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.

Erin Espinosa from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency conducted a webinar in April where she presented her research on pathways of the juvenile justice system.

The webinar, “Pathways Girls Take to and Through the Juvenile Justice System,” highlighted how mental health, trauma and gender all intertwine and affect the paths that juveniles take that may lead to their involvement in the juvenile justice system.

Espinosa discussed the differences in pathways girls take that increase their likelihood of involvement in the justice system versus boys, and said girls are detained for longer periods of time in comparison to boys.

Factors taken into account when analyzing a youth’s length of stay stemmed from ethnicity to mental health markers, she said in the webinar. Girls who have experienced trauma or received mental health treatment are likely to be incarcerated for longer periods of time, up to five days longer than boys, Espinosa said.

“Boys…none of that was a factor [trauma or mental health] — it was crime-related activity,” she said. “We keep boys locked up longer, essentially for criminogenic issues, and girls tend to stay longer for treatment issues.”

Aside from higher levels of traumatic experiences, girls of color additionally face higher rates of sexual abuse that contribute to their funneling within the system, Espinosa said in the webinar.

The National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice reported that four out of five girls in the juvenile system reported experiencing some form of sexual abuse in their adolescence. Additionally, 35% of Latina girls under 18 experienced sexual abuse during their childhoods, according to a 2013 study by San Diego State University scholars. 

The U.S. Department of Justice revealed in a report that minority youth make up half of the youth population in placement facilities. Black girls make up 34% of girls in placement facilities across the United States, while Hispanic girls account for 22%.

Victimization endured by girls can translate to an increased likelihood of their involvement within the justice system. Factors of victimization can include such as adultification and hypersexualization.

Girls of color, notably Black girls, are unprotected members of society who are often hypersexualized,” LaTasha DeLoach said.

DeLoach, a senior center coordinator in Iowa City, Iowa, said visibility of a body plays a role in the high levels of sexual abuse of Black women.

Upon further discussion of sexual assault and kidnapping rates, LaTasha noted how Native American kidnapping numbers “are terrible,” as many cases remain unreported, and thus remain unmentioned.

Black and Latina girls, in comparison to their White counterparts, are perceived to be less innocent and more adultlike, as highlighted in a report by The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. Further in the report, paradigms of Black femininity –– like Mammy and Sapphire –– are mentioned which emulate the idea of Blackness correlating with hypersexuality and aggression.

As mentioned in the report, the Mammy and Sapphire stereotypes originated during the period of slavery in the United States and portray Black women as “hypersexual” and “aggressive.”

The Sapphire paradigm reflects an angry and stubborn Black woman whereas the Mammy paradigm is that of a nurturing and loving mother-figure, as stated in the report.

Black girls are viewed as being adultlike in all stages of their childhood in comparison to White girls, as revealed in a study conducted by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Iliana Pujols is a 22-year-old Latina who has been involved in the juvenile justice system in West Haven, Connecticut, since she was in fifth grade.

Pujols was charged with her first offense when she was 11, and she kept committing a variety of crimes, she said.

“I ended up going into my 18th birthday with about nine assaults,” she said. “I had like larceny, conspiracy, all kinds of things.”

Pujolos was suspended during her sophomore year of high school and soon after attended an alternative school, which she graduated from and said it was a great experience.  

Pujols said from a young age she was expected to be mature and play the role of an adult. She was raised to sometimes “play the role of mom,” and on occasion act as the head of the household. 

Appearance is also a factor of adultification — individuals are perceived as older despite being of a younger age. Pujols said she was often viewed as an aggressor due to her build and mature demeanor.

“The immediate assumption was that I was the aggressor because I was necessarily a little bit bigger than the other girl,” she said. “They thought I was over 18, but I’ve always presented myself as a very mature person, and an older person. So nobody knew that I was like 16 years old at the time.”

Though a Latina –– from Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and Dominican descent –– Pujols said she was often perceived as a younger white woman, which she said sometimes “played in her favor” in juvenile court.

Pujols mentioned she was often put in a lot of “privileged predicaments” during her encounters with the justice system, citing living in West Haven and passing as a white girl as contributing factors to her privilege.

