Humane Exposures Blog

You see, October is National Youth Justice Awareness month. The purpose is to  raise awareness about youth prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system. It was started by Tracy McClard, a parent who lost her child to suicide while he was incarcerated in an adult facility in Missouri.

McClard started campaign in 2008 with a 5k run/walk fundraiser dedicated to Jonathan, her son who hanged himself three days after his 17th birthday rather than face three decades in an adult prison.

Her assertion is that Jonathan would still be alive today if he had been put into the Missouri Dual Jurisdiction Program. This residential-style program  provides both counseling and educational services to juvenile inmates in a setting that provides additional support by being open to family visits. These are all characteristics that the adult facilities lack.

On the good side the preponderance of data that has come to light in these past few years supports her assertions. Public awareness both of the plight of those lost in the system and the financial savings of embracing more effective programs is starting to make a difference.

According to Maggie Lee over at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange:

[Liz] Ryan [president and CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice] is optimistic that both Democratic- and Republican-led states, despite tight budgets, will continue reforms. ‘Recidivism research is having an effect,’ she said, pointing to studies that say putting children through adult courts reduces reoffending. Both blue and red states are beginning to channel more youth away from adult incarceration.

In December, McClard and other activists and some state legislators will re-file a bill that proposes to remove barriers to the Dual Jurisdiction program.

McClard said that since her first run, ‘things are changing, people are becoming more aware … Conversations are starting, people are changing.’

‘The way we’re doing it now is so wrong and so horrendous we cannot keep doing it,’ she said. Kids are ‘so amenable to rehabilitation if you give them what they need.’

The entire month of October is dedicated to awareness of these issues. If you want to get involved or start an associated event in your area, go take a look at the Campaign for Youth Justice website, where a large array of resources is available including an event-planning toolkit, a film-screening budget sheet, and more.

If you do get an event going and are considering screening a film I’d like to close by suggesting our own documentary, It’s More Expensive to Do Nothing. You will never forget the view inside the penal system that it provides.

Greetings readers! I am very happy to announce that we have now carved out a foothold on Flickr, one of the oldest photo-sharing platforms online.

Not only will we be sharing photos of our own, but you will see some of Susan Madden Lankford’s images from our trilogy of books, and you will also get to share your own.

Today we are launching two new photo communities:

• Prison Photography
• Faces of the Homeless in the US

Image by JillK1 on Flickr

The ranks of the homeless in New York City are swelling, and with them the number of homeless children. Life on the streets of the Big Apple is tough enough to drive adults to despair; how much more so a child?

Sometimes life in a homeless shelter is more than a 14-year-old can handle.

Francheska Luciano, who is among a growing number of homeless children in the city, said living in a shelter was “like living in hell.”

“I’m tired of this,” she said Friday while sitting on a curb outside a shelter intake center in the Bronx with her mother and little sisters. “It’s a nightmare every day.”

Those are the lead paragraphs in the recent The New York Daily News coverage of the staggering rise in homeless numbers. The reason they start off their reporting that way is because the most unsettling number their research unearthed was just how many kids sleep in shelters or with no roof at all.

The number of children in the city’s shelters hit 19,000 last week, the most recent city data available show.

‘Not since the grim days of the Great Depression has New York City had 20,000 children sleeping homeless each night,’ said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless.

This news follows the well-publicized statement last August by Mayor Bloomberg who opined that New York City shelters offer a “much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.” The implication that people are subject to overcrowding because they do not want to leave the shelter system is hard to avoid – specially in contrast to stories like the recent New York Times profile on a nine-year-old girl living in a Manhattan homeless shelter.

No matter how you parse it, the bottom line is that almost 20,000 children are experiencing their early lives on the streets of the city.

How humane is it to continue to accept and enable homelessness in America – especially when the homeless in question are children.