Will Lewis and Zyion Houston-Sconiers entered the juvenile justice system as teens on opposite sides of the country. They were both raised in poverty, lacked a stable family life, and joined gangs in search of companionship. 

After they put their youth cases behind them and aged out of the juvenile system they found themselves back in trouble with the law. In Tacoma, Washington, cops caught Houston-Sconiers with a gun in a backpack, and near Atlanta, Lewis was arrested in an alleyway where a robbery took place. 

Recidivism — defined as a “relapse into criminal behavior” — has long been used as a primary indicator of a juvenile system’s success. However, experts argue that measuring when a system fails and youth reoffend should not be the only way to know how well it is working.

Juvenile recidivism is measured differently from state to state, making it difficult to compare jurisdictions, said Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

“Personally, I have tried my damnedest to not use the word recidivism,” Sickmund said. “One, people can’t understand it right. Two, people can’t spell it right. Three, nobody really knows, ‘What do you mean by that?’” 

Sickmund said some jurisdictions measure whether a youth is arrested, others whether they’re found guilty of a crime, and others whether they are committed to a secure facility. All of these methods of determining recidivism yield vastly different results, she said.

In 2019, the federal government reauthorized the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018. In it, lawmakers now require the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), for the first time, to establish a national standard for measuring recidivism. 

But as things stand now, by OJJDP’s own admission: “National recidivism rates for juveniles do not exist.” The best they have is data from 2006, attributed to Sickmund, which shows 12-month rearrest rates to be 55%, reconviction rates to 33%, and recommitment rates to be 12%.

Sickmund said that for adults, recidivism data usually focuses on how many adults return to prison after they’re released. However, she says that metric won’t work for juveniles, because kids have much more varied types of contact with the system — they may, for example, go through a diversion program, initiatives that offer youth alternatives to formal processing in the juvenile system, or be put on probation. 

Additionally, Sickmund said there is oftentimes no reliable way to link adult and juvenile offenses. The two court systems are distinct and rarely share records. 

Houston-Sconiers’ and Lewis’ later offenses are the type which most recidivism statistics won’t capture. 

Lewis was 18 when he was arrested in the alleyway. At the time he was awaiting decisions on college applications after completing a rehabilitative second chance program offered to him by his juvenile judge, Steven Teske. 

As Lewis tells it, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — and Teske believed him. Teske, who was not involved in Lewis’ adult case, said that after reading the police’s incident report, he found Lewis’ story “really quite believable.”  

Police charged Lewis for committing a burglary, which is a felony. Lewis took a plea deal, which resulted in a short stint in prison. 

“We don’t give up,” said Teske. “He was now in the adult system and we were supportive of him.”

Because of Lewis’ future plans to get into the aviation industry, Teske said they knew he could not have a felony on his record. So the judge intervened. 

“I appointed [Lewis] an attorney specially to file a motion to expunge that offense and went to the district attorney and she agreed,” Teske said. “In fact, I actually helped out the defense attorney because he was doing pro bono. I prepared the consent order, gave it to him. He took it to the D.A. (district attorney) who signed it. Took it to the judge who signed it to remove that felony from his record.”

Now, Lewis’ record is clear of his adult crime. In May, 2020, he graduated from Middle Georgia State University with a master’s degree in cybersecurity and he aspires to get his Ph.D. by the time he’s 30. 

Houston-Sconiers didn’t have the same luck. Since he was released from prison early after his juvenile crime as the result of a relatively high profile Washington State Supreme Court case, he said he felt like he had a target on his back. Police officers across the community recognized him and, he said, on multiple occasions stopped and searched him — sometimes violently. 

“When I first got out, it was a movie, man. I enjoyed it. Life was treating me good. But once that movie was over, life was real, it got very real for me,” Houston-Sconiers said.  “When I didn’t know what else to do, what was natural to me came.”

One day in November 2018, Houston-Sconiers was wandering his Tacoma neighborhood on foot, looking for a ride home. He had just been released from the hospital, where he had been diagnosed with bronchitis and prescribed medication. 

According to Houston-Sconiers, who studied official reports related to his case in detail in an effort to mitigate his sentence, police officers were watching the area he was walking. When Houston-Sconiers got into his friend’s vehicle, he said the police followed him. Three officers pulled them over for running a stop light, searched the car, and found a backpack with drugs he maintains were not his and a gun he admits was his own. They arrested and charged Houston-Sconiers for both. 