Though Pujols was able to divert some consequences for her actions, her friends were not necessarily as lucky as she was. Recalling an instance where she and her friends got in trouble, Pujols mentioned that she might “get off with a ticket,” whereas her friend “might end up locked up for the night.”

Pujols said it’s important to approach incarcerated girls on a relational level. She recalled when she first began working at the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance and spoke to an incarcerated girl who positively spoke about her experience with a counselor.

“One session in specific stood out to me when I had this conversation with this young lady, and she was like, I like my program because, like, I can talk to my counselor about sex and losing my virginity and having my period and what to use and stuff like that”  Pujols said.

Young girls are likely to go through changes while they are detained, ranging from hormonal changes to transitioning into a young woman.

“One of the things that we’ve heard come up a lot is the need for not only role models and credible messengers,” Pujols said, “but more specifically when it comes to females needing that emotional connection, no matter where you go.”

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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. 

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In the early 1930s, Robert Carr, a member of the Creek Nation, was expelled for “incorrigible behavior” from Chilocco Indian Agricultural School near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. 

By the time he was 21, Carr had been incarcerated in three different institutions. He died in a Kansas state prison where he was held for stealing $30 worth of food, said his niece, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, a professor and Indigenous studies scholar at Arizona State University. 

It was the height of the Great Depression and, according to Lomawaima, Carr said he committed the crime because he couldn’t get a job and was hungry.

The school-to-prison pipeline –– a trend of school discipline pushing children into prison –– is recognized to have started developing at the end of the 20th century, experts say. But Carr’s story is an example of this phenomenon from decades earlier, when the U.S. government sanctioned, and sometimes operated and financed, hundreds of boarding schools for Native American children that relied on military and carceral practices to forcibly assimilate them into Western culture.

Modern juvenile incarceration disproportionately affects Native American youth, and experts on U.S. Indian policy trace the disparity back to the U.S.’s Native American assimilation policies of the 19th and 20th centuries –– which included boarding schools. Not only were boarding schools often little better than prisons, they intentionally broke up Native American families and triggered trauma that has compounded over generations, leading to many of the disparities Native Americans face today, according to a report by the National Congress of American Indians.

However, Lomawaima said the history of boarding schools is nuanced. 

Native American boarding school students report vastly different experiences, many of which are displayed in Phoenix’s Heard Museum exhibit “Away from Home,” which shows the evolution of boarding schools. Early boarding schools tried to strip youth of their culture and language, but schools changed policies over time and in their final years were more culturally tolerant. Some allowed kids to remake their school policies so they could express and share their culture.

Boarding school policies were just one part of the government’s efforts to undermine Native Americans’ sovereignty and rights, Lomawaima said. These institutions were built on centuries of federal policies aimed at land acquisition through erasing Native culture. 

“It’s not that what happened in boarding schools was directly responsible for every bad thing that happened in Indian country,” Lomawaima said. “But it’s linked to every bad thing that happened in Indian country.”

Lomawaima first learned about boarding school history from her father, Curtis Carr, Robert’s brother. Curtis and Robert entered Chilocco in 1927, when Curtis was 9 years old. He persevered longer than Robert, but ran away at about age 14 because he wanted to see his mom and “he just couldn’t hack it anymore,” Lomawaima said.

Lomawaima’s father rode the rails to California and weathered the Great Depression in a hobo camp, fought in World War II and eventually became a flight engineer and in-flight photographer for Boeing. 

Lomawaima said the stories he told of his boarding school days were mainly lighthearted tales of boyhood pranks on teachers and his school gang teaching him to fish. Under the surface, she knew there was more. 

“Even in the funny stories, you could see the reality of institutional life,” she said.

For nearly a century, the federal government funded boarding schools both on and off reservations. They were started as an extension of government policies aimed at assimilating tribes into Western culture, converting them to Christianity and weakening their cultural and family ties.

The real goal of these accumulated policies, said Addie Rolnick, professor of law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was to “get rid of [Native Americans] as a barrier to settlement,” enabling U.S. settlers to expand west and take advantage of the continent’s rich land and resources.  

Over the years, boarding schools took many forms and Native American students’ experiences varied greatly, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, schools were brutal by many accounts.

