Bart Lubow, Director of Juvenile Justice Strategy for the Annie E. Casey Foundation talks about the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI) at an April 2012 conference in Houston dedicated to the topic. JDAI is currently the the most widely replicated juvenile justice system reform project in the nation, with initiatives in 38 states.
Archive for Criminal Justice
Racism in Memphis: Shelby County Juvenile System on the Hot Seat
The Memphis’ juvenile jail has been found decidedly wanting in a recent federal investigation. According to it’s findings, there have been problems at the Shelby County Juvenile Court for years, mainly concerned with overly harsh discipline, inadequate protection of the incarcerated, and a strong dose of racism in the way that the inmates are treated.
Thomas Perez, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, reported Thursday that both his attorneys and outside consultants found “systemic civil-rights violations as well as patterns of discrimination against black youths, who are more likely to be detained, to receive tougher punishments and to end up in the adult system.”
Beth Warren at The Commercial Appeal gives us a bit more detail on the DOJ findings:
Detention officers have used restraint chairs to strap down juveniles and pressure-point control tactics, such as bending a youth’s wrist backward to induce pain, according to a three-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Both, as practiced in Memphis, are unconstitutional, according to the report by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
The report also found dangers in the physical layout of the jail, such as its two-level design with a balcony.
‘There is no systematic suicide-proofing of the building, no education to detention staff regarding necessary precautions and no plans to correct these risks,’ according to the report.
These issues are of grave concern, but even worse is the widespread racism endemic in the justice system. Unlike the situation inside the facility, the racist component begins on the streets. Just look at the arrest findings (via WREG TV, Memphis)
Black juveniles who were arrested in Memphis and surrounding Shelby County were twice as likely as whites to be detained in jail and twice as likely to be recommended for transfer to adult court, where a conviction generally brings harsher punishment, Perez said.
As is established in numerous reports over recent years, when you put juveniles into adult facilities the recidivism rate spikes. In other words, a much larger percentage of them are arrested again after release. The simple fact is that placing youth in facilities with adult offenders creates a training ground for criminals.
Perez has publicly stated that the goal is not to place blame, but to find a way to fix the problem. We will be keeping an eye on Shelby County and will let you know how well he does.
Image by Vector Portal, used under its Creative Commons license
Category: Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice |
Tags: "racial disparity", juvenile jail, Memphis, racism, Shelby County, Shelby County Juvenile Court, Thomas Perez
House Proposes 50% Cut in Juvenile Justice Spending
State and local juvenile justice programs are looking at some very deep cuts in their federally based funding. The Congressional rampage to cut federal “discretionary” spending is lurching their way with a proposal that should unsettle anyone who is concerned with the fate of our country’s youth.
On the national level, Justice Department programs are funded by money appropriated by a single House committee, currently controlled by Republicans.
That committee has just submitted it’s financial proposals for the new fiscal year which starts on October first. In that proposal money dedicated to juvenile justice is reduces from $424 million in 2010 to $209 million, a slashing cut of more than fifty percent.
Ted Gest of the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange takes a closer look at the declining reosurces:
Federal aid for juvenile justice already had fallen more than 50 percent to its lowest level in more than a decade, says the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which represents state advisory committees in Washington, D.C. The coalition is asking Congress for $80 million for “formula grants” that helps states comply with mandates in a key 1974 juvenile crime law, such as separating juvenile and adult defendants in jail and keeping minor offenders out of custody.
If you doubt the importance of keeping juveniles out of adult facilities, please look through the blog. It has been a constant refrain for us, as it is one of the biggest factors encouraging recidivism.
House appropriators, rather than adding funds for those purposes, would cut them to $33 million.
Continuing such cuts may raise questions about whether states will continue to abide by the federal requirements, with relatively little money at stake, as some states have done regarding the federal sex offender registration law.
This is really the big issue here. While progress has been being made in some states, a drastic reduction in federal funds could put those forward strides in jeopardy. As Gest noted above there is already a precedent for that sort of reaction, a fact that should give chills to any juvenile justice advocate.
Brace yourselves; the fight is about to get harder.
If you find yourself in the La Jolla area on Saturday, come out and meet Susan Madden Lankford, author of Born, Not Raised, at Warwicks. She will be holding a book signing from noon ’till 2 PM [details here].
Suicide in Jail: A Special Report
It is always gratifying to see solid, in-depth reporting. Today I’d like to share an excellent example of such an instance – a special report on the Emmy-Award winning interactive news talk show Richard French Live.
French, who has interviewed personalities ranging from Presidents Obama and Clinton to Sen. Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner, takes on the troubling topic of prison suicide.
The conditions in our penal system are often in the news because of brutal or substandard conditions. Inadequate supervision, use of unusual force, inmate violence, drugs and other reprehensible conditions are no longer surprising when they turn up in the news.
