A Police Cell is no Place for a Sick Youngster

When an adolescent is seriously ill and desperately needs help, a police key turning in a cell door lock is the last thing they should hear. A night surrounded by criminals and drunks banging on the walls is hardly a helpful environment for any sick person, but for young people with severe mental health problems it can be catastrophic. Despite this, each year hundreds of teenagers find themselves not in hospital beds but banged up.

Police cells are for those suspected of doing wrong, not those whose bodies have somehow gone wrong. But now a dispiriting Health Select Committee report about child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in England has highlighted horribly high levels of detention. The report finds a litany of failings that go far beyond the placement of sick youngsters in custody. Most damning is the number of times police end up looking after someone who really needs a doctor. This is the worst symptom of a system in very poor health indeed.

View the CAMHS Report

Just Kids

When Stacey Torrance was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in a Philadelphia courtroom in 1988, the sentence seemed somewhat unusual. First of all, life in prison is typically reserved for perpetrators of violent crime. And while someone had been killed during the chain of events that landed Torrance in front of a judge, Torrance hadn’t planned or participated in the killing. Torrance had agreed to lure Alexander Porter, the brother of a friend, to an older acquaintance who planned to steal Porter’s keys and then burgle the home of Porter’s father. But instead of simply stealing Porter’s keys, the older acquaintance, along with an accomplice Torrance had never met, tied him up and threw him into the trunk of their car. Torrance, too, was tied up–something he had not agreed to. Torrance was then taken to his mother’s home and released. Porter was driven away and eventually killed by Torrance’s older acquaintances, who were later tried for first-degree murder and eventually sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

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Mississippi County Jails Kids For School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness, DOJ Alleges

In Meridian, Miss., it is school officials – not police – who determine who should be arrested. Schools seeking to discipline students call the police, and police policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency, according to a Department of Justice lawsuit. The result is a perverse system that funnels children as young as ten who merely misbehave in class into juvenile detention centers without basic constitutional procedures. The lawsuit, which follows unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with the county, challenges the constitutionality of punishing children “so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience” and alleging that the city’s police department acts as a de facto “taxi service” in shuttling students from school to juvenile detention centers. Colorlines explains:

Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations.

To illustrate how this system works, Colorlines provides the example of Cedrico Green. When he was in eighth grade, he was put on probation for getting in a fight. After that one incident, every subsequent offense was deemed a probation violation — from wearing the wrong color socks, to talking back to a teacher – and the consequence was a return to juvenile detention. He couldn’t even remember how many times he had been back in detention, but guessed 30 times – time when he wasn’t in school, fell behind in his schoolwork and subsequently failed several classes, even though he said he liked school.

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Juvenile Detention Reform in New York City: Measuring Risk Through Research

Executive Summary

The January 2006 closure of New York City’s only alternative to juvenile detention brought the city close to a crisis: family court lost its only alternative pretrial supervision option and the population in local detention facilities was at its highest in three years. This situation also presented an opportunity for the city’s juvenile justice system to take stock of how and when it was using detention—equivalent to jail in the adult context—for youth facing
delinquency charges. The Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator in conjunction with a variety of agencies and entities involved with the juvenile justice system seized this occasion to explore new methods for responding to young people awaiting sentencing that would be more effective at producing positive outcomes for youth and enhancing public safety.

They embarked upon a two-phase reform process, with assistance from the Vera Institute of Justice. First, they conducted a research study and designed an empirically based risk-assessment instrument (RAI) measuring the likelihood that a youth would fail to appear in court or be rearrested during the pendency of his/her case. The tool would be used to help inform family court judges’ decisions about pretrial detention for juveniles. Second,
the group planned a variety of community-based alternatives to detention (ATDs) for young people who did not require secure confinement and could be supervised and better served in their own communities.

This report examines the development of both the RAI and the alternatives to detention and presents preliminary outcomes of the reforms. In examining city data, researchers found that certain pretrial factors, such as an open warrant for a previous delinquency
case or a previous arrest, significantly correlated with failure to appear in court or rearrest. However, other notable factors, such as charge type and charge severity, were found to not correlate with failure to appear in court and rearrest. Both types of findings informed the RAI’s composition.

Information from the Juvenile Justice Research Database—the database used to monitor and assess the RAI and ATD programs, once implemented—suggests that the reform effort is contributing to positive outcomes for youth and communities by a variety of measures.

> Family court judges frequently refer youth who score mid-risk on the RAI to ATD programs, reserving pretrial detention for youth who present the highest risk of failure to appear in court and/or rearrest.

> Detention use at arraignment (first court appearance) has dropped from 32 percent to 24 percent since citywide adoption of the RAI and ATDs—a 25 percent decrease. Far fewer low-risk youth (from 24 percent of a 2006 study sample to 9 percent in a post-implementation 2008 sample) are going into detention.

> Overall, there has been a 30 percent reduction in the rate of rearrest for youth during the time their cases are pending, from 26 percent to 18 percent, between 2006 and 2008.

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This report is from the Vera Institute of Justice. Tom

Shocking Report Reveals Epidemic of Sexual Abuse in Juvenile Prisons

More than one out of every ten child prisoners in state custody is molested or raped, according to a new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.