Sandy White Hawk, president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, said boarding school survivors have given consistent accounts of abuse, forced labor, inhumane conditions and attempts to erase Native American culture by cutting students’ hair, dressing them in uniforms and punishing them for speaking their tribal languages. 

White Hawk said she attended a healing ceremony for boarding school survivors where “I don’t know if there was one man who did not share that he had been raped –– and women as well.”

The education was rudimentary and largely focused on training Native students for menial labor, said former Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid, who was also chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission. Many students were forcibly removed from their homes to attend boarding schools against their parents’ wishes. In 1894, the U.S. imprisoned a group of Hopi men in Alcatraz for resisting their children’s removal.

A 1928 government-commissioned survey, now known as the Meriam Report, gave a scathing summary of school conditions, and by the 1930s, the U.S. adjusted its boarding school policies. 

But, Lomawaima said, “There’s policy and then there’s practice and they don’t always line up.” Accounts of boarding school conditions during this time vary greatly.

The Great Depression was particularly hard on Native American tribes, Lomawaima said, and some parents willingly sent their children to boarding schools. They knew that at school their children would at least receive three meals a day, something many parents couldn’t provide.

This was the case for the Carr brothers. Lomawaima said archival records show that in 1926, Cora Carr, their mother, requested her sons be allowed to attend Chilocco. 

In the era her father and uncle attended Chilocco, Lomawaima said children were allowed to go home to see their parents on breaks, a significant difference from earlier school policy. Despite some improvements, though, “it was a very harsh environment” built on strict military discipline and regimented schedules, she said. The school used methods like the “beltline strategy” to encourage students to regulate themselves.

“They would line the boys up in two lines, like running a gauntlet. They hit him with their belts,” Lomawaima said. “As my dad said, if some guy had it out for you, he hit you with the buckle end.”

Lomawaima said her father had fond memories of the Saturdays he spent hunting and fishing in Chilocco Creek with his boarding school gang. He also credited the school for teaching him practical trade skills that he was able to develop into his later career as a flight engineer, but he said those skills didn’t make up for destroying his family. 

More significant boarding school reforms came during the Civil Rights era, though White Hawk said there were still some reports of brutal treatment. During this later period many Native American families developed school pride after multiple generations attended a specific boarding school. Many students have shared fond memories of boarding schools and express regret that so many were closed. 

Patty Talahongva, a Hopi journalist for Indian Country Today who attended Phoenix Indian School in 1978-79, said, “Things changed in the boarding schools over time. What did not change was the quality of education. It was always substandard.” 

Later-era students at some schools took back the experience and made it their own. Talahongva said when she was attending Phoenix Indian School, students shared their culture through tribal clubs and powwow groups. But there were still vestiges of the militarized regimen that had characterized early boarding schools.

Attendance was no longer mandated but Talahongva decided to go to Phoenix Indian School in 1978 because there wasn’t a high school on the Hopi reservation. 

“The only option on the table was to go to boarding school, and is that being forced?” Talahongva said.

Experts say trauma from the boarding school era has been passed through generations of Native American families. They point to the lasting effects of historical trauma as causes of the high levels of PTSD, incarceration, violence and poverty Native American youth face today.

But White Hawk said the trauma isn’t just historical –– it’s present-day. 

“I’m 66 and we still have the generation right here who are the last to have gone to those kinds of boarding schools,” White Hawk said. “It’s not in the past at all.”

But Lomawaima said that, while historical trauma is real, blaming everything on it can mask the fact that, “there’s bad stuff happening now.” It can imply that victims are permanently broken and often lets the victimizers off the hook, undermining the strength and resilience Native people have shown by surviving centuries of colonialism.

Talahongva said the boarding school system was devastating because generations of Native Americans grew up away from their families and culture. If young people returned to their tribes, she said, they didn’t know their traditions or how to be parents.

“We’re healing ourselves,” Talahongva said. “And every generation gets a little bit better.”

Experts like Lomawaima and Brenda Child, professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, question whether too much emphasis is placed on boarding schools as the main cause of Natives Americans’ historic and current trauma, especially since students’ recollections of their boarding school experiences are so disparate. 

