Zakiya Cherif of Philadelphia was at work when she received the call that her 17-year-old son, Zaphir Reddy, had been arrested. 

“I was scared. I was really scared. I feared for my son’s life,” Cherif said.

Cherif’s life quickly changed. On top of being heartbroken, she said the costs have been enormous because of legal fees and all the time she has taken off work for court dates and visitations. Before COVID-19, she was visiting him once a week, renting a car to drive 2 1/2 hours to the Loysville Youth Development Center in Loysville, Pennsylvania, where he has lived this past year. Cherif’s son was sentenced for two years in 2019 for a crime she didn’t want to discuss.

She also pays for extra food and toiletries.

“There is not enough food being given to the children,” Cherif said. “You have to order it through a system that they have set up with the prisons.”

Because of the enormity of the financial, emotional and psychological burdens on families of those incarcerated, small and large nonprofits around the country often step in to try to fill the voids, to help parents navigate the complicated justice system.

“What you see is a juvenile justice system that does not allow for family input or family participation. Very few juvenile justice systems work with families,” said Liz Ryan, president and CEO of Youth First Initiative, a national advocacy campaign to end the incarceration of youth and direct resources to community programs for youth.

Justice for Families reported in a study that 75% of families of kids in the juvenile justice system face financial barriers related to transportation and time. Fifty-one percent said their annual household income amounts to less than $25,000, while the national median income for families is twice that. 

Single parents like Cherif struggle more with only one household income to pay the price of incarceration. One study indicated that more juvenile offenders come from single-parent families, particularly mother-only families.

The Youth Art and Self Empowerment Project in Philadelphia, also known as YASP, is Cherif’s first support system. YASP staff members support mostly Black and brown families, helping parents understand the justice system legal jargon and processes, filling the courtroom with support during court dates, and helping their children reenter the community after incarceration.

 “They kept note and kept me focused and paid attention to things that I wouldn’t know to pay attention to,” Cherif said. “So that was my support.”

“And then my church family made sure they attended the trial dates,” Cherif said. “They kept my son in prayer, they checked on them. They visited him. They wrote him letters. And my family, too, they started to step up as well.”

Cherif began volunteering for the Philadelphia group after her son was incarcerated, as payback for the help it provided her. She became a member of YASP’s “youth participatory defense hub” when she realized how limited support there is for people who look like her son, an African-American male. 

“You feel like you failed to keep your child away from the legal system,” Cherif said.”… He’s already got several strikes against him and then to add the incarceration on top of it.”

She now sits with other mothers and fathers in court and tries to help them through a juvenile justice system that she said doesn’t work for many of them. She doesn’t want other moms or dads to go through what she did.

Across the country, In Wichita, Kansas, Tyler Williams is a founding member and a community organizer with Progeny, a youth/adult partnership focused on alternatives to youth imprisonment. Williams and others in this youth justice advocacy group also mentor kids and get them involved in juvenile justice reforms in the community. 

His passion for advocacy and reform grows from his own experiences. 

Starting at 13, he spent six years at a juvenile facility. He now works with youth at risk of getting in trouble with the law. He also helps those readjust after being in detention.

After his release at 19, he and other formerly incarcerated youth worked to build Progeny.

“We were really young, really just trying to make a change and a difference in our community, as youth who have been directly impacted by the system and have firsthand knowledge,” he said.

They saw problems that a lot of youth are facing due to what Williams describes as holes in the justice system.

“We wanted to be out there, try to make a change, give the youth a voice – to enact policies that are a lot more beneficial, not only to youth, but to also … the communities and victims as well,” Williams said.

Earlier this year, the advocacy group created a “COVID-19 call to action,” requesting that Kansas develop a better plan for keeping youth safe in juvenile detention facilities. They called for such things as halting new admissions, finding alternative living options, and providing immediate medical care to detained youth.

“While some jurisdictions have canceled visitation, we believe that this is not a time for youth to be separated from their support systems,” said Williams in July. “This will only exacerbate mental health issues and further isolate youth.”

