A recent story broadcast on Omaha television highlighting the heartbreaking death of a juvenile justice system-involved 15-year-old illustrates the complexities of the reform needed within system.

Everette Williams, a high-school freshman, was one of 3,000 active juvenile cases in Douglas County, NE, when he was shot at a bus stop while wearing an ankle bracelet. In its story, the Omaha television station, WOWT, featured two voices: Don Kleine, the chief law enforcement officer in Douglas County, and an adult who was incarcerated as a minor.

Kleine said the opportunity to turn someone in the right direction at an early age is key: "We have had some homicides recently that were committed by 14, 15, 16, 17 year-olds, that maybe had a history in juvenile court and obviously they didn't get what they needed."

The article continued with a personal success story from the adult, who as a minor was placed in secure confinement for nine months for stealing a car stereo. He is now “a father of two with a great job” the reporter touted. While intriguing, this success story is the exception rather than the rule. Highlighting secure detention as a way to successfully address juvenile delinquency is a misguided and dangerous notion. Instead, the policies and practices of justice must be driven by data that demonstrates what is effective.

The facts show that the use of secure detention for non-violent juvenile offenders is overwhelmingly harmful. Detention often hampers a youth’s developmental process and propels them in a negative life direction, as shown by recidivism rates of 50 percent to 80 percent for youth who have been incarcerated, according to a 2008 report published by the Annie E Casey Foundation.

A recent article in Youth Today cites a Canadian study that joins a host of research showing that both here and abroad juvenile justice systems are more likely to increase delinquency than cure it, especially when youth are incarcerated. The study showed that the more restrictive and intense intervention, the greater its negative impact. In fact, youth placed in a juvenile correctional institution were 38 times more likely to have adult criminal records.

Community-run diversion and alternative to detention programs garner the results our communities need. San Francisco’s Detention Diversion Advocacy Program has resulted in half the recidivism rate of juveniles referred to detention or funneled elsewhere through the juvenile justice system.

Programs like BronxConnect a faith-based, community-based alternative-to-incarceration program focuses around mentoring services for Bronx court-involved youth to prevent recidivism and address youth-initiated goals in areas such as education and employment. Since partnering with the courts in 2000, BronxConnect has achieved a better than 75 percent success in rate in keeping court-involved youth from returning to the system.

Outcomes like these provide tangible examples of what is possible and what young people from all backgrounds deserve. If the overall aim of the juvenile justice system is to effectively increase public safety and rehabilitate troubled youth, then the use of cost-effective community-based alternatives must begin to trump the use of secure detention.

Yesterday’s protests should send the message that students, parents, teachers and other education staff are fed up with higher tuition for fewer services. Instead, news coverage has focused heavily on the havoc created by those who broke from the larger protests yesterday across California.

The 150 people in the Bay Area who walked onto the 1-880 Freeway were consequently arrested and taken to jail. Ten of the arrested protestors were youth. This ploy to gain media attention was certainly successful. By now, we have all seen the screenshots of protestors face down on 880, but what has been lost in the coverage is the reason for it all. It is a huge statement when youth decide that potentially being arrested or injured by a car is a small price to pay for a better future. This statement is lost however, when reports of broken windows and stopped traffic are deemed the only news fit to print.

Here’s some news. In California it costs $604,552 per day to incarcerate the nearly 9,000 juveniles the state holds in residential placement. That is approximately $24,641 per year to incarcerate one youth. By contrast, it is a mere $3,048 to send one student to a CSU university to school for the year. The figures speak for themselves about our priorities. But what price are Californians paying for this practice?

“It just really sends a clear message that in 10 years they expect us to be in one of those correctional facilities that they keep pumping money into – the money taken from our school system,” says Rosa Baltodano, program coordinator at the Center for Young Women’s Development in San Francisco.

The correlation between the lack of educational opportunities and imprisonment is direct, according to a report by Northeastern University. The study found that 18-to-24-year-old male high school dropouts had an incarceration rate 31 times that of males who graduated from a four-year college." If you're a young black male with no high school diploma, you are 60 times more likely to end up behind bars than your classmates who earned a bachelor's degree.

