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Getting the Juvenile-Justice System to Grow Up

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Tuesday, Mar. 24, 2009 Getting the Juvenile-Justice System to Grow Up By Ken Stier Time Magazine If it's not the biggest scandal in American legal history, many are calling it at least the darkest day for the country's troubled juvenile-justice system. For more than four years earlier this decade, two senior county juvenile-court judges in northeastern Pennsylvania took kickbacks of $2.6 million in exchange for packing thousands of kids off to privately owned detention centers. Many of the kids had committed minor offenses and didn't have the benefit of a lawyer. A 14-year-old from Wilkes-Barre, for instance, spent a year in a Glen Mills detention facility for the offense of stealing loose change from unlocked cars to buy a bag of chips; he was only set free after public-interest lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the punishment...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on March 30, 2009 (boomark / email).