“When you think about it, when did you ever get pulled over by three officers for a traffic stop?” Houston-Sconiers said. “They knew what they were doing.”

Thanks to Washington State’s three-strike system, designed to crack down on repeat offenders, Houston-Sconiers was facing life in prison without the possibility of parole for getting caught with a gun in his friend’s car. He said it’s a dangerous part of town, and the gun helps him feel safer. 

Like Judge Teske with Lewis, Washington State Sen. Darneille sympathized with Houston-Sconiers’ side of the story, and did some, as she calls, “extraordinary interventions” to help him. After Darneille vouched for Houston-Sconiers before his prosecutor and judge, his sentence was reduced from life to 11 years. He’s one year into it now. 

“I wish that we could make these kinds of interventions on every person’s case,” Darneille said. “[People] can become ill, can die in this system. Losing relationships, losing educational opportunities, losing self-esteem, losing hope is common throughout our system.”

Beyond the technical problems it presents, Sickmund and other advocates — like Sean Goode, the director of a diversion program near Seattle — argue against using recidivism as a metric because it ignores the positive things a person does. 

“I think recidivism is a horrible data point,” Goode  said. He prefers not to focus solely on whether a young person becomes involved with the criminal justice system again, but “what are they engaging in as an alternative [to criminal behavior], and I think that is super substantive — and probably the most difficult thing to measure.”

Each morning, when Houston-Sconiers awakes in his cell, he reads aloud his concrete plans for the future: to be an author and semi-truck owner and operator by 2024. 

“I wanna be a millionaire,” he said. “And I want my kids to be billionaires. That’s how I know I’ve succeeded — if my kids do more in life than me.” 

Zyion’s wife, Arrogrance Wood-Houston, has no doubt in his ability to achieve his ambitious goals. 

“Everything that you hear, I promise you it’s gonna come to life,” she said. 

Today Lewis travels the country, telling his motivational story to judges, kids, and other audiences, hoping to inspire kids like him to turn their lives around and adults in the justice system to empower them to do so.  

Lewis also wants to transform his hometown of Riverdale, Georgia. When he was a kid, he said, the “poverty was extreme — rats, roaches. It was real tough.” He wants to spark interest in IT and aviation among his community’s youth, providing certification training that can allow them to make $20 an hour out of high school.

Both 25-year-olds are married, raising children, and have firm convictions to improve their communities. None of those things register in measures of recidivism. 

“You’re measuring success by measuring failure,” Sickmund said. 

Source art courtesy of Arrogrance Wood-Houston

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Because of jurisdictional rules, Native American youth make up more than half of all juvenile cases in federal court. But the federal justice system was never designed to process juveniles and “literally has no place to put them,” according to an Obama-era report from the Indian Law and Order Commission. 

“They are coming into a system that isn’t built for juveniles, and then they make up about half of it,” said Addie Rolnick, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of the 2016 report “Untangling the Web: Juvenile Justice in Indian Country.” 

Juveniles that are subject to state jurisdiction are only sent to federal court as a last resort, and juveniles represent less than 2% of cases in the federal system. Because of federal jurisdiction in much of Indian Country, however, Native American youth make up over 50% of juveniles in the federal system, Rolnick said.  

“The federal system is designed to only handle a certain kind of kid and to push most of the kids into local courts,” Rolnick said. “And then they have all these Native kids who don’t get pushed into local courts.” 

A number of lawyers, tribal leaders and other advocates have been fighting to bring the issues of a “jurisdictional web” in Indian Country to the forefront. With tribal youth subject to prosecution in up to three different courts –– tribal, state and federal –– the solution isn’t always an easy one. 

“It’s something that makes the question of how to fix things for them harder, because you have to fix at least a couple of different systems to make things better for any Native kid,” Rolnick said. 

The inconsistency of who handles crimes committed by Native Americans funneled an estimated 190 tribal children each year into custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons between 1998-2008, according to a 2011 report from the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center. 

The majority of those cases came from Indian Country districts under substantial federal jurisdiction, which include South Dakota, New Mexico and Montana, among others. 

For the last 15 years, Rolnick has focused her research and advocacy on improving juvenile justice in Indian Country and for Native American youth in all parts of the country.  

She testified before Congress in July 2015 and again in 2018 on improving federal policies and untangling the jurisdictional web in Indian Country, which she said “tends to undermine the authority of tribal governments and does not serve youth.” 