Budget cuts are affecting us all – even staff at the California Department of Corrections. An email to Paul Verke, media liason at the Department of Corrections, sent by this blogger prompted an automated out-of-office reply, “I will be out of the office…due to the State-mandated furlough program.”

Those who work to prevent youth from entering the juvenile justice system know that alternative to detention programs could address concerns about public safety that arise when speaking of cuts in prison spending. We know that alternatives for youth who are deemed low and medium-risk are more cost-effective than incarceration, reduce recidivism, and encourage rehabilitation.

By contrast, cuts to education cost more in the long run. It is clear where the funding for education should be shifted from in California: prison spending. Our kids deserve to be in school, not in jail and not in the streets. It is shameful that they even have to protest for the right to affordable and quality education.

We cannot control the media, but we can control our state representatives. Write letters and petition the state congress. It’s not enough to flood the streets and have the intended message lost in the media’s translation. Remind California’s government that we don’t work for them, they work for us.

Lauren Jones is a Communications Intern for the BI/CJNY and a senior at San Francisco State University, studying Journalism.

A recent incident in San Francisco, coupled with other cases across the country of students being arrested in schools, demonstrate a serious lapse in our juvenile justice system and the way that we overreact to youth misbehavior.

In this particular situation, a 13-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of punching a classmate and stealing 46 cents during an after-school program. For this act, the boy was charged with felony robbery, extortion and assault – and faces deportation plus a bench warrant that will be issued if he fails to attend a March 8 hearing in San Francisco that is 3 days after he and his mother are deported back to Australia.

The news coverage has highlighted the issues of immigration, deportation and the negative impacts that those policies can have on families. It has focused primarily on a politically charged aspect of the incident, the deportation of the undocumented boy and his mother to Australia as a result of his felony charge. At issue in most local coverage is San Francisco’s much debated sanctuary policy, and “whether officials should shield undocumented youths from deportation when they are suspected of a felony crime.”

However, what is missing is one of the most alarming aspects of this particular incident – the charges leveled against the boy. The charges reported are completely unjust given the alleged act, and illustrate the widespread issue in juvenile justice of ramped up charges against young people whose behavior is typical of adolescents their age. In New York recently, a 12-year-old Latino girl was arrested for doodling on her desk. In Florida, an 11-year-old girl was arrested at her school for a scuffle at a bus stop with a classmate three days prior.

According to media reports in San Francisco, the parents of the sixth grader who the 13-year-old boy had bullied had filed a police report. The 13-year-old was arrested after he and his parents spoke to the police officer.

“I think my son was in shock, as I was, “ his stepfather, Charles Washington said in a press conference. “What he actually did, and what the actual charges are, they are universes apart. Back when I was in school, at worst, a bully was sent home for the day, creating problems for them at home, when they explain to their parents why they’ve been sent home.”

It is shocking and puzzling that such charges would be leveled against a 13-year-old boy who allegedly took 46 cents from another boy after punching him - essentially acting as a bully. Why would a rational adult level such serious charges at a boy who was in a schoolyard fight?  What happened to conflict resolution?

The boy’s stepfather said his stepson was held for a week at Juvenile Hall. “We did not understand why this was happening,” Washington, who is a bus driver, said at the press conference. “Kids on my bus get on and do way worse things than he actually did, and the police usually make their presence known, but there is no worry about going to Juvenile Hall.”

Is anyone in the public protected by charging this youth with such felonies? To me this is yet another example of our broken justice system and of prosecutors abusing their power by targeting youth.

In this case and many others across the country, no one is held accountable for their pivotal role in changing the outcome of a youth’s childhood.

W. Haywood Burns Institute

WEEK OF ACTION TO PROTECT YOUTH March 1-5, 2010

Every day across the nation, youth are detained in juvenile facilities for shoplifting, running away, getting in a brawl at school, or other minor offenses. Two-thirds of youth in juvenile detention are youth of color, even though they make-up only one-third of the nation's population. That is because youth of color continue to receive more severe sentences than White youths, even when they have comparable offense charges and histories.

