Criminal Law

New York Numbers Game

Posted on February 26, 2008
Matthew Schwarzfeld, a reporter at the New York-based urban policy magazine City Limits, looks at the costs associated with implementing the ambitious state plan, put forward by Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) commissioner Gladys Carrión, to shut down six youth prisons next year...

The Murder of Lawrence King

Posted on February 25, 2008
On February 12, Brandon McInerney, a 14-year-old at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, walked into his computer lab and shot 15-year-old Lawrence King (pictured above) in the head in front of two dozen classmates. Lawrence was declared brain dead a day later and taken off life support on February 14...

Grits for Breakfast: TYC Can Learn From NYC

Posted on February 22, 2008
Scott Henson at the Texas-based blog Grits for Breakfast read Wednesday’s New York Times story on the Juvenile Justice Initiative and thinks officials at the Texas Youth Commission should, too. When it comes to developing cheaper alternatives to youth prisons, he suggests, the TYC can learn a lot from NYC...

Promising Incarceration Alternatives in NYC

Posted on February 21, 2008
The New York Times Metro section took a look yesterday at the city’s Juvenile Justice Initiative, a promising alternative incarceration program that keeps medium-risk offenders at home and provides intensive therapy. “Until the Juvenile Justice Initiative, family court judges had few options for dealing with youngsters convicted of less-serious crimes,” the paper reports...

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Defendant in Shaloh Joseph Case Enters Not Guilty Plea

Posted on February 20, 2008
The 12-year-old Florida boy facing second-degree-murder charges for killing his 17-month-old cousin, Shaloh Joseph, entered a not guilty plea in Broward County juvenile court on Monday. News here. Background here.

Mississippi to Shutter Notorious Girls? Prison

Posted on February 20, 2008
Some successes are measured; others are unqualified. This one is the latter. Seven months ago the Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit against the State of Mississippi, citing abusive conditions at the Columbia Training School, a notorious girls’ prison...

Time In

Posted on February 20, 2008
As many have I’m sure noticed, the lights at Juvienation have been turned off for the past few days. Blogger’s prerogative: this is not my full-time job, and it’s not my only freelance gig, either. I’m trying to keep a lot of balls in the air, and sometimes that requires scaling back on the time I [...

File Under ?Fargo?

Posted on February 20, 2008
From the AP: A high school senior accused of trying to pay hit men $260 to kill his adoptive parents had always been a ”very good child,” his mother said through tears Wednesday. Jacob A. Jett, 18, allegedly gave the money and three handguns to two men as part of the plot to kill Richard and [...

NC Conference: Update

Posted on February 15, 2008
More on the powwow in Greensboro to consider raising the age at which teens can be tried as adults, from the Raleigh News & Observer: The Greensboro gathering, which continues today, brought together more than 200 juvenile justice practitioners for the N...

NC Considers Raising JJ Age

Posted on February 14, 2008
Officials in North Carolina are meeting today to discuss raising the age of criminal responsibility to 18. Cross your fingers…

New Report on LWOP in Illinois

Posted on February 14, 2008
Progress on the campaign to abolish life without parole in my home state: the Illinois Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Children, a group that includes lawyers and academics and advocates, put out a report yesterday that calls for doing away with LWOP sentences for juvenile offenders...

USA Today: Time for Change on JJ Policy

Posted on February 13, 2008
Annette Fuentes, a top journalist on the national youth advocacy beat, takes a big-picture look at trends in juvenile crime and policy and borrows a line from presidential hopeful Barack Obama. In “Give the Kids a Break,” an op-ed in today’s edition of USA Today, she argues that “the time for change is right”–particularly on [...

Stonewalling in Connecticut

Posted on February 13, 2008
A tip of the hat to John Kelly at Youth Today, who points me to this interesting story out of Connecticut: Governor Jodi Rell, who promised in August 2005 to shut down the Connecticut Juvenile Training School (CJTS) in Middletown, has decided instead to expand its population–by more than 100 percent...

TYC Scandal of the Day: Pope Resigns

Posted on February 12, 2008
Dimitria Pope, the troubled acting executive director of the Texas Youth Commission, resigned late last night. As the Houston Chronicle reports, Pope has been a lightning rod for controversy since her appointment last spring to an agency that was then being ripped apart by one of the worst abuse scandals to ever hit juvenile corrections...

The Colbert Report

Posted on February 12, 2008
A few weeks back I pointed out that Washington Post columnist Colbert King “has been on a bizarrely impassioned tear in recent months, attacking the DC Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services and its head, Vincent Schiraldi, a nationally renowned expert on juvenile justice reform who founded the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and was until recently [...

NY Daily News on NYU JJ Panel

Posted on February 12, 2008
There’s much to be said about the lively, exciting ?Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State? panel discussion that took place at NYU on Friday. If and when I pinch away some time to comment, I will. For now, though, I’ll turn it over to Errol Louis, a columnist at the New York Daily News, who [...