In two of our books we have looked at the plight of women in prison and the shameful state of juvenile justice. Here is another look at the system that examines the conditions faced in a New York facility that primarily houses male inmates.
(Since this is a full length report I’ve embedded a playlist with all the parts in the proper order for ease of watching.)
Convict Speaks Out Against Transition Center Closures
The pressure cooker of incarcerated life is one that people adjust to out of necessity. The rules of interaction are drastically different, and often more brutal, than a life lived without bars.
One of the reasons the American rate of recidivism (the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested) is so high is that prisoners are trained into the prison lifestyle and find themselves unable to readjust once returned to society.
This is exactly the issue being stressed in Illinois right now as the battle is joined to keep transition centers across the state open. Illinois Gov. Quinn has plans on the table to close fourteen facilities across the state, including many that help ease convicts back into the social patterns of everyday life.
The PJ Star brings us one convict’s view:
Convicted felon John Flood credits a state transition center with helping him get his life back on track after prison and testified Tuesday that Gov. Pat Quinn’s plan to close them would have a disastrous effect on inmates looking for a fresh start.
‘They know how to do prison; they don’t know how to do the world,’ said Flood. The 54-year-old spent nearly two years at Westside Adult Transition Center in Chicago after his theft sentence before landing a maintenance supervisor job.
Readers of our books are well aware that we find it vital to bring these people back into society. Mental health programs, substance abuse programs, inmate halfway houses, and transitional centers like the Peoria Adult Transition Center are essential in order to reduce recidivism.
Facilities like these help to provide a lifeline to those trying to adjust to the outside world. When released, prisoners often end up drifting back into the same criminal circles that got them behind bars to begin with. Many times this is due to feeling like outcasts or as though they are unable to function in the normal world.
Transition programs ease them from one environment to the other, helping to support their efforts to re-learn the world. Closing centers like these is a blatant invitation to failure and expense, and it is our hope that Gov. Quinn will alter his stance on the issue.
Keep in mind the convict, Mr. Flood. In his testimony he said he had nowhere to go without the Westside transitional center. Now he is leading a productive life on the right side of the bars.
Image by *clarity*, used under it’s Creative Commons license
Category: Criminal Justice |
Tags: budget cuts, closings, Gov. Pat Quinn, llinois, rehabilitation, testimony, transitional centers
The Lens: A Panel and Discussion on Juvenile Justice
On March 22, 2012 at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center of New Orleans a very interesting panel took place.
The Lens convened a panel of five criminal and juvenile criminal justice experts from the New Orleans area to address issues surrounding the new French Quarter Curfew, LGBTQ youth issues in juvenile facilities, the rebuilding of the Youth Studies Center, and the school-to-prison pipeline. (While the discussion is focused on New Orleans, many of the topics covered are relevant to communities everywhere.)
The experts on the panel included:
- Dana Kaplan – Executive Director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (See our prior interview with her here.)
- Wes Ware – Founder & Director of BreakOUT!
- Michael Bradley – Deputy Chief District Defender
- Eden Heilman – Senior Staff Attorney at Southern Poverty Law Center
- Alison McCrary – Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow at Safe Streets/Strong Communities
Here is the full panel. Please note that the video begins after panel introduction.
Supreme Court Update: second chance for juveniles?
For those of you following the story we wrote about last week, Supreme Court to revisit life in prison for juveniles, here is a quick update via Newsy:
It is well documented fact that juveniles are biologically distinct from adults developmentally. These physiological and mental differences make it outlandish to treat them like adults when it comes to matters of crime.
While Justice Scalia may be correct in pointing out that the majority of states allow life sentencing he ignores one vital point. Just because it is, as he put it, “the will of the people” does not mean that the people have all the facts.
This is why we continue to produce works such as Born, Not Raised and It’s More Expensive to Do Nothing, to help provide both information and perspective so that we can make better decisions as a society.
Category: Born Not Raised, Criminal Justice, Humane Exposures, Juvenile Justice, Legislation, Prison Reform |
Tags: juvenile justice, life sentence, Supreme Court
Supreme Court to Revisit Life In Prison for Juveniles
Incarcerating juveniles for life is a uniquely American failing. The U.S. is the only nation that makes this blunder.
Most of the problem stems from the 1990’s when the histrionic term “super-predator” came into vogue among a certain vocal and excitable group. Randy Hertz of The Nation sums up that background nicely:
In the 1990s, a small group of academics capitalized on and galvanized a growing hysteria about violent crime by youths, speculating that an anticipated rise in the youth population, coupled with spurious theories about the exceptional deviance of children of color growing up poor, would lead to a new generation of ‘severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators…capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons.’ Fearing that the rehabilitation-focused juvenile justice system would be inadequate to protect society from this impending menace, lawmakers passed laws that circumvented juvenile court and sent kids to criminal court for prosecution as adults.
