During the mid to late 1990s, a fear of violent youth crime swept the nation, fueled by inaccurate estimates from criminologists and media reports. 

A substantial rise in youth violent crime in the 1980s through early ‘90s prompted criminologist and then-Princeton University professor John DiIulio to write an article in 1995 predicting that a new breed of juveniles were going to terrorize the nation: “super-predators.”

The youth violent crime rate began to significantly decrease that same year, but by the time this was recognized, the damage had already been done. 

James Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University predicted the same thing as DiIulio. In his report for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, he forecasted that by 2005, the juvenile violent crime rate would increase by 20%.

At the time, DiIulio and Fox said their logic made sense. The youth violent crime rate was already at 30 per 100,000 in 1994, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and with even more children being born as a consequence of the baby boomer generation, they said the rate would rise with the population. 

But, DiIulio and Fox didn’t account for outlying factors that could have contributed to crime in their estimates. Instead, they said these children were born different.

The youth crime rate fell faster than it rose. In 1995, the same year DiIulio first coined the term “super-predator,” it had already fallen by nearly 6%, and continued to fall at this rate until it reached about 11 per 100,000 in 1999, where it has flattened out.

A report by the National Consortium of Violence Research found that the quick increase and decrease of youth violent crime during this time could be attributed to the crack cocaine epidemic, an economic recession, high unemployment rates and other factors.

Fox said in an interview with News21 he doesn’t regret what he said because he helped raise an alarm about the need for measures to prevent youth crime, like after school programs, and to an extent it worked. He noted that many cities implemented preventative crime measures, but acknowledged that the conversation created a lot of harsh and punitive laws. 

DiIulio, who now teaches at University of Pennsylvania, later said he regretted spreading his “super-predator” theory, but was not available for an interview. The U.S. Department of Justice deemed his theory a myth in 2000.

Legacy on Life

The Bureau of Justice Statistics first began tracking the number of youth in adult jails in 1993, when there were roughly 4,300 kids incarcerated. By 1999 — six years later — this number more than doubled. Nearly 9,500 kids were in adult jail, and 91% of them were being tried as adults. 

Catherine Jones was one of these kids. 

Jones was 13 years old when she and her 12-year-old brother, Curtis Fairchild, were among the youngest children to be charged with first-degree murder. On Jan. 6, 1999 they shot and killed her soon-to-be stepmother, Sonya Speights, in their Brevard County, Florida, home.

Her uncle, a convicted pedophile who lived in the same home, had been sexually abusing her since she was five. She told a pastor about the abuse, and it was reported to the state. She remembers nothing changing after the abuse was reported. She remembers her father not believing her.

But one person did believe her: Her brother, because it was happening to him too. 

Jones said when Fairchild told her that he was being abused, her 13-year-old mind couldn’t think of an escape other than death. She remembers being in the shower, and her uncle coming into the bathroom and opening the shower curtain to masturbate. When he finished, she said he left 35 cents on the toilet seat. Her father and stepmother were in the other room.

“And I vowed in my head that now, to me, everyone’s responsible,” Jones said. 

When she was arrested, she said she told the investigators and her lawyers about the abuse. In most cases, this kind of trauma would have been a factor in deciding if she and her brother would be charged as adults and, if found guilty, how long their sentence would be. 

Tod Goodyear, who was one of the homicide investigators on the case and now the public information officer for the Brevard County Police Department, said he remembers the abuse coming up, but that his job was to investigate the homicide. He said Jones told him their motive was that Speights was getting in the way of the children’s relationship with their father, but Jones said she did not say this.

Local headlines read, “Police: Jealous kids plotted killing” and “Shooting ends fight for dad’s attention.” Jones said she remembers watching herself be described on television news as “remorseless” and “not appearing to have emotions” because she didn’t cry in court hearings. But she said this reaction was her usual defense mechanism to cope.

“From the time that I was arrested and I received that infamous label of a super-predator or a child killer or the youngest female killer, I was never referred to by my name in headlines,”  Jones said.