Jurisdiction in Indian Country has taken shape through decades of Supreme Court rulings and federal policy enactments, resulting in an “indefensible morass of complex, conflicting, and illogical commands,” according to the Indian Law and Order Commission. 

“It kind of makes many people throw up their hands and not want to touch the issue of Native youth,” Rolnick said. 

The federal government exercises jurisdiction over Native American youth through the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act, which extends federal authority over serious offenses, such as assault and murder. 

But a 2018 report on Native American youth from the U.S. Government Accountability Office recognized that the Major Crimes Act gives the federal government jurisdiction even over several less-serious crimes such as burglary and theft. 

This is different from the treatment of non-Native American youth, who are not prosecuted in the federal system for the same types of offenses since the federal government does not have jurisdiction over most non-Native American youth.  

Because of this overhanging federal authority, Native American kids are more likely to end up in the federal system than their non-Native American peers.  

But there is no such thing as a federal juvenile justice system. 

“The Federal Bureau of Prisons is not a juvenile justice organization,” Rolnick said. “It’s a prison organization.” 

After appearing before a federal judge who likely has no specialization in juvenile justice, a Native American minor will often end up sleeping in a rented bed in a juvenile facility hundreds of miles away from their reservation, often making visitation from family and friends impossible.  

“You end up with these kids that are severed in many cases from their home communities because they’re in the [federal] system, and the system has no responsibility to be in touch with those needs,” Rolnick said.  

The majority of Native youth in the federal system are held in state and local facilities in Rapid City, South Dakota, Washington, D.C. and Dallas –– many of which are long distances from the districts that send tribal youth to federal court most often. 

Due to federal sentencing guidelines, tribal youth in the federal system are likely to receive longer sentences since there are limited alternatives for parole or diversion, Rolnick said. 

In addition, Native American kids in the federal system are more likely to spend time in secure confinement than kids who are in the state system because there is nowhere else to put them. 

Troy Eid, the chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission and former U.S. attorney for Colorado, called the presence of tribal youth in the federal system a “travesty.” 

“They don’t realize there’s this whole block of Native American young people who, by accident of history, are now in federal detention,” he said. 

Eid recalled visiting a federal detention center for juveniles during the Obama administration. There were no schooling programs or resources because there had been no budget request.  

“The president’s budget didn’t include any money for high school for federal juveniles who are incarcerated, and Congress didn’t appropriate any money. No one even thought about them,” he said.  

The pattern repeated itself across several facilities where juveniles in the federal system were held, Eid said. 

“They had nothing to do,” Eid said. “They were just sitting there. There’s no school for them. Can you imagine?” 

Though tribes are the primary authority in Indian Country, the federal government has an easy way in: a federal prosecutor is not required to receive approval from the tribe before proceeding against a Native American kid. 

This differs from the federal government’s relationship with states. Under the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act, the federal government favors state prosecution and can only proceed against a kid if the state waives its jurisdiction. 

“It should come to the tribe first, and they should decide where the federal government can help,” Rolnick said. “That is exactly what happens policy-wise with states, so there’s no reason why it can’t happen for tribes.”  

Many tribes are either too small or under-resourced to manage the jurisdiction themselves and resort to state or federal authorities to handle criminal cases. However, tribes cannot opt out of external jurisdiction. 

When the Indian Law and Order Commission was created after the passing of the Tribal Law and Order Act in 2010, the commission recommended that the federal government “take a back seat in Indian Country” and give the tribes the ability to exit the criminal justice system for juveniles if they wish. 

“We don’t think they should even be in this business, and that tribes should have that decision,” Eid said. 

Carole Goldberg, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and member of the Indian Law and Order Commission, said the commission agreed on the consensus that tribes should be given the choice to opt out of state and federal jurisdiction. 

“It would put much more of the criminal justice system in the hands of the tribes themselves,” she said. “We had a bipartisan agreement that the way to improve justice and safety in Indian Country is to achieve greater tribal control over those systems.” 

Goldberg said the commission had been hopeful that their bipartisan set of recommendations would develop some congressional support, which is a necessity given that jurisdiction in Indian Country is in Congress’ control. 

But action has been sparse in terms of juvenile justice reform.  

“There just is not any interest,” Eid said. “I can’t get anybody’s interest in it.” 

The fact that Native American youth are even in the federal system is “one big accident,” Rolnick said. And because tribal kids represent relatively low numbers in both the general population and in the justice system, they are often glossed over in conversations about reform. 

