: Move mentally ill youth from state lockups CantonRep.com:
  The state should transfer mentally ill juvenile inmates to psychiatric facilities as soon as possible and find money for their treatment, according to a new report on the status of Ohio’s youth prison system.
• Pennsylvania court amending waivers for juveniles
  The Times Leader:
  New statewide rules regarding legal representation of juveniles in court were sparked by the judicial scandals that first rocked Luzerne County three years ago.
• Despite weak economy, crime in Los Angeles County still declines
  LA Times:
  There have been dire warnings that crime would rise since the economy began stalling several years ago. But in Southern California, crime continues its long decline despite the weak economy. Indeed, 2011 brought new worries about a "double dip recession," yet streets in many parts of the region were the safest they've been in decades.
• New California bill goes after parents of truant teens
  Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:
  California Assembly Bill 177, which took effect on January 1st, expands the number of reasons for which parents or guardians can be ordered to take anti-gang parenting classes if their child is convicted of a crime.
• Board of Juvenile Justice retains ban on discrimination based on youths’ sexual orientation
  Washington Post:
  Virginia’s Board of Juvenile Justice again has retained a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation at its residential centers.
• Richmond Juvenile Detention Center has been placed on state probation
  Richmond Times-Dispatch:
  For the second time in three years, the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center has been placed on state probation because of ongoing safety concerns.
• New Illinois laws include shifts in juvenile sentencing process
  A new state law requires that Illinois judges sentencing minors to state juvenile prison ensure that incarceration is the least restrictive option and that efforts to find alternatives to secure confinement were unsuccessful.
• Alabama’s Lauderdale County shutting down detention center
  Weeks after the Justice Department announced its investigation into Lauderdale County's juvenile justice system, county officials are moving to shut down the youth detention facility a grand jury described as unfit to house dogs.
• After jail, youth with disabilities need special support to stay out
  When young people with disabilities end up in the juvenile justice system, they're less likely to return to youth prisons after their sentence is up if they have jobs or go to school quickly after being released, a new paper says.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Pennsylvania Senator calls for closing of loopholes in law on synthetic drugs
  Join Together:
  U.S. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to close loopholes in a synthetic drug law that allows makers of the drugs to slightly alter their ingredients to avoid federal and state bans.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York recently unveiled his budget plan to policymakers, and included significant juvenile justice reforms in the plan.
After previously closing some of the state’s juvenile lockups due to their ineffectiveness, Governor Cuomo is now asking lawmakers to close additional facilities and to send lower risk youths from New York City to facilities back in their hometown.
New York’s juvenile facilities are expensive and they often don’t work. Right on Crime has previously noted the extraordinary recidivism rates for youth exiting state lockup facilities in New York: over 80% return to a facility of some sort within ten years, and costs stretch over $250,000 per year.
Under Governor Cuomo’s plan, youth currently in non-secure facilities would begin receiving programming closer to home in the next biennium; in the 2014-2015 biennium, youth in limited-secure facilities would be transitioned closer to home.

I’m so very proud of the new Miss America, Laura Kaeppeler. First, because she is from my hometown of Kenosha, Wis., and second, because she’s used her own experience to help a lot of hurting kids. If you don’t know Ms. Kaeppeler’s story, it begins when her father, Jeff, was arrested when she was a 14-year-old high-schooler. He went to trial and was sent to serve 18 months in federal prison for mail fraud when she was at Carthage College studying music.
This impacted Laura’s life, much like the other estimated 10 million children who will experience having a parent imprisoned. She started a mentoring nonprofit called Circles of Support to assist children living with a parent behind bars.
According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 3 percent of Americans live either behind bars, under parole supervision or on probation. This means that more than 7.2 million adults in 2009 lived under the shadow of a court sentence. An additional 86,927 juveniles were living in juvenile correctional facilities.
That’s a LOT of kids being impacted. And since most people who are serving time in a prison have a sentence from 3-15 years, it can take a huge chunk out of a childhood spent with a parent. How do we help children with such massive holes in their lives to keep them from following their parents into the juvenile justice or prison systems?

This past fall, Washington state's Snohomish County juvenile court system ran a pilot project called Promising Artists in Recovery (PAIR), modeled after Reclaiming Futures. The program connected teens in the county's juvenile justice system with local artists who shared their craft and mentored the youth.
The Herald has a terrific feature story on PAIR, Reclaiming Futures and the teens and mentors who participated. Check out this video on the pilot:

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Behind California’s Governor’s plan to close state’s juvenile justice system
  The Bay Citizen:
  For the second time in one year, Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed permanently closing the Division of Juvenile Justice, a move that would make California the first state in the nation to eliminate its youth prison system and shift responsibility for the most dangerous young offenders to counties.
• Kate Middleton’s new cause: addiction and recovery
  LA Times:
  Eight months after wedding England's Prince William, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge (formerly Kate Middleton), has revealed she will become a patron of the British charity Action on Addiction, which supports research, prevention and treatment of addiction, support for addicts' families and the education and training of those working in the field.
• Data: OJJDP releases delinquency cases in juvenile court fact sheet
  This new fact sheet from the OJJDP presents statistics on delinquency cases processed between 1985 and 2008 by U.S. courts with juvenile jurisdiction for public order, person and property offenses and drug law violations.
• Funding Award: Everychild gives $1 million to juvenile justice center
  Centinela Youth Services, Inc. has been named the recipient of the $1 million 2012 Everychild Foundation grant. The funds will launch and sustain a restorative justice center across the street from three Los Angeles juvenile courts over a three-year period.
  

• Delayed by months, suicide-proof beds still not in cells at youth prison
  An Illinois youth prison still does not have suicide-proof beds in rooms where kids on suicide watch are held. The installation has been plagued by delays.
• Some juvenile cases to revert to youth court after adult court sets penalty
  A new law in Ohio will send juveniles convicted of a non-mandatory offense in adult court to juvenile court before any adult sentence is served. This will allow the juvenile court another opportunity to determine whether the offender can be rehabilitated in the juvenile system.
• Assaults, crowding plague Maryland’s youth detention facility
  Price George’s County youth detention facility remains plagued by assaults, security lapses, crowding and understaffing, according to a new report.
• Georgia lawmaker makes juvenile justice reform top priority
  Rep. Wendall Willard, R-Sandy Springs, said one of his priorities for the session is to reform the state’s juvenile justice system. “Our juvenile code has not been really updated in 40 years,” Willard said. “I think we maybe lock them up too quickly instead of trying to find ways in the community to address problems they’re facing.”
• Op-ed: Keep teens out of adult criminal court
  Chicago Times: Illinois needs to change the law so that children and teenagers cannot be charged as adults when the only evidence against them is an unreliable, uncorroborated confession. And when DNA evidence is available, it should be tested before any juvenile is transferred to adult court.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Scarcity of ADHD drugs points to larger problem
  LA Times:
  In what the National Institute on Drug Abuse calls a "cause for alarm," abuse of prescription stimulants is also becoming more prevalent in high school. An institute survey of 45,000 students found abuse of stimulants had increased among high school seniors, from 6.6% to 8.2%, just in the last two years.