Tell Congress to protect juveniles and address disparities.

Thirty-six years ago, the federal government signed into law an act that provides federal standards to protect juveniles coming into contact with the juvenile justice system. Today, the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act (JJDPA) is overdue for reauthorization.

JJDPA includes four core protections for youth in the juvenile justice system:

· Keep runaways, truants and other "status offenders" out of secure facilities;

· Prevent youth from being placed in adult jails (with limited exceptions);

· Ensure that youth in adult jails are separated by sight and sound from adult offenders;

· Require states to address the disproportionate contact of youth of color with the system.

We must urge Congress to act.

Now is the time for Americans to take on the responsibility of getting troubled and vulnerable youths back on track. It is time to push our government to encourage a fairer, safer and more effective juvenile justice system. Tell Congress to renew their commitment by preserving and advancing juvenile justice system reforms and effective delinquency prevention efforts by reauthorizing the JJDPA. The Senate Judiciary Committee has passed S. 678. But there has been no bill introduced in the House.

You can make a difference.

1) If you have only 30 seconds...

Sign a petition calling for action on the JJDPA: In the House and In the Senate

2) If you can spare a few minutes...

Email, send or fax a letter urging the House of Representatives and the Senate to reauthorize the JJDPA.

3) If you can give even more of your time...

Thank you for helping to protect youth across our nation.

Sincerely,

The Burns Institute in partnership with the Act4JJ Campaign (www.act4jj.org)

By Sarah Covert

On a daily basis, youth call our hotline at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL) to talk about the horrors they face in prisons across the state. In the past six months, we’ve received reports of youth who were jumped by other youth, resulting in broken jaws and knocked-out teeth, as well as of guards employing excessive use of force. 

It isn’t often that we are heartened by the moves of our statewide justice system. But, last week the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) announced that a center for the developmentally disabled would be converted in 2011 to a moderate-security juvenile facility. It is the first time that the state of Louisiana is looking to design small therapeutic facilities that are home-like and lack razor wire and cells, a rarity in Missouri.

OJJ should get the credit that they deserve for moving toward the building of this first moderate-security facility and taking one critical step toward the expectations set forth in a 2003 law, Act 1225, which demanded Louisiana’s system be modeled after Missouri’s. That state’s successful juvenile justice system includes residential facilities and fully-funded community-based alternative programs that allow for treatment of delinquent youth in their homes.

We know that new facilities such as the one proposed by the state cannot come in addition to the large, correctional style facilities where youth are currently housed and often face inhumane conditions. They also cannot come at the expense of community-based alternatives to incarceration, which research demonstrates would more effectively serve a significant proportion of the youth currently in the state’s care.

Written by Danny Weil Education Feb 20, 2010

The Daily Censored

The war on youth and the horror of zero-tolerance policies in schools: No Child Left Behind without handcuffs?

CNN) — There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 ” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker. Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct. Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates. “They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa recalled. “I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person.”

Alexa is no longer facing suspension, according a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education. Still, the case of the doodling preteen is raising concerns about the use of zero tolerance policies in schools. I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person. –Alexa Gonzalez Critics say schools and police have gone too far, overreacting and using well-intended rules for incidents involving nonviolent offenses such as drawing on desks, writing on other school property or talking back to teachers. “We are arresting them at younger and younger ages [in cases] that used to be covered with a trip to the principal’s office, not sending children to jail,” said Emma Jordan-Simpson, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund, a national children’s advocacy group.

There aren’t any national studies documenting how often minors become involved with police for nonviolent crimes in schools. Tracking the incidents depends on how individual schools keep records. Much of the information remains private, since it involves juveniles. But one thing is sure: Alexa’s case isn’t the first in the New York area. One of the first cases to gain national notoriety was that of Chelsea Fraser. In 2007, the 13-year-old wrote “Okay” on her desk, and police handcuffed and arrested her. She was one of several students arrested in the class that day; the others were accused of plastering the walls with stickers. At schools across the country, police are being asked to step in.