“It’s a numerical invisibility, but it’s also an historical invisibility,” Rolnick said. “Juvenile justice systems were doing really poorly for a while, and we are swinging back the other way. I think that Native kids were sort of left out of that swing for a while.”  

Source photo courtesy of Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

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In most schools, the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education is taught as a major victory for reaching equality in education. The 1954 decision desegregated schools and united Black and white students under one roof. 

What they don’t mention is what the nation lost after Brown versus Board of Education, and how it laid the groundwork for the school-to-prison pipeline.

In a 2019 study by Princeton University, researchers found that Black students were three times more likely to be suspended than white students. 

Forty-five years ago, this rate was the same. 

The first national study on school suspensions by the Children’s Defense Fund in 1975 attributed this statistic to racism among white teachers, specifically in the South. It pointed directly to the school-to-prison pipeline before the term was coined. 

It noted how vague codes of conduct leave room for teachers to assert biases, how exclusionary discipline harms students, and how this kind of discrimination can push a child into juvenile deliquency.

It asked the  federal government to set up a compliance policy to hold schools accountable for “widespread and systematic” discrimination. Although the U.S. Department of Education now has a guidebook and sometimes conducts its own investigations into school districts, no official compliance policy has ever been implemented.

“The U.S. school system was never designed for us,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis. “When the Black community started to build their own schools and develop their own systems, that was essentially and literally destroyed through Brown v. Board of Education.”

Before integration was law, Black schools served multiple functions in their communities. They created classroom environments designed to teach students they could be whatever they wanted to be. Black educators were advocates in their communities and networks of support for their students, said Vanessa Siddle Walker, an education historian and professor at Emory University who has studied the effects of the landmark court case. 

Some, like the Valena C. Jones Elementary School in New Orleans, taught their students to become productive American citizens. The elementary school was fashioned after a Republic with each classroom designated a state with a governor, judge, policemen and other government officials. 

Before there was a Voting Rights Act protecting their Black teachers’ right to vote, Black students were learning to be part of a government. 

After the 1954 decision, historians estimate about 38,000 Black teachers in the South lost their jobs. White parents didn’t want their children to be taught by Black people. If Black schools didn’t shut down, white teachers replaced Black teachers in them. In 1966, American Teachers’ Association, the Black teachers’ organization, merged with the National Education Association, which is still in operation. 

“It became clear that the NEA, particularly in the beginning, was less interested in equality in merging and more interested in just accomplishing a merger,” Walker said. 

The impersonalized approach resulted in a negative environment that does not encourage Black children to have aspirations and lacks advocates, Walker said. By dropping Black students into white schools, desegregation created a harmful environment without specific efforts to address Black students’ needs.

Tiffanie Harrison attended school in Round Rock Independent School District, where she now teaches in Round Rock, Texas. The district is 9% Black. 

“I think that as a student in a largely white community, I was really encouraged to be color blind, which is really harmful because it’s not a thing,” said Harrison. “If you don’t see color, you don’t see people.”

Studies after studies show Black students achieve most when they are taught by Black teachers, and they achieve least when taught by white teachers. 

In Los Angeles, where Southerners had increasingly fled Jim Crow, a school police department was created in 1948 to patrol increasingly integrated schools and protect against foreseeable property damage, according to a study by The Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. 

These origins have led to an atmosphere of mistrust and overcriminalization of Black and brown youth in public schools, said Maria Fernandez, the group’s senior campaign strategist. She said this atmosphere does not address the root issues of a child’s behavior, and instead intensifies them.

For Rosemarie Allen, a social justice educator in Denver with expertise in early childhood development, this feeling is familiar. Black girls receive more discipline in school than any other student.

Allen began attending school about a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She said she was taught by all white teachers, and was suspended and disciplined often. She remembers one teacher describing her behavior as “demonic.”

After the third grade, Allen said, she remembers feeling resentful toward school. She was then pushed out of three middle schools. If she didn’t have a father who constantly supported and fought for her, she said she would have entered the school-to-prison pipeline.

As desegregation efforts progressed, scholars said different types of segregation emerged. 

Special education is one of them, said Steven Nelson, a professor in educational leadership at the University of Memphis and former education advocate at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Black students are overrepresented in special education settings for learning and behavioral disabilities, according to the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools. 

“I have personal experience with it when I kept getting in trouble,”  Allen said. When she was in school, her teachers tried to place her in special education, but the criteria in the 1960s, when Allen was in school, was an IQ test. Her test results led to her being skipped ahead a grade. 

