Criminal Law

TYC Drops Isolation

Posted on June 06, 2008
Citing this article in the Waco Tribune Herald, Grits for Breakfast brings the promising news that the Texas Youth Commission will no longer house violent youth in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, a punitive practice more appropriate for adult prisons than for juvenile offenders, who are ostensibly supposed to receive treatment in the [...

Cali Grants Basic Rights to Juv Parole Violators

Posted on June 05, 2008
Settling a federal class-action lawsuit in Sacramento yesterday, the State of California agreed to extend basic constitutional rights to juveniles charged with parole violations. The LA Times reports, “The lawsuit, filed nearly two years ago by former wards of the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice, alleged that the state was violating youths’ rights to due [...

NPR on Frost Vandals

Posted on June 04, 2008
NPR’s All Things Considered took up the Robert Frost vandalism story yesterday. Take a listen.

Youth Crime Wave in Daytona?

Posted on June 03, 2008
Here’s a curious AP article (unsigned and, I would argue, unfocused and possibly misleading) on the alleged uptick in felony crimes committed by young people in Daytona Beach. “Daytona’s crime rate is more than double Florida’s and the nation’s, having jumped 13 percent in 2006 alone,” the article states...

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Favela Blues

Posted on June 03, 2008
Check out this short review in Salon of City of Men, the TV miniseries by Fernando Meirelles (who directed the 2002 hit City of God)–which, like the film, aims its unflinching lens at teen culture in the mean streets of Rio de Janeiro. The series aired in Brazil from 2002 to 2005 and is now [...

Hearing to Discuss Runaway/Homeless Youth in NYC JJ System

Posted on June 03, 2008
New York readers, mark your calendar for June 11, next Wednesday, when the City Council’s committees on juvenile justice and youth services will hold a joint hearing on the links between runaway and homeless youth and the juvenile justice system...

Poetic Justice

Posted on June 03, 2008
Stopping by woods on a possibly snowy evening last December, a large group of young people broke into the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vermont, the former summer residence of the celebrated American poet Robert Frost, and trashed the place. This was the scene as imagined by New York Times reporter Dan Barry in his January [...

In Good Company

Posted on June 03, 2008
Memo from the department of self-promotion: Juvienation has been included on the Criminal Justice Degree Guide’s list of the Top 100 Criminal Justice Blogs. There doesn’t seem to be an order of rank on this most distinguished of lists; rather, the blogs have been organized by type...

Court to Consider Takeover of California Youth Prisons

Posted on June 02, 2008
Is receivership imminent for the California Division of Juvenile Justice? Could be. Advocates at the San Francisco-based Prison Law Office, who filed a major taxpayer lawsuit in 2003 alleging abuse and institutional incompetence in the state’s youth prisons, have filed a follow-up complaint alleging that the comprehensive reforms Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger promised when he settled the [...

Welcome, and Welcome Back

Posted on June 02, 2008
Please welcome a new blog put together by the Families & Allies of Virginia?s Youth, which is “a statewide family-driven organization that engages youth and families of all races, ethnicities, and economic status.” Its mission, according to the website, has two central planks: We work to empower and support [...

NYT to Jindal: Go Missouri!

Posted on May 30, 2008
From the New York Times editorial page: Two years have passed since the federal courts relinquished control of Louisiana?s notoriously troubled juvenile justice system. The state regained its autonomy by reducing the number of children held in detention and by promising to embrace reforms based on Missouri?s system, which long ago abandoned sprawling, prison-style facilities in [...

NYT on JJDPA

Posted on May 23, 2008
Editorial in today’s New York Times: Children in Adult Jails Children who are confined to adult jails are at greater risk of being raped, battered or pushed to suicide. They also are more likely to become violent criminals than children handled through the juvenile justice system...

Texas Potheads Smoke Pot From Head

Posted on May 09, 2008
Well, I guess it’s less likely to shatter than glass, but still…

Settlement Reached in TYC Case

Posted on May 07, 2008
From the AP via Houston Chronicle: AUSTIN ? A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. U.S. District Judge Ricardo Hinojosa signed the settlement Monday and it was announced by the TYC on Wednesday...

Jena Six Update

Posted on May 07, 2008
Remember the Jena Six? Almost a year and a half after the school fight that set this national scandal in motion, and more than half a year after an estimated 20,000 civil rights protesters descended on the small Louisiana town to demand justice for the black defendants, only one of them has faced trial...

Cross-Examining the Adolescent Brain

Posted on May 06, 2008
“Should young people who are accused of a crime receive the full force of laws intended for adults, given accumulating evidence that their brains are not fully matured?” This is the question that an interesting article in the health section of today’s Washington Post attempts to address...