Another Progeny effort is the “Invest Don’t Arrest” campaign, which is working to reimagine the juvenile justice system and reinvest in community alternatives.  Williams said one of Progeny’s goals is to close Kansas’s last youth prison, investing those funds into the community instead and keeping families whole rather than sending kids to detention facilities.

Ryan of Youth First Initiative said the best, most effective programs for young people across the country are ones that work with the whole family, not just with the young person.

“It’s really a question of are we willing to do the right thing here and keep kids together with their families? And invest in youth and their families.” Ryan said. 

Another organization, Youth Advocate Programs Inc., or YAP, a nonprofit with offices nationwide, uses a “wrap-around” model to support families impacted by their childrens’ incarcerations. 

Jeff Fleischer, president and CEO of YAP, explained that his organization receives a small portion of money that originally would have gone to incarcerating youths and instead invests in the families of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth. The group mentors, counsels and helps both kids and parents find jobs. 

“We’re the alternative to incarceration,” Fleischer said.

Resources are redirected from incarcerating young people and redirected to serving the entire family, Fleischer said. Advocates are assigned to a whole household and are available to provide support to not only the youth, but the parents and siblings as well. 

“They have a team of people now that are supporting them. They have an advocate that’s in their home for 10,15 hours a week,” Fleischer said.

Tyler Williams agrees the approach in reforming juvenile justice today has to go beyond the youth. It needs to be community-based, he and other nonprofit leaders say.

“In order to help heal not only yourself you got to heal the other people around you because it’s a community,” Williams said. “And if there’s one bad thing in the community, then we need to help fix it.”

Source for art: Artwork created by youth during a Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project workshop

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Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, there has been a wave of advocacy that has successfully removed police officers from public schools.

But Floyd’s murder did not start the movement. It added fuel to a fire that has burned for decades in communities of color. 

The story of school policing is one that is rooted in the fights for civil rights and education equality. 

In 1948, the Los Angeles School Police Department, which would go on to become the largest school police department in the nation, was created to combat violence in newly integrating schools, according to a 2017 ACLU report. Around the nation, as schools began to integrate, the notion prevailed that bringing Black students into white schools would also bring violence. 

Police presence grew in schools and so did its opposition. In 1971, Boston’s Black Student Federation staged a boycott of its public school system. Nearly half of the Black students in the city stayed home from school during the week of Feb. 8, according to a report in the Journal of Urban History. Among their demands was “the removal of police from schools and surrounding areas.”

Decades later, amid the uprising following Floyd’s murder, a handful of school districts have answered renewed calls to remove police from schools. Advocates say police escalate school discipline situations and their strict surveillance of communities of color disproportionately funnels those students into prisons, according to the ACLU and the Advancement Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. 

Despite their proliferation after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, there is no evidence that school resource officers actually make schools safer.  The Advancement Project identified 62 assaults by school police officers between 2009 and 2019.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the decision to end the school district’s decades-long contract with the local police department came just over a week after his death. In Oakland, the city voted to disband its school police department a month after his death, after falling one vote short in March.

But for both cities, there was a George Floyd before 2020. 

Four years earlier in a suburb of Minneapolis, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside of Minneapolis in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter. 

It was just the latest highly-publicized offense in the fraught relationship between police and the Black community. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while selling CDs  outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

“We don’t need to tie that history to learning environments in our schools and to also be developing fake narratives around what police actually mean when we are seeing differently every day what police mean to our communities and how that history continues to live on,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis.

Talks of eliminating school resource officers began in the Twin Cities following Castile’s murder, Eban said. 

Nearby, a Minneapolis suburb ended its contract with local police departments in 2017. After several incidents of excessive force, Intermediate District 287 in Plymouth, Minnesota got rid of its police officers and replaced them with student safety coaches, trained to de-escalate conflict and address students’ mental health needs.

The battle was ongoing. 