Legacy of Language

The way Jones was described was exactly how DiIulio and Fox described the incoming cohort of juvenile criminals.

Fox said he didn’t agree with the word “super-predator,” but instead used phrases like “teenage blood bath” and described children, particularly teens living in “urban” areas, as having “little to live for and to strive for, but plenty to die for and even kill for.”

Fox said his use of the super-predator rhetoric was not racist because the increase of violence he predicted was among both white and Black youth. Critics disagree. 

“If you introduce a framework that dehumanizes a population, you are nevertheless joining ranks with a discursive practice that has long, long existed,” said Geoff Ward, a professor at Washington University who focuses on the racial politics of social control.

This dehumanization is a mechanism of “othering,”  Ward said, and people, especially white people, use it to justify and protect themselves from what is happening to other populations.   

Ward said this concept isn’t new. This framework was used when European colonizers called indigenous people “savages” to justify taking their land. He added that it is used today by the current administration to rationalize harsh immigration policy by labeling certain immigrants as rapists and criminals.

James Forman, a law professor at Yale University and expert on mass incarceration, said people were already scared from the spike in crime rates in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and fear of crime is often a result of the systemic racism the country is built on. 

“The willingness to think of Black people as the other, as the criminal element, is what made people able to mobilize on that fear, to create these harsh laws,” Forman said. “Because people thought, ‘Well, these harsh laws are aimed at somebody other than my child.”

Black and Latino youth were not only disproportionately incarcerated during this time, but they were also disproportionately shown on television and in newspapers being arrested for crimes, reinforcing negative racial biases without explicitly saying it, said Ward. And they still are. 

Jones said when she watched news reports that depicted her as a “remorseless” super-predator at 13-years-old, she began to believe it. 

“I didn’t realize I was numb because of everything I had went through,” she said. “I really thought maybe I was just incapable of feeling.”

Legacy of Law

In the 1996 election, both Republican Bob Dole and Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton ran on platforms to be “tough on crime” and restore “law and order.”

 A 1996 speech by Hillary Clinton came into headlines in 2016, another election year, when a Black Lives Matters activist interrupted a private campaign event to ask for an apology for the mass incarceration of Black Americans under her husband’s administration. 

“These aren’t just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy,” Hillary Clinton said in the speech.

Advocates say initiatives under the 1994 Crime Law passed by President Bill Clinton contributed greatly to mass incarceration, and the super-predator myth added to it by funneling more people, specifically Black and brown Americans, into the adult prison system for longer periods of time.

A U.S. Department of Justice study found that legislatures in nearly every state revised or rewrote their laws to make it easier for jurisdictions to transfer kids to adult court through lower age limits, automatic transfers and handing off the decision-making from juvenile court judges to criminal prosecutors.

It took 21 days for the courts to decide to transfer Jones and her brother to the adult court system, where they were charged and convicted. As soon as their case moved to adult court, they were treated like adults. 

At 13, Jones said she didn’t understand what the right to remain silent really meant. She signed a plea bargain for second-degree murder that gave her 18 years of incarceration and life on probation. She was told if she didn’t, she would spend the rest of her life in prison.

She was sentenced within 10 months without having a trial.

Over 75% of the over 2,800 people currently serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed under the age of 18 were incarcerated during or after the 1990s, according to the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth. 

The campaign also found that Black children are sentenced to life without parole at 10 times  the rate of white children, fueling the racial disparities seen in both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.

“You cannot separate the creation of a justice system from the society that’s asking it to be created,” said James Bell, founding president of the Burns Institute, which works to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. 

Legacy to be changed

Laws passed in response to the super-predator myth are slowly being reversed. The 2012 landmark Supreme Court case Miller v. Alabama ruled that it is unconstitutional to sentence a child under 18 to life without parole without considering how children are different from adults.

Steve Drizin, clinical director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions who has experience representing juveniles charged with serious crimes in the ‘90s, said he began to see a slight reversal in these punitive laws when the juvenile death penalty was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005. 