Anti-Bullying Bill Passes Florida Senate

Posted on May 02, 2008
From the Miami Herald: For the last several years, proponents of anti-bullying legislation have fought for a state law that would prohibit harassment of students. Every year, the bills failed. But on Wednesday, supporters were cheering after the Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up for All Students Act unanimously passed the Florida Senate; it previously got unanimous support in [...

The JJ Channel

Posted on April 30, 2008
From the Campaign for Youth Justice April newsletter: The Campaign for Youth Justice now has a presence on YouTube! We have created a channel called “jjreform” which can be accessed at www.youtube.com/jjreform. Currently, there are several videos that represent the juvenile justice issue of transfer and youth in adult prisons and jails, including a success [...

Captain Kangaroo Court

Posted on April 30, 2008
Col. Peter Brownback, the US military judge presiding over the trial (if you can call it that) of Canadian-born Omar Khadr, has rejected a bid by Khadr’s attorneys to dismiss the case on the grounds that it contravenes international law. Khadr, who has been held at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, was 15 years old when [...

Missing: Public Defenders in Washington State

Posted on April 30, 2008
From Pennsylvania to Washington, where, the Olympian reports, legal aid for indigent juvenile offenders is similarly absent. Citing the 2007 “Status Report on Public Defense in Washington State,” the paper notes that “seventeen counties never or only sometimes make public defense attorneys available to children and teenagers during their first appearance in juvenile court...

JLC Files Petition to Protect Youth Without Counsel

Posted on April 30, 2008
The Juvenile Law Center has sent a petition to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court requesting immediate relief for the approximately 200 youth in Luzerne County who, records show, have appeared in the county’s juvenile court without representation since 2005...

Tapping the Medicaid Pipeline

Posted on April 25, 2008
I have to admit, at first I was a little intimidated by John Kelly’s article in the April issue of Youth Today (subscription only). For starters, it’s about Medicaid, a knotty subject I’ve never been able to untangle. Kelly is a clear writer, though, and I know from chatting with him that he’s got [...

Victoria Lindsay and the ?Powder Puff? Girls

Posted on April 23, 2008
The videotaped beating of Victoria Lindsay, the 16-year-old from Lakeland, Florida, who was assaulted on March 30 by six girls she knew at Mulberry High School, seemed to many people to come out of nowhere. When did girls become so violent, so cruel and so savvy about using images as a means of humiliation? Isn?t [...

The Dock and the Bay

Posted on April 23, 2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote a short post about underage prostitutes in Las Vegas in which I cited some eye-opening statistics from a report that had just been released: more than 400 minors were found working as prostitutes in the city in May 2007; almost 1,500 minors have faced prostitution-related charges in the area [...

Lost Boys in Baltimore

Posted on April 23, 2008
Caseworkers in Baltimore have lost track of more than 100 of the young offenders they are supposed to be supervising, an internal review by the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services has found. Baltimore Sun reporter Julie Bykowicz broke the story yesterday and ran a follow-up today with responses from local and state lawmakers...

Willie-Hortoning Obama

Posted on April 23, 2008
Check out this new anti-Obama attack ad set to run in North Carolina ahead of the May 6 primary. It was put together by Floyd Brown, the genius who brought us the Willie Horton smears against Michael Dukakis back in 1988, so that should give you a sense of what to expect...

Houston (Palm) Oilers

Posted on April 21, 2008
When you think of cronyism, you don’t immediately think of public defenders. They just don’t seem to fit the profile, for some reason. But an analysis by the Houston Chronicle has found that an elite, favored inner circle of local public defenders, all of whom provide financial contributions to support the judges who dish out [...

Girl Fight

Posted on April 21, 2008
I neglected to cover plenty of important juvenile justice stories in the past week, I realize. But the one that jumps out concerns the arrest of eight Florida girls (ranging in age from 14 to 18 ) for their alleged role in the kidnapping and assault of another girl, a 16-year-old classmate...

Catching Up?

Posted on April 21, 2008
OK, time in. This blog, an unpaid labor of love, sometimes has to take a back seat to bacon-bringing freelance work. Hence the lack of posts in the past week, while I copy-edited a funny tell-all memoir by a young guy who got swept up in the UN Oil-for-Food scandal...

Pittman Postscript

Posted on April 15, 2008
The Sentencing Law and Policy blog weighs in with the post-Supreme Court prospects in the Pittman case: This case will now likely head to a federal district court through a habeas action; it will be very interesting to see if any lower federal court might find merit in the constitutional claims made in Pittman...

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