“We wouldn’t have gotten here, even with everything that happened with the murder of George Floyd, if we didn’t challenge the school district and the school board’s values a year earlier, when the Minneapolis police department had done other racist things,”  Eban said. 

In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project’s work zeroed in on removing police from schools in 2011 after the murder of Raheim Brown, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by an Oakland school police officer. It launched its Bettering Our School Systems (BOSS) Campaign.

After realizing how deeply embedded police were in their schools, the campaign launched efforts to reform the police in schools. Not only was there a school police department, but the schools also contracted a number of city police officers and school resource officers, said Manning.

“Police in schools were normalized,” said Ni’Keah Manning, the advocacy group’s program coordinator. “It was so normalized that it wasn’t even questioned.” 

The campaign started with small reforms, such as formalizing a complaint policy against officers to empower students and parents, and establishing a memorandum of understanding to limit the power the city’s police department had in schools. 

Despite their victories in reform, Manning said the goal was always complete abolition. 

“We knew in organizing that a system will only revert back to doing what it was designed to do. And there is no one to make sure they’re being held accountable,”  Manning said. 

The international uprising caused by Floyd’s murder was a catalyst that created a moment of opportunity,  Manning said.  

“It was divine timing,” she said. 

On June 24, the Oakland School Board voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department.

Now, in both cities, the next step is providing alternatives to police in schools. 

In Minneapolis, there had been research for at least 10 alternatives prior to the decision to end the contract with their police department, though none had been approved, according to Eban. 

Manning said the work of the next two to three years will be creating a safety plan that gives the community a seat at the table and focuses on restorative practices that emphasize repairing harm caused by wrongdoing, rather than punishment. 

Source art courtesy of Black Organizing Project

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At one Indianapolis juvenile detention center, residents are given the chance once a month to participate in a shelter dog training program.

The week-long Pawsitive Corrections program, run by the therapy dog nonprofit Paws & Think, is held at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center. Each month, five shelter dogs from Indianapolis Animal Care Services are brought to stay at the center for one week, where 10 residents conduct obedience training along with volunteer trainers.

Since 2013, more than 300 dogs and more than 600 incarcerated minors have been impacted by the program.

In order to participate in the program a resident must be on good behavior, said Kimberly Trimpe, Youth-Canine coordinator. Not only does it provide this incentive, but often the kids can empathize with the dogs they are working with.

“A lot of these dogs come from bad situations [and] have had neglect or abuse histories, too,” Trimpe said. “And that helps the kids to empathize, it really helps them understand communication and to be able to read the dog.”

Trimpe has been with Paws & Think since 2011 and said that’s when the Pawsitive Corrections program started becoming more regular after a period of intermittance.

Terrance Asante-Doyle, superintendent of the detention center, said in a 2017 video that the Pawsitive Corrections program not only is important to him but is a “mainstay” at the center.

“I see the impact it has on the youth,” Asante-Doyle said. “You can see the excitement that the youth have in just being able to interact with a canine.”

The first day of the program involves going over training strategies with the participating residents, and an emphasis on using positive reinforcement, Trimpe said. On Tuesday, the dogs arrive and stay until Friday, with the actual training lasting an hour each day.

“It’s amazing what they teach them in four days,” Trimpe said, adding that the hope is to eventually extend the program if circumstances allow.

Though training is only an hour long in the afternoon, volunteers are needed until the evening to spend time with the dogs and make sure their needs are met. Trimpe said they also encourage the detention center staff to allow the residents time with the dogs outside of their training.

Wendy Lane, longtime Pawsitive Corrections volunteer, said she has seen the program make kids more confident in themselves after their participation.

“I think the majority don’t hear what they do right, it’s always what they’ve done wrong,” Lane said. “Doing this program (has showed me) that they’re still kids that have the same wants and dreams as any other kid that’s not in that situation.”

Asante-Doyle said he has seen kids turn their behavior around immediately when they find out they can be part of the program.

“Not only does it help with behavior, but we’re also doing a service to the community as far as being able to help these dogs become more adoptable,” Asante-Doyle said.

