the crime report

Concern over crime against Latinos, already simmering in Baltimore as a result of several recent attacks, has reached new heights after the fatal beating over the weekend of a 51-year-old man from Honduras, the Baltimore Sun reports. Martin Reyes — whose killing early Saturday was attributed by police to a mentally troubled man who said he hated “Mexicans” — was the fifth Latino shooting or homicide victim in the area in less than two months. All the victims were Honduran. (more…)

The following is the true life story of Manos, a young inmate,who wrote this as he leaves the juvenile justice system and enters the adult system.  The letter was originally published by The Beat Within, a juvenile justice system writing workshop, which has generously allowed The Crime Report to share.

Hey Beat, What’s cracking? Today I’m going to talk and write about my long life story from beginning to end. It all started off when I was born in O’Connor Hospital in San Jose. I was born on September 23, 1992. I can’t really remember a lot of my memories from when I was a little kid, but I’ll tell you the ones I do remember.

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New Report Builds the Case for Action to Better Serve LGBT Youth in Louisiana

Louisiana is notorious for housing some of the most brutal youth prisons in the country. In recent years, it’s made great strides toward reform, as leaders introduced more therapeutic, rehabilitative models.

Even still, youth who identify as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) experience physical, sexual and psychological abuse, excessive use of lockdown and isolation, confidentiality breaches and privacy violations in Louisiana’s juvenile justice system, according to the report “Locked Up & Out.”

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Racial discrimination in jury selection is rampant across a wide swath of Southern States found the Alabama based staff of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in a new report, “ Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: A Continuing Legacy.”

They looked closely at jury selection procedures in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee and found that racially discrimatory practices continue especially in serious criminal and capital cases.

Read the report here.

Use the Crime Report for more information on racial discrimination.

Are youth making the transition from out-of-home care to independent adulthood more apt to commit crime then others? A recent DOJ study comes to the following conclusions: the link between group care and violent crime was particularly strong for African-American youth, high numbers of foster-care placements contributed to increases in both violent and nonviolent crime and foster youth were much more likely than their peers to be arrested as they made the transition to adulthood.

Read the full report here.

Use The Crime Report for more information on juvenile justice.

Way back in 1988, the federal government recognized that minority youths were more likely to be incarcerated than white youths for the same offense, and mandated that states “access and address” the issue. So how are we doing? A new, interactive data set and map from the W. Haywood Burns Institute breaks the information down by state, and further by offense, race and more. The site includes graphs on the state’s one-day incarceration count, and provides contact information for local decision makers and advocates.

Click here for the map.

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President

American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada

Nevada

siegel@unr.edu

The system is failing thousands of our most vulnerable youth. Is it time for reform?

The U.S. spends $5 billion a year on juvenile corrections, but it’s hard to argue that taxpayers are getting what they paid for.  Many criminologists already agree that the country’s criminal justice system is overdue for reform; but no area seems more in need of urgent attention than juvenile justice.

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It’s been seven years since Congress tied purse strings to the issue of disproportionate contact between non-white youths and the criminal justice system, but according to the newest bulletin on the subject, disparities are still stark. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency Prevention reports that African-American youth are still arrested at twice the rate of white youth, while white youth are seven times more likely to live in a neighborhood with an alternative detention program.

Click here to read the full report. Click here to read the accompanying manual.

Use The Crime Report for more information on Race and Sentencing, Juvenile Justice and Race and Gender in Prison.