Our position on prosecuting kids as adults is abundantly clear. It is detrimental to the kids, to society, and to the financial bottom line. It exposes children to hardened criminals while still at a malleable stage of the development. The list of issues with that approach is long and varied.
Hertz continues with a vital note on the matter. You see, the expert recanted.
The same expert who coined the term ‘super-predator’ now acknowledges that it was nothing but a ghost story, a terrifying myth with disastrous consequences. In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of Miller and Jackson, this expert—and others—note that the juvenile crime rates actually dropped from 1994 to 2000. But a relative handful of children accused of serious crimes—a grossly disproportionate number of them children of color—found themselves caught permanently in the web spun by academics and politicians, sentenced to die in prison with no hope of release no matter how they might transform and reform themselves. Once we give up on these children, many prisons compound the hopelessness by failing to provide access to educational programs.
This coming week the Supreme Court will revisit the subject. The hearing will involve two different cases, both young boys who at the age of 14 committed murder. Both cases shared another characteristic – a sentence of life in prison with no potential for parole.
The outrage was immediate among advocates, who called the sentence “brutal” for failing to recognize the difference between the actions of the immature youths and the actions of an adult.
Judge Gail Garinger, State Child Advocate for Massachusetts and former juvenile court justice, weighs in on the matter (via The New York Times):
Homicide is the worst crime, but in striking down the juvenile death penalty in 2005, the Supreme Court recognized that even in the most serious murder cases, ‘juvenile offenders cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders’: they are less mature, more vulnerable to peer pressure, cannot escape from dangerous environments, and their characters are still in formation. And because they remain unformed, it is impossible to assume that they will always present an unacceptable risk to public safety.
The most disturbing part of the superpredator myth is that it presupposed that certain children were hopelessly defective, perhaps genetically so. Today, few believe that criminal genes are inherited, except in the sense that parental abuse and negative home lives can leave children with little hope and limited choices.
As a former juvenile court judge, I have seen firsthand the enormous capacity of children to change and turn themselves around. The same malleability that makes them vulnerable to peer pressure also makes them promising candidates for rehabilitation.
Let us hope the good sense behind the murder decision in 2005 has a resurgence while they contemplate the current situation. The Alabama Equal Justice Initiative is arguing on behalf of the defendants, and their assertion that life in prison for juveniles constitutes cruel and unusual punishment is one that we support.
It is not that we in any way condone the actions, the loss of human life is horrible no matter the circumstances. The simple fact is that young people and adults have a number of purely biological differences. Brain imaging studies have shown that the parts of the adolescent brain responsible for controlling thoughts, actions and emotions are not fully developed. For this reason alone it is imperative that we use appropriate standards for punishment as opposed to dealing with them like adults.
For more on this subject please check out our latest book- Born, Not Raised: Voices from juvenile Hall. It’s hot of the presses having only been released this last week!
21st Century Jim Crow
In celebration of Black History Month the ACLU is posting a variety of personal narratives on their blog. Inimai Chettiar was the author of one that should be of particular interest to our readers here: Why Mass Incarceration is the New Jim Crow.
In it she tells of being pulled over while in a car with her friend Jamal, an African-American man. Jamal refused a breathalyzer test because, she states, he felt there was no cause for arrest. Police then put him in cuffs and brought him in since declining the breathalyzer results in a mandatory arrest, incarceration, and a one year driver’s license suspension. Penalties that police are not required to notify drivers about.
It’s a sad story about one man becoming a statistic, and a story that makes it easier to understand why 1 in 3 black men in the United States have spent time behind bars.
At the arraignment, I was not surprised that every driver pulled over the night before was black or brown. A recent Department of Justice study found “an alarming racial disparity” in police treatment of motorists of color. Black Americans are twice as likely to be arrested during a traffic stop and nearly four times as likely to experience the threat or use of force. Cops regularly pull over black men for minor traffic infractions and then arrest them, while they let white drivers drive on. What made Jamal more likely to be pulled over and arrested than other Americans was his misfortune at being a Black man driving at night in a rich white suburb.
Numbers attest to the fact that African Americans make up a disproportionate percentage of our prison populations. It’s a sobering thought, but once you start to consider the extent of it’s ramifications it becomes downright frightening.
This system of racial profiling and using prison as a one-size-fits-all solution is one of the reasons Black communities are and will remain economically worse off than the rest of the America. More Black men are imprisoned by this country than were ever enslaved. It’s bad enough that the Great Recession has affected Black men more than every other demographic, but our ever expanding prison complex is further decimating the already bleak economic future of Black America.