A few years ago, Lane walked into her downtown CVS and the security guard stopped her. He recognized her from the program, and told her that he looked forward to it every day when he participated. 

“He said that program got [him] through having to be [in the detention center] … he still remembered his dog’s name,” Lane said. 

This encounter represents exactly what Paws & Think is trying to do with the Pawsitive Corrections program, Lane said, by leaving a positive impact on vulnerable kids.

Lane herself has benefited from the program: her therapy dog, Liza, was a shelter dog that graduated from the training before Lane adopted her in 2014. Today, she brings Liza to the detention center on Saturdays to interact with the kids and said it’s where Liza enjoys therapy sessions the most.

“The kids gave her a second chance, and I feel like she’s just like giving back to the kids,” Lane said. “I like to tell the kids that because the kids do make a difference in these dog’s lives. And hopefully the dogs and this program make a difference with the kids. I think it does, and I think that’s what keeps it going, because we do see changes.”

Source photo courtesy of Paws & Think.

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When Jayanti Demps-Howell was 9 years old, he was suspended from school in Flint, Michigan, for a cartoon superhero drawing he had made at home and brought to school. 

He had done the same thing plenty of times before — drawing artwork at home and then bringing it to school. When he was upset about receiving a bad grade, he expressed his feelings through his drawings. He drew a cartoon strip of a teacher entering a classroom giving out bad grades, and a superhero blowing her up.

He was suspended for three days for “threatening a teacher.” 

Dawn Demps, his mother who has had a career in education for much of her adult life and is currently earning her Ph.D. in education policy and evaluation at Arizona State University, said he was expressing himself in a healthy age-appropriate way, and was concerned that this “threat” would show up in the future.

“It makes it look like he came in there and he threatened the teacher,” his mother said. “Like he never spoke to the teacher.”

Jayanti Demps-Howell experience isn’t an anomaly. A 2019 study by Princeton University found that Black students are four times more likely to receive suspensions than white students.

This was the beginning of the now 15-year-old’s aversion to school. His mother remembers his attitude towards school changing after the suspension. 

Dawn Demps said her son isn’t much of a talker, and when it comes to serious stuff he expresses himself through art, so she asked her son to draw self-portraits of how he views himself and how he thinks the school views him when he was 13.

Jayanti Demps-Howell drew himself as Goku — his favorite character on Dragon Ball Z. 

“What I was saying is that I perceive myself as being awesome and being cool, to me in my own eyes,” Jayanti Demps-Howell said.

But when he drew himself from the school’s perspective, he drew himself reaching for a graduation cap with a target locked on his chest. He said it represents how people don’t want Black men, like himself, to succeed.

“And as an educator, that kind of hurts. But as a researcher, I understand,” Dawn Demps said about her son’s feelings towards school. 

That drawing led Dawn Demps to construct a project asking other kids who had been suspended to draw the same thing. She found that most kids saw themselves achieving their dreams, but thought the school viewed them as failures. She is currently writing an article about her project to discuss the results.

“These kids are very deep. They are not lost on what’s going on,” she said. 

As part of her dissertation, Dawn Demps is studying the Black Mothers Forum, a local Arizona collective of Black moms working to dismantle the school to prison pipeline. When Dawn Demps shared the artwork with the group, Debora Colbert, executive director of the Black Mothers Forum, said it showed how many kids, especially Black kids, feel predestined for prison.

“Imagine being 5 years old. And having your hands handcuffed behind you because a teacher said you were a threat,” said Colbert. 

A 5-year-old in Arizonan did get handcuffed for this reason, and the Black Mothers Forum helped the family advocate for themselves, Colbert said. When Dawn Demps’s son was suspended a second time from his Arizona high school, the forum helped the the family as well. 

Colbert said a big focus of the group is empowering parents to advocate for themselves and their children when it comes to school discipline. Currently, they are helping parents navigate the reopening of schools amid COVID-19.

