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juvenile justice
Stop Locking Up Children, Americans Say
'The things we’re doing aren’t just wrong because we’re doing them to kids, they’re wrong because we’re doing them to humans'
Mar 03, 2016
Americans "overwhelmingly support" shuttering all of the country's juvenile prisons and replacing them with community-based rehabilitation and prevention programs, according to a poll announced Thursday by Youth First, a new campaign to close youth prisons nationwide.
"We believe that youth prison model should be abandoned and replaced with more humane and less costly alternatives to incarceration," Liz Ryan, president of Youth First, said during a Thursday press conference.
Among other proposals to reform the system, 83 percent of poll respondents agreed with Youth First's argument that states should invest in alternatives to incarceration. A whopping 89 percent agreed with the group's proposal to design new forms of treatment that include family members. The support held across party lines: 79 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans, and 81 percent of independents agreed with the group's suggestions for reform.
Youth First argues that the current system "isn't safe, isn't fair, and doesn't work" and advocates for a new model of treatment for youth convicted of crimes, including involving the family in a treatment plan that emphasizes rehabilitation and prevention. The group also argues for closing incarceration facilities and using the savings to fund new community-based programs.
Support for Youth First's reform proposals was robust even among those who have been victims of crime and those who have family members who have been victims, the poll found. Crime victims do not support the "tough on crime" rhetoric and punishment-based programs that were touted by U.S. politicians in recent decades, which were responsible for the corresponding dramatic rise in juvenile incarceration rates, the group said.
Da'Quon Beaver, an advocate with youth prison reform groups Just Children and RISE for Youth in Richmond, Virginia, described his own experience as an incarcerated child during Thursday's press conference. He was tried as an adult at age 14 and sentenced to 48 years--which meant he spent his most formative years in multiple maximum security juvenile prisons, he said.
"My experience at these prisons--they are prisons, it doesn't matter what softer names they give them," Beaver said, "anything you can imagine happening at adult prisons is happening at these juvenile prisons."
Beaver described mentally ill children being placed in isolation units instead of treatment, legally-mandated school hours being called off for days at a time because of "lack of security staff," and kids doing nothing for 12 hours a day but sitting in a tiny windowless room watching "a box TV with about four channels." This is not to mention the violence, the ever-present threats of sexual assault, and the prevalent use of chemical and physical restraints by correctional officers in youth detention centers, also cited by Youth First in its reform initiative.
Youth First also announced the release of an online mapping tool that allows visitors to explore the racial disparities of youth incarceration--children of color are incarcerated at far higher rates than white children charged with the same crime, the data showed. Its mapping tool also brings to light the surprising number of enormous detention centers built for children in the 19th century that are still in use today.
The group said a bipartisan coalition of governors from Connecticut, Illinois, and Virginia has also recently committed to closing some of the old, outdated facilities in their states.
Beaver attested that the "things we're doing aren't just wrong because we're doing them to kids, they're wrong because we're doing them to humans."
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How The Assault at Spring Valley High Brutally Demonstrates the 'School-to-Prison Pipeline'
The assault at Spring Valley High is representative of the U.S.'s disturbing habit of criminalizing black and Latino children.
Oct 29, 2015
Officer Ben Fields had not a moment's hesitation in putting a black girl in a chokehold to yank her from her desk chair, slam her to the ground, and throw her across her classroom. The video of this assault has gone viral and has rightly prompted outrage from white people.
Here's the thing: The suspension, expulsions, beating, and arresting of black students in the U.S. is closer to the rule than the exception when childish behaviors occur at school. The national statistics on how often school discipline involves authorities physically attacking students isn't available. But we do have data on the disproportionately high rates of out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to the criminal justice system that black children experience in our schools daily.
Here are some recent stories illustrating the data:
Honor student Kiera Wilmot, a black high school sophomore, was arrested for conducting a science experiment that had been going viral on the internet by putting household cleaner and a piece of aluminum foil in a bottle and making smoke. She was charged with two felonies.
A 14-year-old black student from Texas was choked by a school police officer "for his own safety," during a lunch-room tussle with another student.
A 12-year-old black boy was arrested for engaging in a staring contest with a white student, who while giggling, told the teacher that she felt "intimidated" though she had started the game.