In a chapter of a book she contributed to, Child concludes that the boarding school experience does not summarize all the bad things that have ever happened to Native Americans. Rather, it’s a metaphor useful for summing up the many federal policies that accumulated over “the allotment and assimilation era” to undermine tribal sovereignty and allow European settlers to claim tribal lands. 

In some ways, Lomawaima’s father’s experience at Chilocco actually reinforced his cultural identity. Curtis Carr hadn’t been raised in a traditional Creek home; he learned about tribal culture from his gang at school and they developed their own culture of resistance that helped them be resilient in the face of abuse, Lomawaima said. 

Lomawaima said her father taught her and her sister to always resist and question authority. 

“That’s certainly not to say that boarding schools are blameless because they were not,” Lomawaima said. “But it also is just a reminder that they weren’t the only thing going on, not then, not now.”

Source photos courtesy of the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center and K. Tsianina Lomawaima

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Each of Richard Ross’s photographs starts with a knock on a kid’s cell door and an introduction to his work. Then he hands them his camera for them to take a picture. 

“You trust them with it,” he said.

By giving his camera to the children he photographs, Ross invites them to become participants in the image that they create together. For the past 15 years, Ross has traveled the country on a mission to document children and teens in solitary confinement. 

His award-winning series “Juvenile In Justice” captures the images of more than 1,000 children who are incarcerated at over 300 U.S. detention centers. His photos illustrate the ways in which U.S. detention centers manage kids through detainment, treatment and punishment. For Ross, the use of solitary confinement is an indicator of a failing juvenile justice system.

“I’m not really the activist,” Ross said. “But if you’re pushing legislation or policy, I have the images. I have the audio. I have the library to help you get your message out.”

Despite a lack of data, anecdotal reports from advocates across the country suggest the practice of solitary confinement is far too common throughout the juvenile justice system. Ross said he believes the data exist in a “cold fluorescent light” and that the images and voices of the kids are essential to building empathy and enacting change. 

Ross challenges his viewers to ask themselves how they would react if they came across a kid locked in a closet. For him, the answer should be easy. 

“You would immediately take them out and comfort them,” he said. “You would try and find out who put the kid in the closet and what their thinking was. You [would] try to hold those people accountable. Then you would also try to do something to explain to the adult in the room, [that] you can’t do that to a kid, it’s way too damaging.”

People often ask Ross how he was able to photograph inside detention facilities. At first, he said, access was easy. 

“I started going around to institutions, and I would go at least once a week,” he said. But when his photos became the catalyst for juvenile justice reform, “doors started closing in front of me,” Ross said.

In his photo series, Ross invites viewers to empathetically visualize the conditions of confinement that children endure. For advocates like Jennifer Lutz, an attorney for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy in Washington, D.C., and campaign coordinator for Stop Solitary for Kids, his images are a “game-changing tool.”  

“Photographs and images from inside juvenile jails and prisons undeniably show that these youth are not frightening offenders,” Lutz said. “Instead, they are children, no different from yours or mine. These images capture the inhumane, bleak, and overly-correctional conditions inside some juvenile facilities –– places where no child should be.” 

Across the country, more than one-third of children behind bars have spent time in solitary confinement, according to a report by the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. A typical stay in isolation can range anywhere from a few hours to six months, leaving many with physical, psychological and often developmental damage. 

As a photographer and professor of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ross said he thinks of himself as a conduit for the voices of these incarcerated children.

“Each kid’s image and voice is compelling to me,” he said. “And it’s my job to pass it over to you, with the lightest touch possible and just let that kid tell the story.”

Ross’s photography is supported through prestigious grants from philanthropists Pam and Brook Smith, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also was awarded Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships. 

The power of his images is their ability to illustrate the “inhumanity” of the justice system, said Laurie Garduque, criminal justice director of the MacArthur Foundation. 

“The system causes damage and harm, and it shouldn’t be this way,” Garduque said. “Behind the images is a narrative that compels people to ask why is the system this way and how can we change it. Richard isn’t issuing a call for help but action.”

Ross said his journey documenting children in the justice system began when his book  “Architecture of Authority” brought him to an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas. It was here when he saw six detained kids in cells, with their backs turned toward him, that he realized the focus of his work was about to transform.  

“I was sitting there talking to them and I was the only way they were going to have a voice,” he said. “And then it really became a mission.”