In the 1970s, while Black students were being bused to white schools, the beginnings of the special education legislation of today emerged. 

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education. However, for Black students, advocates say it does the opposite. 

“We may have them in the same school building, so the school building level numbers look OK,” said Nelson, who also taught and advocated on behalf of students with special education needs. 

“But when you look at the special education programs,” Nelson said, “one of the things you see is that you have this disproportionality of Black students being served in those settings, especially in those self-contained settings.” 

The segregation of Black students into special education, he said, contributes to Black students in those settings becoming stagnant. 

Angela Mann, a school psychologist and assistant professor at University of North Florida, said academic performance of students in special education is often not included in the performance of the whole school. She said this can lead to stigma, substandard instruction and low expectations, making it difficult for these students to succeed. 

“It doesn’t matter what curriculum you teach if the child doesn’t feel like he or she can do it,” said Walker, the education historian and professor at Emory University.  

Even though she was smart and did well in school, Allen said her guidance counselor told her she wasn’t college material. She said she got into California State University through the Educational Opportunity Program.

As a college student, she said she still noticed the differences between how Black and white students were treated, and the disparities that existed in higher education. 

“But it never broke my resolve that I was going to make a difference,” said Allen.

She remembers reading the first study on classroom climate while she was pursuing her doctorate degree in Equity and Leadership in Education at the University of Colorado, Denver. It was from 1973.

The study specifically picked students that had the same intellectual abilities. It found that Black students were given less attention, ignored more, praised less and criticized more. It said it appeared to be a “disturbing instance of white racism.”

But there was one sentence that resonated with Allen: “It is the gifted Black who is given the least attention, is the least praised, and the most criticized.”

She said this was the first time she realized and believed that she was not the label her teachers gave her. She said she wished she could call her dad, but he had already passed away. 

“I must have cried for an hour,” Allen said. “If I could just tell Daddy, that it wasn’t me all those years. That it was [racism] and the fact that we didn’t prepare each other for each other, you know? And we still don’t, which is why I do what I do.”

Source photo courtesy of Florida Memory Photos

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Across the country kids, and their families, that are part of the juvenile justice system are faced with fines and fees and children who commit crimes are also often ordered to pay restitution as part of their sentence. These costs leave them in debt and push them further into the justice system. 

Youth who cannot afford to pay will often face consequences from extended probation to going into debt. Many families also will go into debt trying to pay the costs of the juvenile justice system.

Poor families and families of color are often affected the most by these fines and fees, said Andrew Keats, staff attorney from the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia who has been researching fines and fees for since 2019. 

“Black and brown families who are least able to pay are having the greatest impact and find themselves most involved in the juvenile justice system just as they are in the criminal justice system,” Keats said.  

The U.S. Justice Department investigated police departments after the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri. This investigation showed that policing and ticketing practices are putting minority families in debt. The money people have to pay is used to fund “services that benefit all of society,” Keats said, adding that it is the poorest people and the families who are least able to pay that. 

“It bears out in collection rates,” Keats said. “Most of this debt does go unpaid. Some states will pay lots of money to collection agencies and various other third parties or lawyers to try to enforce and collect the money [from poor families].”

Keats explained the difference between fines and fees: Fines are typically a punishment for specific offenses from drug crime to property crimes. Fees typically cover the cost of administering court proceedings, including the juvenile’s representation. 

Even though representation is provided by the court if an individual cannot afford it, many states charge for the cost of defense counsel. 

“You watch ‘Law and Order’ and probably heard the Miranda rights read in every episode,” Keats said. “What they don’t tell you is that even though the Constitution gives you automatically a defense attorney…it does nothing about you being then charged for that representation anyway.”

The cost of the defense attorney is often a flat fee, Keats said — however, the cost of confinement varies. Depending on the state and the detention center, families can accrue a daily charge that is roughly at the rate of child support payments. 

“It is usually put on the family because parents have an obligation for the care and support of their children,” Keats said. 

When the state takes the parental responsibility off of the parents, they are supposedly providing care and support for the children. This means that the state is charging parents what the law says is a reasonable fee for care; however, it can become very expensive.

Youth and their families may be charged for probation services even if the child never spent one night in a detention center. Probation services are diversionary programs like community service, counsueling, skill building programs, drug and alcohol treatment, sex offender treatment programs or any sort or behavioral or alternative treatments.