In the wake of closed Arizona schools, Dawn Demps is working to create a curriculum to educate her son through experiences rather than a classroom. Part of this curriculum is connecting him with successful Black men in the community to show Jayanti Demps-Howell a variety of career paths.

The first man he spoke with was Ronald Young, who goes by Chef Ron. After their conversation, Jayanti Demps-Howell made an Instagram account — @jaycookz_04 — to showcase his cooking, and Jayanti began looking into culinary schools. His mother said this was the first time he showed interest in education after high school.

Dawn Demps said that even if schools open back up, she’s not sure if she wants him to return.

About her son being home, Dawn Demps said: “I know my son is safe. I know nobody is targeting him. I know nobody is stereotyping. I know nobody is going to call the police on him for him doing something that teenagers do.”

Source photo courtesy of Dawn Demps

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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.

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

The post Why recidivism statistics don’t tell the full story appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

To understand why victims of childhood trauma pose a higher risk of being placed in detention, researchers point to a phenomenon commonly referred to as the sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline.

Girls go behind bars for status offenses like skipping school, drinking alcohol and violating curfew. Studies say these actions are often driven by adverse childhood experiences, including sexual abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and mental illness, leaving many girls –– disproportionately girls of color –– susceptible to arrest and imprisonment.

“Sexual abuse is a primary predictor of criminalization in girls,” said Yasmin Vafa, the executive director of Rights4Girls in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of at-risk youth, particularly girls and gender-expansive youth.

In 2015, 81% of girls in South Carolina’s youth detentions said they’d experienced severe and repeated sexual abuse, according to “The Girls’ Story,” a report by Rights4Girls and The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

In the 26 years since the founding of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, executive director Jessica Nowlan said that of the 38,000 young people the center worked with, the overwhelming majority have suffered physical and sexual violence. 

The San Francisco nonprofit provides jobs, education, healing and a voice for system-impacted youth, even visiting facilities to assist kids prior to their release.   

“We are talking about young people who have very little power in terms of our society,” Nowlan said. “These are young people that have been pushed to the margins.”

Now 41, Nowlan spent much of her childhood at the mercy of systems she now works to reform. Addiction and abuse were among the adverse experiences Nowlan often witnessed in her childhood home, though she said the child welfare system was riddled with trauma of its own.    

By age 13, Nowlan was homeless in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.  

Shoplifting and parole violations fueled the 17 incarcerations in Nowlan’s past before she found the Young Women’s Freedom Center. Through the center’s work and healing programs, Nowlan broke away from the systemic cycle. 

A sense of belonging, a safe place to go or a person to confide in can be pivotal factors in a child’s life, forces that are strong enough to even deter them away from the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline, Nolan said.  

“The pipeline part, it’s complicated. It’s not just ‘You get sexually assaulted at 16, you’re going to go to prison,’” said Danielle Arlanda Harris, a professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia. “It’s being exposed to situations that make the likelihood of prison more possible.” 

Harris said the wide net cast by the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline over multiple vulnerable populations is what makes the phenomenon’s classification as a “pipeline” somewhat problematic. 

Difficult to recognize, escape or heal from, Harris said the pipeline is better represented as a colander. While not all youth impacted by sexual abuse will end up incarcerated, the chance at-risk kids receive the help they need to before passing through the strainer and falling into the system is unlikely, she said. 

The psychological impact of repeated sexual trauma during pivotal developmental years is what makes the abuse to prison pipeline sometimes hard to recognize and can occur in tandem with other adverse childhood experiences. 

Francine Sherman, a clinical professor of law at Boston College Law School and co-author of study “Gender Injustice,” said girls with histories of abuse are often dually-involved with the welfare and juvenile justice systems.

According to the 2015 report, 47% of girls involved with child-welfare were referred to court for status offense charges.

 “It’s a whole lot less about the girl’s initial behavior, than it is a colossal failure of our response,” Sherman said.  