Dontradrian Bruce, a black high school student who earned all A's and B's, held up three fingers-the number of his football jersey- in a photo taken by his science teacher as he completed a successful science project. Dontradrian was suspended for 21 days, accused of making a gang sign.
Kyle Thompson's school principal said that Kyle was such a great kid, he wished his school was full of Kyle Thompson's. Yet when this 14-year-old black student declined to show his teacher a note he had written, the child was led from school in handcuffs, barred from all public schools in the state for a year and is spending a year under house arrest.
The criminalization of black children starts almost the moment that the child leaves her mother's door. According to a recent report from the National Education Association, black children represent only 18% of pre-schoolers, but they make up nearly half of all pre-school suspensions. Anecdotal evidence is sometimes even more horrifying than the data itself:
Joah was 3 years old and his mother received a call from the school that he hit a staff member on the arm, was deemed "a danger to the staff," and suspended. He was suspended 5 times that year.
A little 5-year-old black child in Mississippi was required to wear black shoes as part of the school's dress code. The family didn't have black shoes for him and his mother colored in some white and red sneakers with black magic marker. He was nabbed by the cops at school and sent home in the back of a police vehicle.
Due to a spike in crime by juveniles in the 1990s, social scientist John Delulio propagated a myth of the rise of "superpredators." These superpredators were to be "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches" and "have absolutely no respect for human life." This false panic paved the way for Zero Tolerance policies that over-criminalized childish behaviors in schools. Consequently, we've seen expulsions and suspensions almost double since then. The Vera Institute reports that about 2 million secondary school students are now suspended annually. Compare that to just 3 million students graduating high school that same year.
Black and Latino students are suspended and expelled at much higher rates than white students. Black students in middle school are suspended at a rate almost four times more often than white youth and three times more likely than white youth for the same infractions overall. Particularly alarming is that over 70% of all students receiving school-related arrests and referrals to law enforcement are black or Latino.
The consequences of both this excessive criminalizing of children and the racial bias in harsh punishments are extreme. The Kirwan Institute cites studies showing that a single suspension in the first year of high school doubles the dropout chance for that child. Children who experience expulsions are three times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. Once caught within the juvenile system, the psychological and economic consequences can have a lasting and burdensome impact on children while simultaneously decreasing their educational and financial opportunities and increasing the chances of re-incarceration. People incarcerated as youth are nearly 70% more likely to be in jail again by age 25 than youth who were not referred to juvenile detention.
The current discipline policies in our schools undoubtedly criminalize our children and criminalize them with a bias, especially against black youth. When officers like Ben Fields react to a child who won't relinquish her cell phone with excessive violence and arrest, he is potentially condemning her before she has even had the chance to grow up. Right now, our school policies assume black kids are criminals, and we should beat 'em up, kick 'em out, and lock 'em up.
Are you outraged yet?
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End All Youth Detention and Torture at Rikers Island Now
Jun 14, 2015
Solitary confinement is pretty horrible for anybody, but it's especially horrible for a child. It is psychological torture.
-- Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of Just Mercy
When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it's unbelievable that this could happen to a teenager in New York City. He didn't get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!
-- Paul V. Prestia, Kalief Browder's lawyer to The New Yorker
Before I went to jail, I didn't know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I'm aware, I'm paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.
-- Kalief Browder to Jennifer Gonnerman, staff writer for The New Yorker
Nobody of any age should be held in jail without a trial for three years. No child or adolescent should be held in an adult jail. No child or youth should be housed in facilities where those entrusted to care for them violently assault them. Yet, a 16-year-old accused of stealing a backpack was kept in one of the most violent adult jails in the United States, Rikers Island in New York City, for three years without a trial. This was morally scandalous and inhumane. Even worse, he spent more than two years of that time in solitary confinement, locked up alone except to go to the shower, the recreation area, the visit room or the medical clinic. This was torture. The suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder on June 6, barely two years after his release and return home, was the final horror in his tragic and brutal journey into the depths of the adult criminal justice system in New York City and state.
At Rikers, Kalief was cruelly beaten by juvenile gangs, and beaten by a guard as he was calmly walking from solitary confinement to the shower. This violent abuse was caught on video and made public in April by an investigative reporter from The New Yorker. Other alleged abuses were not: The cruel guards who denied him meals, medical care, trips to the shower and extended his time in solitary confinement by making up disciplinary problems.