Over the course of his 15-year journey documenting America’s isolated youth, Ross’s work, lauded by advocacy groups, filmmakers, writers, academics and policymakers, has helped to push legislative reform for juvenile justice –– notably exhibiting in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, along with state and local courthouses.

For Ross, his images are not for the traditional art student, but instead for the people who are most affected.

“My ideal viewer is the kid, to make sure that they know they’re valued,” he said. “The kid that’s been released, to make sure that their experience in this world has been noticed, honored and responded to. And the people that are going to change that policy for the future.”

Laura Abrams, a University of California, Los Angeles social welfare professor, used one of Ross’s images for the cover of her 2013 book, “Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C.” 

“Youth imprisonment in this country is extremely diverse,” Abrams said, pointing to Ross’s collection as one that portrays the vast range of facilities. 

The kinds of juvenile facilities are as varied as the kids they detain. Some are old orphanages, some transitioned from mental health facilities into juvenile holding centers or treatment centers, some are group homes and some are locked facilities, Abrams said.

“A lot of people have an image of youth imprisonment as just being in a cell, [and] that fits some facilities, but a lot look more like dormitory style,” Abrams said.

In over 35 states, Ross has captured images of hundreds of facilities and isolation rooms. His photography showcases the vast range of detention types and the architecture behind them, while drawing the viewer into the blurred and obscured faces of kids in isolation.

Seeing these graphic images can and should be shocking, Lutz said.

“Much like [how] images of the murder of George Floyd have sparked a new awareness of racial violence and oppression, images of incarcerated youth speak to our shared humanity,” Lutz said. “We cannot look away. Ross and other artists’ work is a critical driver of reform, empowering advocates to compel justice professionals, judges, legislators, and other stakeholders to confront these realities and the urgent need for change.”

Driven by conditions children in detention facilities are subjected to, Ross sees no end for this project, calling it a moral imperative. 

“How do you walk away from it?” he said. “I can’t figure out how it stops unless it’s handing it off to another generation that’s going to say, ‘I’m going to make a difference, not in all these kids, but in some of them.’”

Lead source photo courtesy of Richard Ross

The post Capturing kids in confinement: A look through the lens appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

Unlike the adult courthouse that stands beside it, the Clayton County Juvenile Court building has no grand columns or dominating facade, but rather a wall of windows and a lobby its creator likens to a Hilton Hotel.

The design of the non-traditional juvenile courthouse in Jonesboro, Georgia,  was spearheaded by Judge Steven C. Teske. He and the architects he worked with designed the space to reduce anxiety, comfort the traumatized and encourage collaboration between youth, justice officials and community leaders. The building reflects the judge’s commitment to restorative justice principles: he focuses on making human connections with young offenders in an effort to address the root causes of their behavior rather than merely punishing them. 

“You want to be encouraging,” Teske said. “The only way you’re going to help people change their behavior is through positive relationships.”

The building, officially called the Clayton County Youth Development & Justice Center, was constructed in 2012 to house the jurisdiction’s forward-thinking system, which has become a national model for juvenile justice reform. 

Teske has served as a juvenile judge since 1999. He inherited a system that was unorganized and overwhelmed with complaints from schools. In 2003, as a part of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, Clayton County –– the sixth largest of Georgia’s 159 counties ––  invited community members and parents into the courthouse along with the youth to find solutions to the problems plaguing their lives and giving rise to their behavior. According to the county’s annual juvenile court report, since these innovative programs were enacted, detentions have declined by 70%.

According to Margaret J. King, director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis think tank, traditional courthouse architecture –– like that of the Harold R. Banke Justice Center next door to Teske’s building –– evokes a specific feeling to the public. 

“Courthouses are intended to be imposing, to inspire awe, and when they are typically classical and overscaled, calculated to make us feel small and insignificant in order to communicate their authority and power,” she said. “They radiate the majesty and gravity of the law.” 

This is just the type of building Teske did not want to build. One of his central directives to the designers of the facility, he said, was, “I don’t want a traditional courthouse.”

For Teske, the physical differences between the juvenile court building and the adult one next to it mirror the philosophical differences in the courts’ goals. He said his system is not intended to dominate the people involved with it, but to invite them in to solve problems cooperatively.

