The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/juvenile-justice/)
The arrests were made after officials released security videos that showed the teens running undetected through the empty hallways of the facility and escaping through the front door. Three employees of the privately managed center were fired.
Since the Columbine High School attack two decades ago, at least 33 underage shooters have killed someone on a K-12 campus. Do they deserve to be imprisoned with no chance of release?
North Dakota, Colorado, and Idaho are the newest states accepted into the “Restoring Promise” program piloted by the Vera Institute of Justice. The program is modeled on incarceration strategies used in Europe that provide less rigid environments for young offenders.
Children were sent to isolation after refusing to do classwork, for swearing, for spilling milk, for throwing Legos. School employees use isolated timeout out of frustration or as punishment, sometimes referring to it as “serving time,” find Pro Publica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune.
Texans shunted to adult prison for minor offenses committed when they were teens share vivid stories of their experiences, in a report by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. The state is one of just four that still commit youths as young as 17 to the adult justice system.
Mississippi criminal justice data covering the past 25 years show that laws granting discretion to judges and prosecutors over when to charge children as adults end up treating black children far more harshly.
The New York Police Department maintained a database containing the fingerprints of thousands of children charged as juvenile delinquents, a violation of state law that went on for years and that NYPD had previously denied.
Caren Harp, head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection, says the government hopes to “roll back” the bureaucratic requirements that have led to states dropping out of a program aimed at ensuring core protections for youths in custody.
Twenty-five years ago, Georgia created one of the most punitive juvenile justice systems in the nation. The end product, a newspaper found, is a system “at once too lenient and too harsh,” barely holding many youths accountable but then confining them in brutal, chaotic juvenile prisons that end up turning them into worse criminals.
When the juvenile justice system is used as a stand-in for school discipline, the consequences can be dire, writes a former Pennsylvania District Attorney.