Around this same time, he said, more robust research on brain development emerged, showing that children’s brains don’t fully develop until their mid-20s, which helps explain impulsive crimes and those that are reactions to trauma.  

While there have been great strides to repair the impact the super-predator myth had on juvenile incarceration, advocates say there is still work to be done. There are 13 states without a minimum age to try a child as an adult and about 95,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons each year.

Jones was released in 2015 when she was 30 years old. She said she left the worst part of her life behind her.

“The air smelled different. It felt different,” she said. “Once you got past that control room with no barbed wire, it was like everything became so big.”

Jones said when she was first in prison, she thought she deserved to be treated like a “super-predator.” She said the guilt of taking away the life of her stepmother destroyed her, and she lives with it every day, but now it fuels her to create change. 

Jones now works full-time at the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth advocating for children to be treated as such in the criminal justice system. She said children need to be held accountable for their actions, but they need to be held accountable in age appropriate ways.

Between the campaign and volunteering with Fresh Start Ministries to support abused women, she juggles two toddlers. She said she wants her kids to have the security she didn’t have, and wants them to know she will always be there for them.

“Instead of a super-predator, I’m a super-mom,” Jones said. 

Source art courtesy of Newspapers.com

The post The myth that left a legacy for young offenders appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

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

The post What was lost in Brown v. Board of Education appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

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.

The post Fines, Fees leave families of detained kids in debt appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

Today, the Latino and Hispanic population is the largest ethnic or racial minority group in the country, according to the U.S. Census. Yet, experts say their presence in the juvenile justice system is severely underreported.

Many experts agree Latino, Indigenous and Hispanic youth are misidentified and poorly counted in county, state and national statistics due to inconsistencies in definitions, categories or even having the option to self-identify at all. 

“We’re basically invisible,” said Marcia Rincon-Gallardo, director and founder of Noxtin and executive director of the Alianza for Youth Justice. Both organizations focus on the disproportionate impact of the juvenile justice system on Latino youth, families and communities. 

Hispanic youth are disproportionately represented in the justice system, according to existing statistics from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). Hispanic youth are detained at nearly twice the rate of white youth and are committed to court-ordered placement 30% more often than white youth. 

In certain states, the disparity is significantly worse than the national average. 

For example, in Utah, Montana and Pennsylvania, Latino youth are more than three times as likely to be held in placement than white youth, and in Massachusetts more than seven times as likely, according to The Sentencing Project, based in Washington, D.C.

Rincon-Gallardo said there are also inconsistencies among the various legal institutions such as police, courts and correctional facilities. 

“Each one of those institutions counts Latinos a particular way and sometimes it’s apples and oranges to try to aggregate it,” Rincon-Gallardo said.  “What we found are incredible inconsistencies even in the 11 most populated Latino states and so we’re very concerned.” 

Data on race and ethnicity reporting from states as a whole are decreasing, said Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

Sickmund said that in the past, the federal government encouraged states to track and report racial and ethnic data in order to receive funding. Recently, that has begun to change as funding to states’ juvenile justice departments shrinks, making it more expensive to abide by the grant requirements than to just not record the data at all. 

“Of late because the money available to states for juvenile justice has gotten really low, a number of states have or are considering no longer playing the [government’s] game,” Sickmund said. 

The result of this is less reliable data on a state and county level, Sickmund said. She often asks state justice departments to “please report the data,” or the data published on sites like the OJJDP’s will be largely theoretical. 

“They’ve dropped out of asking for the money and the quality of some of the data has really diminished,” Sickmund said. “It’s kind of becoming a problem.”

Already most states’ systems do not record ethnicity but also do not have an option to identify as Latino or Hispanic, resulting in Hispanic youth being counted as “white,” according to a report from The Sentencing Project. 

The terminology in research and data collection use is important as well, Rincon-Gallardo said. 

The term Hispanic refers to persons who are from or have ancestors from a Spanish-speaking country, which does not include all countries in Latin America, and also refers to countries like Spain and Equatorial Guinea. The word Latino refers to those who are from Latin American descent, which includes non-Spanish-speaking countries like Brazil. 