Sherman noted that systems like welfare and education are in place to provide solutions for at-risk youth, but often fail to address the root of their trauma and behavior. This lack of understanding can push children further down the path of arrest or incarceration.

“Girls’ trauma is different. Girls’ responses are different,” said Rebecca Epstein, executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, an advocacy group that addresses disparities of race and class nationwide. 

Advocates like Epstein push for a more gender-responsive justice reform that addresses the needs and driving risk factors for girls who’ve been led into the system, especially policy that supports low-income girls and girls of color.

“It’s important to recognize the dual effects of girls, race and gender in examining how she’s perceived and treated and responded to in our public systems,” Epstein said.

While the driving forces behind the sexual abuse to prison pipeline tends to target girls, gender expansive, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth, experts and advocates notice and acknowledge that race heightens these risks even further.

“White girls and girls of color share certain challenges, but they’re also very unique. Girls of color and low-income girls are the voices that are most consistently absent from the conversation,” Epstein said.

Minority girls are at an increasingly high risk of sex trafficking and arrest, due to racial disparities in socioeconomic status. Even more, black youth overrepresented in the justice system, accounting for 53% percent of all prostitution arrests, according to a 2017 data report by The U.S. Department of Justice. 

“Incarceration and detention [are] never appropriate for children, particularly girls, because of their unique pathways into the system, because an overwhelming majority of girls behind bars are survivors of sexual abuse,” Vafa said.

Often the needs of incarcerated victims of rape and abuse go untreated and ignored while in detention, leaving kids at a heightened risk of revictimization. 

Girls tend to lash out in response to retriggering events while incarcerated, pushed further into the justice system through a process that Vafa refers to as “bootstrapping.”

“It is retraumatizing to incarcerate them,” Vafa said. “Things like being forced to strip and cavity searches…constantly having your movements controlled by others…being subjected to really harmful techniques like isolation and solitary confinement.”

Girls disproportionately represent 76% of all “prostitution” charges, despite being younger than the legal age of consent, according to a 2015 report by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Survivor advocate Withelma “T” Ortiz Pettigrew said harmful conditions inside of many juvenile detentions often mirror the environment that sex traffickers subject their victims to.

“Many times when they’re put in a detention facility, it’s almost like a dog in a kennel,” Pettigrew said.  

Pettigrew, along with Rights4Girls, launched the “No Such Thing as a Child Prostitute” campaign in 2016 that successfully eradicated the terminology “child prostitute” in the media. For youth justice advocates and survivors, the change is big step towards understanding young victims of sex trafficking.

“It changed the idea that these are willing participants, it changed the idea that they were complicit in and in agreement,” Pettigrew said. “It allowed people to understand that this is something that’s happening to them, not something that they’re willingly participating in.”

In doing this, Vafa said these systems would have to acknowledge and address the intersectionality of girls who are impacted by the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline. 

“It’s really a matter of getting systems to understand the connection between childhood trauma, abuse and incarceration,” Vafa said.

The post What fuels the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline? appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

When Ron Brown College Preparatory High School first opened in Washington, D.C., in 2016, some community members initially pushed back. In a Washington Post article, people commented that the “young kings” sounded like a gang and accused the school of segregating D.C. students.

But this didn’t stop Ron Brown College Prep from creating a safe space for its Black male students using restorative justice principles as a foundation. Instead, “young kings” who enter through the doors of the high school are greeted by staff who aim to empower their students through a loving and supportive environment.

After desegregation, Black schools that once served as safe spaces either replaced Black teachers with white teachers or disappeared altogether. As a result, Black students have been overrepresented in the school-to-prison pipeline ever since, researchers and child advocates say.

Ron Brown College Prep hopes to dismantle this. 

The public high school specifically curated for male students of color was a product of Benjamin Williams’s experience in school and his drive to make a difference. 

Williams, the founder and former principal of the school, grew up in foster care with his brother, living in many homes and attending many different schools. While Williams was more successful academically, he said his brother was just as capable –– he just needed different support. 