An unprecedented report released last month by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has revealed some disturbing statistics about sexual abuse in U.S. juvenile detention facilities. Twelve percent of youth held in such facilities say that they have been sexually abused over the course of one year. Or, to put it another way, more than 1 in 10 of young people under state supervision are molested and/or raped. Nearly all of these incidents involve a staff member (about 85%), while the rest involve another incarcerated youth.

According to the study, male prisoners were more likely than females to report sexual activity with facility staff, but less likely than females to report forced sexual activity with other youth. Surprisingly, a whopping 95 percent of all youth reporting staff sexual misconduct said they had been victimized by female staff members. In the most troubling facilities, between 20 and 30 percent of incarcerated youth reported abuse.

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Jailing juveniles

Sensible fixes to youth crime and delinquency policies

Monday, December 14, 2009

THE SENATE Judiciary Committee should embrace a bill scheduled for debate on Thursday that institutes needed reforms in how the nation deals with youth who run afoul of the law.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act does not impose federal strictures on state and local entities, but it provides funds for those that choose to comply with the legislation's guidelines. In this way, the Justice Department, which administers the act, can provide incentives to states to comply with what it considers best practices.

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This is an editorial from today's Washington Post. Tom

Civil cases against judges involve emotional suffering

By William Ecenbarger

For The Inquirer

MARK MORAN / Citizens' Voice

Former Judges Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. (front, from left), who face trial on criminal charges in the "kids-for-cash" kickback scheme, also are defendants in civil suits.

WILKES-BARRE - There's the 16-year-old boy charged with driving without a license and presenting false identification to police in 2007. He was jailed for eight months, and during that time the court garnisheed a $598 Social Security survivor's check he had been receiving since his father's death.

There's the 14-year-old boy who stole loose change from unlocked cars and was sent away in 2007 for a year; when he was released, he was so anxious and depressed he had to drop out of school and now receives homebound instruction.

There's the 14-year-old girl who was jailed for more than a year in 2005 for punching another girl in school; she was emotionally distraught by the incarceration and today has permanent scars from self-mutilation.

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Supreme Court of Pa vacates 6500 juvenile convictions.

by shmuelman

Thu Oct 29, 2009 at 10:04:17 PM PD

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled late Thursday that almost all juvenile delinquency cases heard by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella from Jan. 1, 2003 to May 31, 2008 must be thrown out.
Ciavarella took millions in kickbacks to incarcerate juvenile offenders in private detention facilities.

This is an excellent link about this story, one of the most egregious abuses of judicial power (outside of appointing Bush President) in the history of the United States.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/...

Ciavarella and Michael Conahan ,who was serving as president judge of the Luzerne County Common Pleas Court, a position that allowed him to control the county-court budget, entered a plea deal that would have them serve 7 year sentences. The federal judge presiding over the case, 83-year-old Edwin M. Kosik, last month rejected the plea agreements Ciavarella and Conahan had signed in exchange for their admissions of guilt.

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Promising Models for Reforming Juvenile Justice Systems

Marian Wright Edelman

Nationally, one in three Black boys and one in six Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of going to prison during their lifetimes. Although boys are more than five times as likely to be incarcerated as girls, the number of girls in the juvenile justice system is significant and growing. This shamefully high incarceration rate of Black youths is endangering our children at younger and younger ages and poses a huge threat to our nation's future. America's cradle to prison pipeline is putting thousands of young people on a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment, and often premature death. The Children's Defense Fund's Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Crusade is committed to dismantling the pipeline, however long it takes. First, we must prevent children from entering the pipeline. Then we must help children already trapped in the pipeline find a way out rather than locking them into a lifelong spiral of arrest and incarceration.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/promising-models-for-refo_b_279204.html

September 7th marks the 35th anniversary of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), bipartisan legislation based on a broad consensus that youths and families involved with the juvenile and criminal courts should be protected by federal standards for care and custody while ensuring community safety is upheld. The JJDPA has significantly contributed to reductions in juvenile crime and delinquency. Reauthorizing this important legislation this year will help to protect children from the dangers of adult jails, improve safety for children in custody, and increase fairness by requiring states to take steps to reduce racial and ethnic disparities. As Congress gears up for reauthorization, this is a good time to look at several promising approaches across the country that are changing the juvenile justice paradigm from punishment and incarceration as a first resort to prevention, early intervention and rehabilitation that put children onto a path to productive adulthood.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/promising-models-for-refo_b_279204.html

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PA Judges Got Cash to Lock Up Teens, Revealed a Broken Justice System

By Donald Cohen, AlterNet. Posted March 6, 2009.

The structure of private detention and prison contracting creates incentives and behaviors that poison our system of criminal justice.

Last month, two Pennsylvania judges pled guilty to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately-operated detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the firms and the other judge kept the centers filled by sentencing over 5,000 teens, many for first-time offenses, since the scheme started in 2003.

One high school student was sentenced to three months for mocking her assistant principal on a spoof MySpace page. She was handcuffed and taken away as her parents watched. "I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare," said the 17-year old.

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