Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

A high school junior steps out from his silver BMW not far from his school’s track and field on Albuquerque’s working-class west side. Andrew Burson, 16, is there because another kid, Marcos Trejo, 14, stole something from him — a ghost gun, witnesses told police. So he pins Trejo against a fence and demands he give it back.

Most of the 50 states have clearly designated which agencies are in charge of hiring teachers for incarcerated juveniles, creating teaching curriculum and other education services. But how and by whom that instruction gets delivered varies substantially from state to state and locale to locale, resulting in a fragmented system that generally provides inferior instruction, according to a recent report from Bellwether Education Partners.

Is pleased to announce various openings at their facility. These positions are located in Douglas County, Nevada. Visit http://chinaspringyouthcamp.com/ to learn more about the Camp. Available positions include:. ■ Youth Program Officer. ■ May be filled as Youth Program Officer Trainee, Youth Program Officer I, or Youth Program Officer II...

We know people who were in the school that day. We have lived with the horror. We have witnessed the untold grief and sorrow of the relatives and friends whose loved ones were victims of that shooting. We decry the paralysis of state and federal legislators to prevent such awful...

David Harrington spent a tense eight months in a Philadelphia jail when he was a teenager — the result of a robbery charge in 2014 that automatically sent his case to the adult court system under state law. Only 16 at the time, he said he got into fights...

“That’s great news!” I responded to Quantae Priest, 26, who’d called out to me on the rec field of our high-security prison. But his news wasn’t entirely good. I could tell from his face. We started to walk laps around the perimeter of the basketball and handball courts of Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, S.C.

After running toward the sound of a gunshot that still haunts her, Marentha Sargent watched her 14-year-old, Adrienne Lambert, bleeding from the chest as she collapsed. Moments earlier, the 14-year-old son of Gene Roessler, Sargent’s friend, had ejected the magazine from Roessler’s gun, pointed its barrel at Adrienne and pulled the trigger. The boy didn’t realize, according to police records, there was a bullet in the chamber of his father’s handgun, which he’d grabbed from the kitchen table of their suburban Houston home while the adults were in the garage watching football on TV.

Unspent American Rescue Plan funds to lower the number of students who wind up in the juvenile justice system. The impact of racial disparities resulting from handling children through the adult criminal justice system. Innovative law school partnerships to aid youth simultaneously in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. How children without lawyers fare in immigration proceedings.

In a letter to the Durham County Commission in North Carolina, prison journalist Lyle C. May, who is incarcerated in Raleigh, N.C., opposed its unanimous vote to spend $30 million on a new juvenile jail. Its 10 signers, including May, were under 18 years old when they went into the juvenile justice system.

Certainly, it’s essential to make a harmed individual feel as restored as possible, but this approach is does not result in true justice. Developed in culturally, ethnically and racially homogenous communities such as Nepal, restorative justice has achieved some success in those settings. However, in the comparatively heterogenous United States, where Black and brown people disproportionately are on the socio-economic margins and disparately treated in the criminal justice system, restorative justice is inadequate. It holds criminally charged individuals accountable, but does not hold accountable the systems and institutions that have failed many of them. For example, when a young Black man in largely impoverished West Philadelphia steals a bike from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, also located in West Philly, restorative justice requires that the young person talk face-to-face with the professor, apologize and pay for the stolen item. This race- and class-blind model does little to address factors that often fuel crime.

Having created several teen courts in Kentucky, I know that such programs doubled as a pre-law apprenticeship for high school students, while also aiming to divert juvenile offenders from incarceration. Judges who preside over juvenile courts often have acknowledged that what happens in those proceedings amounts to a stern lecture...

Between January 1, 2022, and April 25, 2022, Little Rock, Ark. — the 24th most violent of 65 cities, according to the FBI’s most recent data — counted 24 homicides. That compared to 21 homicides during the same period in 2021, according to the Little Rock Police Department’s most recent count. A disproportionate number of those murders involved guns, continuing a trend.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Several civil rights groups are suing South Carolina over conditions at its juvenile lockups, alleging that children in state custody are subject to violence and isolation while deprived of educational or rehabilitative programs. The lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday comes less than two weeks...

About 25% of rural youth in a University of Washington analysis said they were as young as 12 when they began carrying handguns and 20% of the roughly 2,000 rural youth and young adults studied carried a handgun at least 40 times during the last 12 months that they self-reported that activity, according to research published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice announced Thursday that it will reform its beleaguered central prison for youths under a settlement agreement with the federal government. The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice follows a 2020 report from the federal agency that ordered...

ATLANTA — On April 12, Georgia became the 22nd state allowing unlicensed gun-owners to carry a concealed weapon, one in a spate of so-called constitutional carry laws that have supporters and detractors, with the International Association of Police Chiefs among opponents. Nevertheless, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, touted his state’s...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Shortly after Riley Briones Jr. arrived in federal prison, he cut his long, braided hair in a symbolic death of his old self. As a leader of a violent gang and just shy of 18, Briones drove the getaway car in a robbery turned deadly on the Salt River-Pima Maricopa Indian Community outside Phoenix in 1994. He was convicted of murder and given a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

Even as drug use has declined among teenagers during the pandemic, overdose deaths increased, likely due to the highly potent opioid fentanyl, according to a new study. Overdose deaths among teenagers 14-18 held steady for years before doubling in 2020 as the pandemic set in, and they continued to climb last year. A total of 1,146 adolescents in this age group died in 2021 — 20% over 954 deaths in 2020. There were 492 such deaths in 2019.

Within months of his release from a lifetime imprisonment sentence in Louisiana’s 18,000-acre prison in Angola, La., Andrew Hundley, then 34, enrolled in junior college and founded the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and reentry for former juvenile lifers. Under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Hundley, who’d been sentenced in 1997, when he was 15, was released after serving 19 years at Angola.

Incarceration is harmful not only to people held in confinement but to the health of their children who may experience post-traumatic stress from witnessing a parent’s arrest or visiting a parent who is incarcerated. Additionally, financial instability can arise after a parent who is incarcerated can no longer bring home a paycheck. Those and other effects, including ones that can limit a family’s economic mobility for generations, heavily harm children with incarcerated parents.