He said he and his brother would have benefitted from a school like Ron Brown.

Williams was observant growing up. He said he always noticed how people who looked like him were treated: first in his middle school, high school, then college. When he began a career in education, he saw it firsthand.

Researchers from Princeton University found that in 2019, Black students were 2.5 times more likely to be referred to law enforcement, 3.5 times more likely to be arrested and 4 times more likely to be suspended than white students. 

This is when Williams said he realized, “It’s not just me and my brother, it’s more than that.” 

Charles Curtis, a psychologist and restorative justice coordinator at the school, said if school were in session right now, students would probably be talking about police brutality in their morning community circle, which starts off each day connecting them with one another.

“Community circle is really where we connect. We also get in the habit of being together, sharing ideas, doing social and emotional work,” Curtis said. 

Curtis said that Black spaces like the school are important, especially for boys in their adolescence who are growing up in a country that doesn’t accept them.

“It is fundamentally hostile to their existence, to their mental health, to their opportunities to progress,” Curtis said. “They are criminalized. This is their life.”

Built on restorative justice

The morning circle is fundamental to the restorative process at Ron Brown. This process focuses on the reason behind the student’s behavior and connects them with the community and the person they may have harmed, rather than suspending and expelling students as a default. 

Curtis said schools often look at situations warranting either restorative justice or exclusionary discipline. 

“There is no ‘which’ at Ron Brown. It is always restored,” he said. “Even in the most severe scenario where the young person did get suspended, our effort is always restorative.”

Curtis is a part of the CARE Team, which supports students and teachers in restorative practices. It’s made of counselors, psychologists, social workers, a director of empowerment and culture, and other school administrators.

The team addresses school culture, climate, restorative practices, and social and emotional learning, according to the Ron Brown website.

Teachers are also encouraged in their classrooms to address any conflicts or disruptions instead of sending kids out of the classroom. Students participate in peer circles, which use a restorative justice model to address and repair situations between classmates. 

Williams said he was intentional in bringing restorative practices into the school to help students learn accountability.

“You also have to make sure that you hold yourself in a way that you are willing to speak up for yourself. And that’s not something that most of our young men were expected to do prior to walking into the space,” Williams said.

Curtis said involving students in these practices is important because it helps them cultivate skills to not only help them navigate their experience in school, but outside of it as well.

A culture of love

Christian Johnson, who goes by CJ, was heavily involved with the school’s restorative justice practices when he was a student. He led morning community circles and sat in on restorative justice circles as part of the junior CARE team.

Johnson, who graduated with the inaugural class in June 2020, said his experience at Ron Brown shaped him into the leader he is today. He still remembers his first day walking into Ron Brown. 

“I had my jacket newly dry-cleaned, my tie was perfect, my shirt was pressed,” he said. “I was ready.”

As soon as he walked in, he and his fellow classmates were called “young king” by school staff. He said the day started with a morning community circle and greeting his brothers, a ritual that took place every day of his high school career. 

Calling students “young kings,” was a part of a constant push to empower students to take control of their own fate, Curtis said. He said this is deliberate because Black students are often exposed to narratives about what is wrong with them.

“We were intentional about every time we speak to them or of them that we were naming what was right about them,” he said. “You are special. You are important. You are a ruler. You are most of all the ruler of yourself. You decide where you are going.”

Johnson said he remembers Williams stressing the importance of taking advantage of the opportunities the school had to offer. 

The school takes students on college tours as early as ninth grade. Curtis said this exposure is important, because it shows the students that they have options and opportunities to create their own destiny.

Johnson said the moment that stuck out to him the most during his time at Ron Brown was when his stepfather passed away in June and the whole school reached out to him. He said he didn’t expect to be embraced the way he was, but that it speaks to the family culture intrinsic to the school.

“The school hours end when they end, but we don’t ever stop belonging to each other,” Curtis said.