 “[The courts] look at the family as sort of responsible for why the child…has committed criminal offenses or has committed to conduct that put them in this situation to begin with,” Keats said. 

Restitution is another common fee that juveniles are responsible to pay and is used to hold children financially accountable for the crimes that they have committed. Courts often order restitution when there is a victim of a crime and they want financial compensation, said Bob Bermingham, Jr., court service unit director from Fairfax County, Virginia.

Courts have to acknowledge that victims have rights and part of these rights is receiving compensation. Finding the balance between what is reasonable to ask a juvenile to pay and what the victim wants is challenging.

“It causes a significant challenge for us, for the system, in determining what’s an appropriate level of restitution for somebody that is maybe not eligible to work age wise,” Bermingham Jr. said.

Restitution is often ordered in Winchester County, Virginia, even though experts recognize the flaws in the system. Vandalism, property damage and theft are examples of when restitution is ordered.

“Restitution is ordered a lot in cases, which is always kind of difficult when you start saddling a 15-year-old kid with even a couple hundred dollars in restitution,” said Tim Coyne, Virginia public defender. “The child isn’t working. It’s going to follow the parents or the child’s going to have a lot of difficulty being able to get the money up to to pay off.”

In many jurisdictions if a kid cannot pay fines, fees, or restitution is a violation of the terms of probation. This will lead to the child staying on probation and until a juvenile meets the terms of probation, their records will not be sealed.

“If they don’t pay restitution and they’ve made no effort, it’s something the court can look at in terms of saying, well, you didn’t do what you’re supposed to do,” Coyne said. “You can say ‘Judge he’s 13, he has no money and no way to make money’ but if a judge finds that they didn’t live up to the terms of the continuance and can enter an adjudication.”

Probation violations may also lead to the child facing more time incarcerated. 

“If you’re out on probation where payment is a condition for completing the terms of your probation, failure to do so could be grounds for revocation of your probation, and so you end up back incarcerated,” Keats said.

Family members may also face jail time to pay off the debt. Some parents and children will choose to do jail time because time served in detention counts toward debt payment. Under normal circumstances these individuals would not be able to make money to pay the debts while meeting their basic needs, so jail time is preferable. 

“If you end up doing time for a failure to pay, that may be credited to reduce your debt,” Keats said. “Some people would rather they incarcerate. That’s the only way, you know, that if they get credit towards their debt, that’s going to jail or the only way to pay it off going.”

While families are working to pay off debts, they are often put on payment plans. The debt does not accrue interest, but not paying it can affect credit scores, allow for the court to place liens on taxes, and push people further into the system. 

“What [payment plans] means is they’re putting you under court supervision and jurisdiction until your debts are paid off,” Keats said. “So essentially, you’re undressed under court and under system supervision, which obviously the more contact you end up having with our criminal and juvenile justice system, the more likely it is you’re going to find yourself further and further and deeper and deeper in that system with less ways to get out and get on your feet.”

To learn more about this topic, the Juvenile Law Center wrote a 2016 report, “Debtors’ Prison for Kids? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System,” that can be read here.

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What started as four people on Facebook, is now an advocacy group of nearly 4,000, including 1,300 current inmates of Texas detention facilities. Together, they’re fighting for a new state law to allow for earlier parole consideration of prisoners who were given extreme sentences as juvenile offenders.  

The legislation, known as “second look” parole reform, allows those serving a longer-term prison sentence, usually upwards of 40 years, to have their cases reevaluated after serving 20 years or half of their sentence, whichever is shorter. The Parole Board would also take into account evidence of rehabilitation and growth during a defined period. 

The earlier and more meaningful parole review could lessen the number of years left behind bars, providing them an opportunity to rebuild their lives outside of prison.

Several states, such as Nevada, Washington, North Dakota, and Virginia, allow a parole hearing to happen after a maximum of 20 years in prison. The opportunity to have a parole hearing sooner can help encourage young offenders to put effort towards rehabilitation and good behavior while in prison, according to a 2020 Second Look report by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition (TCJC).

“Second Look is a product of policy changes that were unnecessarily harsh,” said Lindsey Linder, senior policy attorney at TCJC.

Leaders from Epicenter Ministries, a faith-based nonprofit in Austin, Texas, focused on assisting individuals and families of those who are serving extreme sentences in adult prisons for crimes they committed as kids, are preparing to testify in front of the Texas Legislature during the 2021 session to pass a Second Look bill in Texas. 

