The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/juvenile-justice/page/2/)
On any given day, dozens of children ages 14-17 are housed in adult jails in counties across Pennsylvania while facing charges in adult court, thanks to a tough-on-crime law passed in 1995.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has been in office less than a month, but some of his appointments suggest a surprising willingness to consider major changes in the state’s justice system.
Kalief Browder was 16 years old when he was arrested in 2010 and accused of stealing a backpack. He was detained for three years without being tried or convicted of a crime and in 2015, at age 22, he hanged himself at his parents’ home. The agreed-upon settlement is for $3.3 million.
Three years after the Supreme Court gave inmates sentenced to life without parole as juveniles a chance at freedom, the justice system is gaining speed in revisiting scores of cases. About 400 such offenders have been released, but most remain behind bars as prosecutors and judges wrestle with difficult cases.
Increasing family and community engagement with probation authorities, and addressing the system’s racial disparities are critical to keeping young people from becoming repeat offenders, according to an Urban Institute study of reforms in Ohio and Washington State.
Pennsylvania’s Commission on Sentencing is weighing whether to use an offender’s age in determining the likelihood of committing a new crime, for a risk assessment tool due this summer. That flies in the face of recent juvenile justice reforms, such as Supreme Court rulings accepting that adolescents have diminished responsibility, warns a Pennsylvania attorney.
Tools used by courts to judge whether an individual will re-offend rarely address the specific interaction of race and criminogenic risk, writes a University of Cincinnati researcher. She found that young African Americans have been especially shortchanged.
Thomas Arrowhead, now 38, was found guilty of a sodomy charge when he was 12 years old. But because he committed the offense before a 2014 Oregon law that allowed judges discretion in requiring juveniles to register as sex offenders, he will likely have to live with the label for the rest of his life.
Justice reformers focus on preventing schools from employing disciplinary approaches that send troubled youths into the justice system. But a Washington State inmate argues that for many young black males, the so-called school-to-prison pipeline begins a lot earlier.
Of the more than 2,600 juvenile lifers serving time in 2016, following a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings limiting life-without-parole sentences, only about 400 have been freed. The court gave states leeway to decide how to review sentences, leading to inconsistencies.