Johnson said Curtis is like his uncle, and that he continues to ask Curtis for advice about both  small and large life decisions. Their relationship extends beyond the school walls, and Curtis continues to support Johnson as he begins the next chapter at Howard University, playing basketball and studying finance.

Johnson said he thinks Ron Brown was built on culture, and that restorative justice contributes to the positive culture he experienced. 

“The loving and the caring that the teachers have and the staff have for everybody is Ron Brown itself,” Johnson said.

Source photo courtesy of Christian Johnson

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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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The two-story house with the white vinyl siding and concrete steps leading up to the door looks ordinary from the outside, but it isn’t.

On the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sits the Courage House, Wisconsin’s first licensed group home for housing displaced LGBTQ youth. Opened in 2019 by Courage MKE, a nonprofit dedicated to serving Wisconsin’s LGBTQ community, the home can house up to five youth at a time.

Residents come from the child welfare system, homelessness and the juvenile justice system, said Brad Schlaikowski, Courage MKE co-founder. LGBTQ youth are overrepresented in both the homelessness and juvenile justice populations, statistics that can often be traced back to non-affirming families and runaway behavior.

An estimated 20% of kids in the juvenile justice system identify as LGBTQ, compared to only 4-6% of the general youth population. LGBTQ youth are also more than twice as likely to experience homelessness than their heterosexual peers.

In 2015, Schlaikowski founded Courage MKE with his husband Nick after they began fostering young girls who identified as LGBTQ and heard what they were going through.

“The stories that they were telling us of their experiences in shelters and group homes were horrible,” Schlaikowski said. “One of the last ones that came to us … she literally had bloody patches in her head because the girls [at her group home] were pulling her hair out because she’s bisexual.”

The Schlaikowski’s decided to hold a fundraiser for a Milwaukee homeless youth shelter and ended up raising almost $16,000. They kept the momentum going, and eventually received enough community support to buy the house.

“The community response [has been] overwhelmingly humbling,” Schlaikowski said.

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Schlaikowski said Courage MKE was about to make an offer on a second house that was going to be a drop-in youth shelter. However, this was put on hold due to financial uncertainty, he said.

Inside, the house is decorated with calming grays and blues, with pops of rainbow here and there, said house supervisor Jenna Sterr. 

Sterr, who has been at the house since April 2019, said she does everything she can to cultivate a family environment for the kids. On a typical day, she arrives in the morning to make breakfast and get them ready for school, and prior to COVID-19 she tried to get them out for weekend activities as often as possible.

One of the most important things for Sterr is to make sure each resident has someone in the house to look up to and share things with.

“I don’t think there’s one kid that has come into this house that I have not bonded with,” Sterr said.

Because the Courage House staff’s ultimate goal is to reunite each child with their parents, residents also participate in therapy sessions with their family.

The therapy sessions take place in a second building behind the house, which Schlaikowksi said makes things easier on the child.

“At least here, they’re still kind of home,” Schlaikowski said. “And so the family comes and they all meet in the back house … and it’s completely private.”

One of the most important things about the Courage House is that each child is free to be themselves, when they may not have had that opportunity before, Schlaikowski said.

“This is the first and only time in their life that they have been able to not worry about what someone’s thinking about who they are and how they identify,” Schlaikowski said. “My favorite part is when these kids just are able to … embrace who they are.”

For everyone working and volunteering at the Courage House, leaving an impact on each child’s life is a priority. Sterr recalled throwing a party for a resident’s birthday, and the boy told her he had never had a birthday party before.

“It just kind of shocked me,” Sterr said. “So we did all kinds of things for this resident … it was really just touching that all the other residents came together to make his birthday so special.”

The children aren’t the only ones that are impacted, Sterr said.

As a member of the LGBTQ community herself, Sterr said finding the Courage House filled a hole in her life.

“I 100% have found what I [was] missing,” Sterr said. “I really love that I am able to be myself and be open and teach the kids that it’s OK to be yourself and show them that you can be an adult and grow up and be who you are.”

Source photo courtesy of Courage MKE.

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