Jamal will suffer the repercussions of this arrest for his entire life. Without a license, he had to quit his job. After employment applications asked for arrest records, his political appointment is now in danger, a job offer from state government was suspended, and several companies cancelled interviews.
All for going 13 miles over the speed limit, while sober.
This is not new news. Professor Pamela Oliver of the University of Wisconsin is one of the people behind the Wisconsin Racial Disparities Project, and her findings over the years have shown that African Americans are imprisoned at least eight times as often as Americans of European descent. Not only that, but American Indians and Hispanics are imprisoned at two to three times the rate that Caucasian Americans are.
As far back as 2005 she was unearthing disturbing data on this subject. Just take a look at this report for an example:
“The Effect of Black Male Imprisonment on Black Child Poverty.” Pamela Oliver, Gary Sandefur, Jessica Jakubowski, and James E. Yocom. Presented at the American Sociological Association August 13, 2005. We find that high Black male imprisonment contributes to high Black child poverty several years later. There are two mechanisms. The first is lower family earnings, especially in two-parent less-educated families, which is presumably due to the reduction in earnings of men with prison records. The second is more complex: high Black male imprisonment is associated with a rise over time in the proportion of Black children living with mothers who have not graduated from high school; this rise occurs despite an overall rise in Black mothers’ education and a positive association between Black male imprisonment and the proportion of children living with mothers who are married college graduates. Due to file sizes, the report and the tables are in two files. Report text as PDF file Tables as PDF file
It is, as so many of the issues facing our justice system, a chronic and long standing problem.
Image Source: Cuffs by cdogstar on Flickr, used under it’s Creative Commons license
Category: Criminal Justice |
Tags: "racial disparity", african-americans, arrests, Black History Month
Special Report: An interview with Dana Kaplan of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
Today Humane Exposures brings you a special report from New Orleans, Louisiana. Today we interviewed Dana Kaplan, the executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.
In a city with a history of poverty and violence the challenges facing those in the field of juvenile justice are massive but not, as you will see, insurmountable.
Humane Exposures- Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana: An Interview with Dana Kaplan by socialgumbo
About Executive Director Dana Kaplan
Since becoming the Executive Director in the fall of 2007, Dana Kaplan has been steadfast in her dedication to the reform of Louisiana’s juvenile justice system. Prior to joining JJPL, Dana Kaplan was a Soros Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City, focused on detention reform. At CCR, Ms. Kaplan worked with community groups and government on developing alternatives to detention and downsizing local jails in states including Tennessee, California, Ohio, New Orleans, and New York. She was also the State-wide Organizer for the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice, a partnership between CCR and two prison family organizations that successfully reduced the cost of all phone calls from New York State prisons by fifty percent. Ms. Kaplan has also been on staff at the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project, where her efforts helped stop the construction of a youth prison in upstate New York and two youth jail expansions in New York City. She has consulted with national organizations including The National Resource Center on Prisons and Communities and the National Education Association (NEA), developing a curriculum for teachers on “Education not Incarceration”. Dana holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley and was a recipient of the John Gardner Fellowship for Public Service.
About JJPL
When the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL) first opened our doors in 1997, our state was acknowledged to have one of the country’s worst systems to treat and prevent delinquency. In July of that year, the New York Times called Louisiana home to the “most troubled” juvenile public defender’s office in the country.1 That same month — after earlier reports in 1995 and 1996 by Human Rights Watch and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) — the DOJ detailed brutal and inhumane conditions in Louisiana’s juvenile prisons, bringing international shame to the system. Louisiana’s juvenile justice system provided virtually no representation for children accused of crimes and then placed them in hyper-violent prisons where they regularly suffered bodily and emotional harm. The large majority of these children were African-American.
JJPL’s mission is to transform the juvenile justice system into one that builds on the strengths of young people, families and communities to ensure children are given the greatest opportunities to grow and thrive. We have three key program objectives to achieve this mission: to reduce the number of children in secure care and abolish unconstitutional conditions of confinement by improving or, when necessary, shutting down institutions that continue to inhumanely treat children; to expand evidence-based alternatives to incarceration and detention for youth; and to build the power of those most impacted by the juvenile justice system.
JJPL litigates on behalf of youth both locally and statewide. Additionally, we educate policy makers on the need for reform, coordinate with parents, youth and other concerned citizens to ensure their visibility and participation in the process, and actively implement media strategies to hold the state accountable for the treatment of its youth. By coordinating our diverse abilities in strategic campaigns to engage policy makers and organize community members and youth, JJPL continues to work on improving the lives of Louisiana’s most vulnerable children. In the past fourteen years of our existence, we have accomplished many achievements.