The bill, if passed and signed into state law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, would grant inmates the ability to be reviewed for parole after 20 years, or half their sentence — whichever is shorter — if they are serving a 40 year or more sentence for a crime committed as a juvenile.

Deanna Luprete, founding executive director of Epicenter Ministries, and others have attempted to get the Second Look bill passed during the past two Texas legislative sessions, which occur every other year. 

Linder said past attempts to get a Second Look bill passed in Texas failed due to reasons such as political climate, excess of other bills on the legislative agenda and a lack of public knowledge about extreme sentencing.

“We’ve just learned more and more about this issue and how deep the whole of injustice is, with regard to juvenile extreme sentencing,” Linder said. “As we’ve learned more about how deep this really goes, we’ve been able to educate people and really change hearts and minds around this issue.”

Luprete says she feels confident the bill will pass in the upcoming session. 

“This is our third rodeo,” Luprete said. “We know what we have to do and it’s going to be incredibly difficult.”

Luprete served as a prison minister in Texas in 2017, where she met three inmates, all of whom were serving extreme sentences after being incarcerated for high profile crimes under the age of 18. One of them, Luprete said, won’t be released from prison until he was 91 years old. 

“That’s the moment my heart was broken,” Luprete said. “From there, I just dug in, you know, and started looking into the laws.”

Luprete started Epicenter as a private Facebook group with herself, her daughter and two other members, but it started to gain traction among families who had incarcerated relatives. The group grew and had 100 members during the 2017 legislative session when it introduced a Second Look bill, Senate Bill 556 and House Bill 1274.

“We’re just asking for them to get a second look.” Leah Metzler, Epicenter chief of staff, said.  “Not a second chance, a second look.”

States were required to eliminate mandatory life without parole sentences for youth up to age 18 after a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning in 2005 — such as the Miller v. Alabama decision in 2012, which stated that all youth “regardless of their crimes” could be rehabilitated and mature out of their illegal behaviors, making life without parole an unconstitutional sentence for a juvenile.

Harsher and longer sentencing became more prominent in the 1980s, during the rise of the “superpredator” era, when both state and federal lawmakers put into place harsher sentences for convicted juveniles, according to the TCJC report.

Despite the national elimination of life sentences for kids, Texas still has the harshest parole eligibility of all states. The state requires that youth, who previously would have received a life sentence, to instead serve at least 40 years before being eligible to even be considered for parole review. 

“They call it Texas tough, you know, tough on crime,” Luprete said.

The TCJC report also states that over 2,000 people in Texas are currently serving life sentences for a crime that was committed when they were younger than 18. At least 600 of those people won’t be eligible for parole until they’ve served 40 years.

“Keeping kids in prison until they die is not making us any safer,” Metzler said. “It’s a drain on us. All of these guys, they’re hitting 40, 42 years old. They are completely rehabilitated.”

Supporters of Second Look policies across the nation argue that sentencing a minor to a life sentence with little eligibility for parole is unethical, as research shows that significant brain development typically occurs in a person’s late teens through mid-20s, affecting their maturity, judgment and decision-making abilities, according to The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.

The first Second Look bill was filed in Texas in 2015, which would have allowed parole eligibility to happen earlier — at 25 years instead of 40 — for a person convicted of a capital felony for an offense committed when they were younger than 18 years old but it never received a hearing. 

During the next legislative session, which occurs every two years in Texas, a similar bill was favorably voted out of committee after having 15 people testify in favor and no one in opposition, but the bill was never put on the House calendar before the session ended. 

Edwin Debrow, media relations coordinator for Epicenter, was incarcerated at age 12 and served a 28-year prison sentence in Texas. He’ll be on parole until 2031, totaling a 40-year sentence, but a Second Look bill in the state might have allowed him to be released sooner.

“This is what I’ve been through,” Debrow said. “If I could reach one person and change one person’s life, I feel like I can make a difference. So I want to change as many young people’s lives as I can.”

Luprete mentors about a dozen “second lookers” involved with Epicenter, like Edwin, almost every week to check in with their progress in reentering society.

Debrow will serve as a spokesperson for Epicenter at the Texas Capitol in Austin during the 2021 session.

“We can’t forget those kids,” Debrow said. “Children are really more than their worst mistake. People should believe that.”