Not all Hispanic people are Latino and not all Latinos are Hispanic, according to a report from the University of Connecticut School of Law. Hispanic is the term most often used in data, according to the Urban Institute. 

Another term being used recently, Rincon-Gallardo said, is L.I.P.O.C., or Latino Indigenous Persons of Color. 

Many Hispanic and Latino people also identify themselves as Indigenous, meaning their family comes from colonized countries in Central and South America but have ancestry tied to the Indigenous populations that lived there prior to the Europeans. 

As most Latino or Hispanic youth have multiple identities, without accurate data collection methods advocacy groups say the disproportionate impact on these communities is hidden. 

Many Latinos identify as mixed race, Indigenous or Afro-Latino. Hispanic or Latino ethnic identities can be split further by country of origin, according to a report from the Urban Institute.

Joshua Rovner, a senior associate at The Sentencing Project, analyzes racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. He found the lack of data and of consistency problematic, he said.

“[In the data] if you are Latino, then you cannot be African American,” Rovner said. “The fact that the data is aggregated or disaggregated but also just grouped in a way that each kid only gets one ethnicity, well half of Native youth in this country are also Latino but they get categorized as one or the other.” 

Tanya Washington, a senior associate for the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, has found it challenging to collect data and rates of incarceration for Latino youth in her work, she said. 

“There may be one state that has state data that’s required and all the locals collect it, and then there’s another state where only certain types of data are collected at the state level, and then the local levels have all their own unique way of doing things,” Washington said. 

During her time as a strategic consultant in Georgia, Washington said the local levels of the juvenile justice system all had their own system of collecting data on race and ethnicity and “didn’t talk to each other,” which made the work very complicated. 

Rincon-Gallardo said that the demographics of race, ethnicity, gender, geography, sexual orientation and gender expression should be collected and publicly available throughout the juvenile justice system.

Without being counted properly, she said, the justice system does not have an accurate idea of the size of the population incarcerated. More importantly, Latino communities across the country will not receive the funding they need to support alternative, solution-based programs for their youth. 

Funding for reform programs often comes from data showing a disproportionate issue within the community. In states such as Arizona or California with more Latino communities than other states, without accurate information, it can be difficult to understand the true scope of the issue. 

“We hear so often of the need for good data, of the need for proven programs,” Rovner said. “The way that you prove that a program is working or understand the scope of a problem is to measure it. You can’t have a solution without measuring the scope of the problem.” 

Organizations such as the W. Haywood Burns Institute, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Alianza and The Sentencing Project are working to bring attention to this issue –– but without the mandated and public data collection for funding, analyzing the problems in their community and identifying the means to solve them proves challenging, Rincon-Gallardo said. 

“We felt that until we get counted and have the data that we cannot hold systems accountable, not only to respond with customized approaches, but also to decrease and to end incarceration for Latinos in the same way that we’re looking to end incarceration for all youth,” Rincon-Gallardo said. 

The post Latino youth ‘invisible’ in juvenile justice data appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

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

The post Texas groups fighting against long prison sentences appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

Advocates, community members and Spokane Public Schools administration in Washington state came together during a 2016 school district meeting to address the high suspension and expulsion numbers of students. It was during that meeting that the superintendent signed an initiative bringing restorative justice to all 54 schools.

Restorative justice, or restorative practices, is a philosophy that focuses on restoring community relationships rather than punishing the offender as a way of discipline. 

“When we treat that individual student with respect and provide the support they need that benefits everyone,” said Julie Schaffer, restorative practices manager in the Office of Family and Community Engagement for Spokane Public Schools. “The whole community is safer and healthier because of that.” 

When students misbehave in schools in the U.S., they are often punished through punitive measures that lead to school exclusion. These measures come from zero tolerance policies which aim to address “disruptive and/or violent behaviors,” according to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report. 

In recent years, schools, districts and communities in over 27 states, including several school districts in California and the Dekalb County School District in Georgia, have started incorporating restorative justice as a way to “shift the culture from discipline to accountability and problem solving,” according to the same report.  