“In the adult system it’s very simple: they’re being punished for a crime,” Teske said. “In the juvenile system, it doesn’t work that way. The kid’s brain is still under neurological construction.”

Architect Melissa M. Farling, an adviser for The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, emphasizes the role design can play in justice systems which aim to be “cooperative and collaborative.” The design of physical spaces, she said, “impacts our physiology –– I mean everything: emotional, psychological, neurological.”

In recent decades, researchers have accumulated a mountain of evidence supporting the central idea guiding the design of Teske’s courthouse: spaces influence people’s bodies and minds.

In one classic 1984 study, researchers split up patients recovering from surgery into two otherwise identical rooms with entirely different views out their windows: one a blank brick wall, the other a sunlit scene featuring leafy green foliage. Patients in the latter room, on average, recovered a full day earlier than the other group and required fewer strong narcotics to ease their pain.  

“People who come into [the facility] are traumatized,” Teske said. “And when they are intimidated, they tend to shut down. And when they shut down, they don’t talk. And we got to get them to talk about what their issues are.”

The juvenile justice building’s lobby is flooded with sunlight and filled with art from school children of all ages in the community. Large windows offer views of a courtyard with trees outside. 

According to environmental psychologist Sally Augustin, these design features reduce stress, boost mood and encourage broad thinking. This type of thinking, she said, is critical to “problem solving and getting along with others.” 

Augustin said the design of a place has an especially pronounced effect on people’s minds in high stress or high stakes situations. In these cases, like when a child is appearing at juvenile court, she said, people “look for clues in their world” to orient themselves and make sense of the situation. 

At Teske’s facility, interview rooms where young people meet with probation officers and other officials are housed in private spaces on the first floor. This way, the adults come to the child, which Augustin said can offer them a sense of comfort and ownership of the place. This, she said, indicates to the young people in the courthouse that they can work with the system cooperatively.  

Augustin said this feature can impact the power dynamic between the young person and justice worker who sees them. The adult will always have the power and authority, she said, but “things get equalized, to a certain extent” when the young person is allowed to claim their territory before the meeting begins. 

Tucked away at the top of the building is Teske’s domain, the courtroom. It is the least accessible part of the facility, because, he said “it is the least frequented place” there. He doesn’t want to judge young people involved in the juvenile justice system, he wants to talk with them. 

Since starting his dialogue-based reforms, Teske has seen less and less activity on the top floor –– exactly the goal of his columnless, conversation-oriented system and building. 

The post Courts with no columns: How building design affects kids appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

For the project “Kids Imprisoned,” the team of student journalists will investigate disparities in sentencing and jail time, conditions of juvenile detention facilities and the impact on families, communities and victims. The stories will be published as a multimedia project online and shared with industry publishing partners across the country. Previous investigations have been published by major news organizations, including The Washington Post, NBC News, the Center for Public Integrity and USA Today, as well as many nonprofit news websites.

“In this moment, with what’s going on in the world, with the Black Lives Matters protests, I feel like we’re reporting in a historic moment and on a historic topic,” said News21 fellow Chloe Jones, an Arizona State University graduate student.

Headquartered at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, News21 was established in 2005 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to demonstrate that college journalism students can produce innovative, in-depth multimedia projects on a national scale. The initiative is led by Jacquee Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a professor of practice at the Cronkite School.

“Across the country, tens of thousands of children are incarcerated for crimes ranging from larceny and vandalism to assault and murder. This project will investigate how states and local jurisdictions are dealing with youth crime and violence, from arrest to detention,” Petchel said. “It’s a topic critical to the future of children and teens, not to mention their families and their victims.”

Normally, students travel from Phoenix to as many as 30 states during a summer News21 reporting project, but the COVID-19  pandemic has compelled remote reporting this year. From their hometowns or campuses, the students hold a daily videoconference with Petchel, other faculty advisers and their own reporting team members.

Previous News21 projects have included investigations into voting rights, post-911 veterans, guns in America and drinking water safety, among other topics. The projects have won numerous awards, including five EPPY Awards from Editor & Publisher, the IRE student journalism investigative prize and a host of other honors.