Source photo courtesy of Epicenter Ministries

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One day in June 1964, Gerald Gault and a friend made a bad decision. They made an obscene phone call to Ora Cook, Gault’s neighbor. Cook called the police and both boys were arrested and taken to a detention facility in Gila County, Arizona.

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, establishing the right of children to attorneys, though children’s advocates say legal representation is still uneven.

The juvenile justice system bewildered Gault and his family, according to Supreme Court testimony. Police made no attempts to notify Gault’s parents of his arrest – they only found out later. As Gault’s case made its way through the court, the judge questioned Gault, never with a lawyer present and sometimes without even his parents, and no transcript or recordings were made. The judge sentenced Gault, who was on probation at the time of his arrest, to six years in juvenile detention. Gault’s parents challenged the ruling. 

Had Gault been older – at the time of his arrest, he was 15 years old – he would have been automatically guaranteed the right to a lawyer, a right afforded all adults when they are arrested under the 14th Amendment. But because Gault was a child – and children were regarded differently than adults in regards to criminal justice – he was not given a lawyer or any of the other rights he would have received had he been 18. 

In re Gault, as the Supreme Court case is known, signified a landmark moment in juvenile justice in the United States: children were officially recognized, for the first time, as having the same legal rights as adults. But over 50 years later, legal experts say the goal of Gault’s case has failed: children across the states are still not provided their right to legal counsel.

A 2017 report from the National Juvenile Defender Center, on the 50th anniversary of the Gault case, found that no state guarantees children access to a lawyer. The children who do get lawyers often don’t get them until after they’ve been interrogated by police, must pay for their own “free” counsel, are encouraged to waive their right to a lawyer, or are denied access to a lawyer after sentencing. 

“Even in the cases in which kids are represented there’s wide disparity with regard to the quality and the resources awarded their representation,” said Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers University. 

According to David Tanenhaus, a professor of history and law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the juvenile system was not designed to have the same formality and procedures as the adult criminal system. Experts recognized that adults and children are fundamentally different – adults require punishment for their crimes, while children and adolescents require rehabilitation – and so they established distinct legal systems. 

“The logic of the original juvenile court is that you should think about what a child needs – so it was more based on needs than thinking about constitutional rights to due process,” Tanenhaus said. 

As a result, the juvenile system was not originally designed to provide youth with a defense attorney. The end result, juvenile defenders say, is a system that is not well-equipped to provide legal help to kids who need it. The rules that had been established to protect kids from the formality and procedures of the adult system failed Gault: he was a youth suddenly facing an adult’s punishment, with no recourse available to defend himself.  

The Gault case determined that children have the same rights to due process as adults, including access to a lawyer, as protected by the 14th Amendment. However, children are still systemically denied this right. 

“Sometimes, children are put in a position where they have to waive their right to counsel or feel that they have to waive the right to counsel,” said Cohen. “In other situations, the quality of counsel they receive is below what the Constitution requires and certainly not what any of us would want if it were our own child who were appearing before the court.”

“the quality of counsel they receive is below what the Constitution requires and certainly not what any of us would want if it were our own child who were appearing before the court.”

Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers University

According to Cohen, there are numerous roadblocks to change. Some are philosophical, like the longstanding belief that justice system involvement is good for children. Others are financial – many public defender offices are grossly underfunded, with juvenile defenders sometimes working enormous caseloads on impossible schedules. 

While Gault did require that youth have access to counsel, it did not require that states establish public defender offices equipped to do so. Because of this, some children — particularly those living in rural areas – are forced to rely on private defense attorneys, according to the 2017 NJDC report.

Instead, overworked public defenders have inadequate time, training or resources to properly handle juvenile cases. This is a problem because cases involving juveniles are a lot more complicated than cases involving adults. 

“It takes a lot longer to represent a child,” said Tim Curry, the legal director at NJDC. “I can’t expect to have one meeting with [a child], go through all these complicated legal situations and expect that to be it.” 

Curry and Cohen agree that another major reason that changes are slow to develop is the structural racism that is baked into the juvenile justice system. Cohen said that while white children offend at the same rate as non-white children, “children of color are disproportionately arrested, disproportionately charged, disproportionately prosecuted and disproportionately incarcerated.”

Since NJDC’s report, some jurisdictions have been working to improve their public defender offices’ counsel to juveniles. Cohen said that while the case moved the juvenile system in the right direction, the standard established by In re Gault remains far from reality. 

“There’s a lot of work that remains to be done,” she said.

Lead photo courtesy of Ernest K. Bennett, Associated Press

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