It should surprise no one that a teenager subjected to this continuous torture; a teenager who maintained his innocence and just wanted his right to a day in court to prove it; a teenager who turned down plea deals repeatedly although it would have meant he could go home immediately; a teenager with no history of mental illness before Rikers Island tried to commit suicide while held in solitary confinement for two of his three years there. It is beyond shameful that he was held without a trial, without being proven guilty and because he was a poor young Black male. This travesty was and is preventable and must be prevented for all youths at risk of such abuse.
If New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators act immediately before this state legislative session ends June 17, 2015 to raise the age of criminal responsibility, as 48 states have done, more tragedies and suffering like Kalief Browder's might be avoided. And youths still at Rikers might have reduced suffering and pain.
Kalief Browder's cruel and unjust treatment began May 15, 2010, when he was picked up with a friend in the Bronx. He shared his story later with a reporter from The New Yorker to make sure this would never happen to anyone else. Kalief was stopped for allegedly stealing a backpack earlier that evening. According to the report, he maintained his innocence and offered to let the police search his pockets. The only evidence against him was the testimony of the alleged victim he never got the chance to confront. Eyewitness identification is notoriously unreliable.
Kalief Browder was immediately funneled into the adult criminal justice system because of the unjust lottery of geography and poverty. New York remains one of only two states in our country that still automatically treats 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. More than a century ago, states began to legislate that children should be treated as children to prevent the inhumane, dangerous, and ineffective practice of putting them in adult jails. New York and North Carolina should end this practice immediately. Not one more young life should be ruined or tragically lost to Rikers preventable torture and violence.
We have long known that putting children in adult jails puts them in harm's way. The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) first documented and began advocating for changes to end these harms nearly 40 years ago after visiting 500 jails across America and publishing in 1976 our deeply disturbing findings in a report on Children in Adult Jails. We found children incarcerated with adults suffered increased rates of physical abuse, like Kalief did. Today they are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile facilities. In light of this evidence, it is outrageous that any state today would subject its teenagers to any adult jail especially like Rikers Island whose culture of violence is notorious. New York must stop right now.
The unjust criminalization of the poor is another reason Kalief Browder ended up at Rikers Island. His family could not afford to hire an attorney or pay the $3,000 bail to keep him home to await a trial that never took place over three long years. Being poor, Black and male, the odds were high that he would end up in the Cradle to Prison PipelineTM and suffer preventable death.
Dr. Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, and an authority on suicidal behavior among African American males, says that among Black Americans, Black males between the ages of 15 to 24 are most likely to commit suicide. "The suicide of Kalief Browder highlights the glaring gap between the alarming psychiatric needs of black boys and men and the absence of effective treatments; a justice system that enacted psychological torture because a putative stolen backpack mattered more than the life and future of a black teen; and the importance to address the unattended psychological consequences resulting from the feverous adjudication, prosecution, and sentencing of black boys and men without regard for their mental health."
More than a thousand days after arriving at Rikers Island, Kalief Browder was abruptly released four days after his 20th birthday. He had spent most of the 17 previous months in solitary confinement. The charges against him were dismissed. It is unclear when the only evidence against him disappeared, and when and if the "victim" had returned to Mexico and could no longer be found. Two years later, after more suicide attempts and mental health hospitalizations, Kalief Browder took his life at home. He was 22-years-old.
His tragically short life has already made a difference. Mayor Bill de Blasio led New York City to ban solitary confinement for all juveniles when he heard Kalief's story. But the Governor and state legislature without another moment's delay must also take action on the age at which children can be placed in adult jails as the Governor's Commission on Youth, Public Safety and Justice recommended. No other child or youth should be at risk of Kalief Browder's fate and our nation needs to change the way we treat Black boys and men and recognize that all lives matter equally.
Albert Camus, the great French Nobel Literature Laureate, speaking at a Dominican Monastery in 1948 said: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." He described our responsibility as human beings "if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it" and "to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents." "I continue," he said "to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." And so must every one of us including our elected officials who must be held accountable. Only then will the cries of the prophets for justice and peace and America's pretentions to be a just nation become a lasting reality.
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