The last two projects, “Hate in America” in 2018 and “State of Emergency” in 2019, won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Award in the college journalism category. The award honors outstanding reporting on issues that reflect Kennedy’s passions, including human rights, social justice and the power of individual action in the U.S. and around the world. “State of Emergency” also won the top Investigative Reporters and Editors award for student journalists.

Fellows are selected for the highly competitive, paid summer fellowships based on nominations submitted by journalism deans and directors from across the country as well as how they perform in a spring seminar at the Cronkite School, during which they prepare by deeply immersing themselves in the topic.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation provides core support for the News21 program. Individual fellows are supported by their universities as well as a variety of foundations, news organizations and philanthropists that include The Arizona Republic, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Knight Foundation, Murray Endowment, Diane Laney Fitzpatrick, Myrta J. Pulliam and John and Patty Williams.

The ASU fellows, their named fellowships and their hometowns are:

– José-Ignacio Casteñeda – Phoenix, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow 

– Kelsey Collesi ­– Shaker Heights, Ohio, Buffett Foundation Fellow 

– Daja Henry – New Orleans, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow

– Delia C. Johnson – Phoenix, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow

– Chloe Jones – Tempe, Arizona, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow*

– Franco LaTona – West Bend, Wisconsin, Don Bolles/Arizona Republic Fellow

– Haillie Parker – San Diego, California, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow

– Kimberly Rapanut – Mesa, Arizona, Buffett Foundation Fellow 

– Jill Ryan – Bear, Delaware, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow*

– Calah Schlabach – St. Michaels, Arizona, Buffett Foundation Fellow

– Katherine Sypher – Orono, Maine, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow

– Anthony J. Wallace – Gilbert, Arizona, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow

This year’s fellows from other universities are:

– Butler University – Sorell Grow, St. Louis

– DePauw University – Joslyn Fox, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Byron Mason II, Chicago, Myrta J. Pulliam Fellows

– Elon University – Victoria Traxler, Oakton, Virginia

– Kent State University – Gretchen Lasso, Amherst, Ohio, Diane Laney Fitzpatrick Fellow

– Morgan State University – Chloe Johnson, Baltimore 

– St. Bonaventure University – Layne Dowdall, Little Valley, New York, and Jeff Uveino, Perry, New York

– Syracuse University – Michele Abercrombie, Boston and Patrick Linehan, Derry, New Hampshire

– University of British Columbia – Braela Kwan, Vancouver, British Columbia

– University of Colorado Boulder – Lindsey Nichols, Strasberg, Colorado

– University of Illinois at Chicago – Brody Ford, San Diego, California, and Nicole Sroka, Chicago

– University of Iowa – Mikhayla Hughes-Shaw, Rock Island, Illinois, Murray Endowment Fellow

– University of Mississippi – Matthew Hendley, Madison, Mississippi 

– University of Nebraska – Morgan Wallace, Gering, Nebraska, James Wooldridge, Kansas City, Missouri, and Ike Somanas, Bangkok, Thailand

– University of Oklahoma – Jana Allen, Muskogee, Oklahoma, Abigail Hall, Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Molly Kruse, Houston, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellows

– University of Tennessee – Gabriela Szymanowska, Knoxville, Tennessee, John and Patty Williams Fellow

*Chloe Jones and Jill Ryan are part of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, supported by the Scripps Howard Foundation.

Past investigations and information on the Carnegie-Knight News21 program can be found at news21.com.

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: The Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. 

Carnegie Corporation of New York: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding,” is one of the oldest, largest and most influential American grant-making foundations. The foundation makes grants to promote international peace and to advance education and knowledge.

Donald W. Reynolds Foundation: The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation was founded as a national philanthropic organization in 1954 by the late media entrepreneur for whom it is named. During its 60-plus years of operation, the foundation was a major supporter of journalism and journalism education, with commitments of more than $115 million nationwide.

Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation: The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, headquartered in Oklahoma City, was founded by Edith Kinney Gaylord, the daughter of Daily Oklahoman Publisher E.K. Gaylord. Ms. Gaylord created the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation in 1982 to improve the quality of journalism by supporting research and creative projects that promote excellence and foster high ethical standards in journalism.

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