Strong Winds in Kentucky and Ohio

Posted on February 12, 2008
The winds of change are blowing through the bluegrass region. In mid-December Kentucky Juvenile Justice Department commissioner Bridget Skaggs Brown–who presided over a punishment-first network of prisons and brought a troublingly punitive, one-size-fits-all approach to sex offenders (see earlier posts here)–stepped down to chair the state’s Parole Board, to the delight of reform advocates...

JJDPA Reauthorization: Draft Bill Coming Soon

Posted on February 12, 2008
Act4JJ just sent around an e-mail blast announcing that a draft of the bill to reauthorize the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act is due shortly. “The Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Education and Labor Committee are actively working to craft legislation for the JJDPA reauthorization,” Act4JJ says, “and we expect to see a [...

Florida Gov Names New JJ Secretary

Posted on February 08, 2008
Big week for juvenile justice in Florida. On Tuesday the Blueprint Commission submitted its report on “getting smart” about its response to delinquency, and on Thursday Governor Charlie Crist appointed St. Petersburg State Representative Frank Peterman to head the Department of Juvenile Justice...

Reminder: New York JJ Panel Tomorrow

Posted on February 07, 2008
Just a friendly reminder to all New York-area readers: From 8:30 to 10 tomorrow morning (breakfast at 8:00), the Wagner School at New York University will host a panel called ?Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State.? Hot topic of discussion, of course, will be the proposed shutdown of six facilities around the state and redirection [...

New Assault Charge for Jena Six Defendant

Posted on February 07, 2008
Jena Six defendant Bryant Purvis, 19, who will head to trial at the end of March to face charges of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy, now has an assault charge to deal with in an unrelated case. Purvis, who since the Jena incident has been living in the Dallas area with his uncle, Dallas Cowboys defensive [...

Launch Room Missile Crisis

Posted on February 07, 2008
Liz Ryan at the Campaign for Youth Justice tipped me off to this outlandish story from Laramie, Wyoming: three 13-year-old girls were charged with violating a city ordinance against “hurling missiles.” Thanks, Liz, for the tip! And, please, pass the ketchup…

Rhode Island to Dismiss, Transfer 17-Year-Old ?Gap Kids?

Posted on February 06, 2008
Last year, during the nearly five-month span after Rhode Island Governor Don Carcieri passed a law that lowered the age of adult court jurisdiction to 17 but before he was forced to repeal it, about 100 17-year-olds were charged as adults for their alleged crimes...

Masked Marauder, Unmasked, Strikes in Gotham

Posted on February 06, 2008
I don’t know how this happened, but the copy of the New York Times that arrived on my stoop this morning does not include this editorial on juvenile LWOP, “A Shameful Record.” I found out about it during my daily visit to Sentencing Law and Policy, and followed the link to the Times’s website, where [...

Florida Blueprint Commission Submits Report: ?Get Smart, Not Tough?

Posted on February 06, 2008
The Blueprint Commission of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice presented its findings yesterday in a much-anticipated report, “Getting Smart About Juvenile Justice in Florida.” The report follows a series of statewide hearings and reflects the recommendations of the twenty-five-member commission that was tasked last summer with charting a new course for the state’s troubled [...

NCJJ Looking to Fill Top Spot

Posted on February 05, 2008
Press release from the National Center for Juvenile Justice: The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has issued a position announcement for the Director of its National Center for Juvenile Justice. The Center, which serves as the Council’s research arm, concentrates on providing research and statistics relating to the juvenile justice system and the [...

Kos on Khadr

Posted on February 05, 2008
Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, filed this dispatch from Guantánamo Bay on yesterday ’s military commissions hearing in the case against Omar Khadr. It’s the first of a series of posts Shamsi will file on Daily Kos this week...

Gitmo ?Justice? for Khadr?

Posted on February 04, 2008
Is there such a thing as a child terrorist? That question was posed at a hearing today in Guantánamo Bay, when Navy Lieut. William Kuebler asked a military judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, to dismiss charges against Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen and accused Al Qaeda fighter who was pulled off the battlefield in Afghanistan in [...

10-Year-Old Girl Arrested, Detained in Illinois

Posted on February 04, 2008
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that a 10-year-old girl who allegedly hit her teacher was arrested Friday in Will County, Illinois, on charges of aggravated battery. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services stepped in immediately to secure her release from the River Valley Juvenile Justice Center in Joliet, where she was being held until [...

High Recidivism Rate for Wisconsin Teens in Adult Prison

Posted on February 02, 2008
A report from the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau found that 17-year-old offenders released from prison in 2002 and 2003 were reincarcerated at more than double the rate of adult offenders released during those years, and at nearly twice the rate of offenders released from juvenile institutions in the state at that time...

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