The Spokane school district has a three-tier process in its restorative justice effort, with the first tier used to help build community relationships so that students feel they can approach teachers with problems, the second tier uses restorative strategies to address problems in the classroom and the third tier aimed at mediation. 

In a Spokane Public Schools presentation on the district’s restorative approach, the differences between a restorative and punitive approach are highlighted as being more focused on why someone may have acted out and how they can work to fix the problem rather than what rule they broke and how the student should be punished.

Schaffer said that teachers within the schools have a freedom in how creative they implement the practices in classrooms.

“It could be like get to know you, games, where there’s a lot of movement or you know, and it depends on the age of the student,” Schaffer said. “So that tier-one classroom level, it’s really the proactive staff.”

Throughout the district, the use of classroom circles, mediation and conferencing are used in a three-tier process focused on building community, resolving conflict, repairing harm and reconnecting students. 

“It’s giving the youth an opportunity to really reflect and come up with their own idea of what needs to be done to repair the harm or the relationship if there was another person involved in the incident,” Schaffer said, describing some of the methods they use in the classrooms

In 1998, Bob Murphy moved to Spokane, Washington, where he became focused on restorative justice after spending a career in education in Alaska as a teacher and principal. 

He spent eight years as a program director for a dispute resolution center where he was involved in a victim-offender mediation program, before being contracted as a restorative justice mediator with Spokane Public Schools.

“From the schools or the juvenile justice system, we really owe it to kids and families to have alternatives where they have an opportunity to learn a lesson from those [mistakes], right,” Murphy said. “And not be hamstrung the rest of their life by a mistake they made as a kid.”

During the 2014-2015 school year, Spokane Public Schools district had 5,506 exclusionary discipline consequences, or any disciplinary actions by teachers which includes warnings, suspensions and expulsions. 

Just four years later, the number of exclusionary discipline consequences dropped from 5,506 to 4,166 by the 2018-2019 school year. The district formed a Superintendent Work Group on Restorative Practices, a collaboration between district staff and community members, to focus on exclusionary discipline. 

Nikki Lockwood, speaking of her experience as a community advocate before being elected as a board member for Spokane Public Schools, said for the first three years the work group met monthly to go over discipline data and worked in subcommittees to propose any changes to address issues. The group currently meets quarterly to continue to address any issues and how to better implement restorative practices.

Modern restorative justice practices have been around since the 1970s, with programs focused on reconciliation between offenders and victims. These practices aim to bring accountability and acknowledgement of the harm caused to the community, while also restoring relationships and aiming to reduce crime. Some restorative justice practices include victim-offender dialogues, conferences and peer circles. 

The philosophy behind restorative justice has its roots in cultures across the world including within Native American communities, the native Maori people in New Zealand and more, according to the International Institute for Restorative Practices. 

In the U.S. larger school districts like Oakland Unified School District in California began implementing aspects of restorative justice in the early 2000s, even decreasing the amount of suspensions by 86% in one middle school.  

However, while restorative practices are implemented, Schaffer said that they can work alongside exclusionary discipline. 

“So maybe there still is a suspension or that student needs to take some time away from the school building,” Schaffer said. “But that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t also be a restorative intervention. And sometimes exclusionary discipline could be shortened based on the student’s willingness to engage in a restorative intervention.”

Nicole Rosenkrantz, community partnerships manager in the Office of Family and Community Engagement for Spokane Public Schools, explained the district recently received two grants to fund an in-school diversion program that will have mentors address student mistakes and behaviors in the school rather than sending them to juvenile court or dealing with exclusionary practices. The program is currently ready to roll-out for the next school year.

“When people are given an opportunity to accept…responsibility for the role they’re playing in something… not only is it an opportunity for a lesson,” Murphy said. ”But it really can fundamentally change how people approach life.”

Source photo courtesy of Spokane Public Schools

The post Washington school district embraces restorative justice appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

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

The post Right to attorneys for children grew out of an Arizona case appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.