Juvenile Justice Quotes

Now, as I’ve suggested before, what is adaptive for children living in chaotic, violent, trauma-permeated environments becomes maladaptive in other environments-especially school. The hypervigilance of the Alert state is mistaken for ADHD; the resistance and defiance of Alarm and Fear get labeled as oppositional defiant disorder; flight behavior gets them suspended from school; fight behavior gets them charged with assault. The pervasive misunderstanding of trauma-related behavior has a profound effect on our educational, mental health, and juvenile justice systems.

Imagine the message that sent to my sister and me. A cousin violates us, confesses, and walks away with barely a slap on the wrist. I learned at a young age that if I was ever going to see justice for the wrongs done to me, I had to find it myself.

...Were you in the military?" "Are you kidding me? I was in high school." "High school," he said quietly. "You’re American. And a civilian?" "Uh, yes. An American civilian." "Lovely. A straight answer. Keep it up. Did somebody train you?" "No, nobody trained me. Unless you count the Rhode Island child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Why?" Malachi held up his hand and ticked off the reasons with his fingers. "You stole a Guard's weapon. If I'm not mistaken, it belonged to a Gate Guard. Which means you managed to do it on your way into the city. You escaped Amid even after he had you in hand. You slashed his leg in just the right place, preventing him from chasing you. Under extreme duress, injured and cornered, you threw a knife and hit a target-" "It's not like I hit something vital.

Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.

She was guilty; the juvenile justice system said so. So that had to mean she belonged.

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted, and lethally injected hundreds of people to carry out legally sanctioned executions. Thousands more await their execution on death row. Some states have no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison.

I never thought that the word RAPE will appear in my life because a woman I deeply care about is raped. ~ Taz

They tell me how they are not scared to die, but they are terrified of the lives circumstance forces them to lead.

nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison.

Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state—or any other country in the world.

Some states have no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison.

The most compassionate thing I can do for them is continuing to see their potential. They need to know that people are not going to abandon them because of their bad behavior. Only in the security of this can they let themselves learn better strategies.

There are still more than 80,000 men, women, and children in solitary confinement in prisons across the United States, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That figure doesn’t include county jails, juvenile facilities, or immigrant detention centers.

The growing consensus among experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a recommendation in 1973 that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”17 This recommendation was based on their finding that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.

Our world cannot be complete without you, and without hearing what you have to say. True justice cannot exist without compassion; compassion cannot exist without understanding. But no one will understand you unless you speak, and are able to speak clearly (Sister Janet to the students, page 155).

And I did find it, in an impressive organization called the Mind Body Awareness (MBA) Project. MBA was doing mindfulness work (both meditation and yoga) with kids in juvenile hall and getting some solid results. I had seen the data on how many kids in juvie have their own fair share of ACEs (one study that came out later on looked at more than sixty thousand young people in the Florida juvenile justice system and found that 97 percent had experienced at least one ACE category and 52 percent four or more), so I figured it would be a good fit. After I met with MBA’s executive director, Gabriel Kram, and heard his story, I was even more

Whenever my colleagues and I encounter a boy who acts "normal"—not explosively violent, not oppositional to every word, not obsessed with killing and dying, not focused on sexual objectification—we are overjoyed with his potential. Here is one who has a stronger foundation on which to build, one who will not knock down his every success like a child with a brick castle to see if the adults will keep helping him rebuild.

former U.S. senator Alan Simpson from Wyoming. Simpson had spent eighteen years in the Senate, including ten as the Republican whip, the second-ranking senator in his party. He had also been a former juvenile felon. He had been adjudicated as a juvenile delinquent when he was seventeen, for multiple convictions for arson, theft, aggravated assault, gun violence, and, finally, assaulting a police officer. He later confessed: “I was a monster.” His life didn’t begin to change until he found himself imprisoned in “a sea of puke and urine” following another arrest. Senator Simpson knew firsthand that you cannot judge a person’s full potential by his juvenile misconduct.

[N]o one has more power in the criminal justice system that prosecutors. Few rules constrain the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all, regardless of the strength of the evidence. The prosecutor is also free to file more charges against the defendepant the can realistically be proven in court, so long as probable cause arguable exists. Whether a good plea deal is offered to a defendant is entirely up to the prosecutor. And if the mood strikes, the prosecutor can transfer drug defendants to the federal system, where penalties are far more severe. Juveniles, for their part, cam be transferred to adult court, where they can be sent to adult prison.

For black youth, the experience of being “made black” often begins with the first police stop, interrogation, search, or arrest. The experience carries social meaning—this is what it means to be black. The story of one’s “first time” may be repeated to family or friends, but for ghetto youth, almost no one imagines that the first time will be the last. The experience is understood to define the terms of one’s relationship not only to the state but to society at large. This reality can be frustrating for those who strive to help ghetto youth “turn their lives around.” James Forman Jr., the cofounder of the See Forever charter school for juvenile offenders in Washington, D.C., made this point when describing how random and degrading stops and searches of ghetto youth “tell kids that they are pariahs, that no matter how hard they study, they will remain potential suspects.” One student complained to him, “We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right and still they treat us like dogs. No, worse than dogs, because criminals are treated worse than dogs.” Another student asked him pointedly, “How can you tell us we can be anything when they treat us like we’re nothing?”56 The process of marking black youth as black criminals is essential to the functioning of mass incarceration as a racial caste system. For the system to succeed—that is, for it to achieve the political goals described in chapter 1—black people must be labeled criminals before they are formally subject to control. The criminal label is essential, for forms of explicit racial exclusion are not only prohibited but widely condemned. Thus black youth must be made—labeled—criminals. This process of being made a criminal is, to a large extent, the process of “becoming” black. As Wideman explains, when “to be a man of color of a certain economic class and milieu is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal,” being processed by the criminal justice system is tantamount to being made black, and “doing time” behind bars is at the same time “marking race.”57 At its core, then, mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, is a “race-making institution.” It serves to define the meaning and significance of race in America.

The most comprehensive studies of racial bias in the exercise of prosecutorial and judicial discretion involve the treatment of juveniles. These studies have shown that youth of color are more likely to be arrested, detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure residential facilities than their white counterparts.65 A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.66 A study sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department and several of the nation’s leading foundations, published in 2007, found that the impact of the biased treatment is magnified with each additional step into the criminal justice system. African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison.67 A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making. In the state of Washington, for example, a review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white offenders differently.68 Blacks committed crimes because of internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of external conditions such as family conflict. The risk that prosecutorial discretion will be racially biased is especially acute in the drug enforcement context, where virtually identical behavior is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations and responses and the media imagery and political discourse has been so thoroughly racialized. Whether a kid is perceived as a dangerous drug-dealing thug or instead is viewed as a good kid who was merely experimenting with drugs and selling to a few of his friends has to do with the ways in which information about illegal drug activity is processed and interpreted, in a social climate in which drug dealing is racially defined. As a former U.S. Attorney explained: I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop the gun charge against the defendant [in a case in which] there were no extenuating circumstances. I asked, “Why do you want to drop the gun offense?” And he said, “‘He’s a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had with him was a rifle. He’s a good ol’ boy, and all good ol’ boys have rifles, and it’s not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.” But he was a gun-toting drug dealer, exactly.

Zero tolerance imagines that kids are at risk of being victimized (violence, drugs, general hooliganism), but it also imagines kids as risks to the school and other students. The APA’s research found that zero-tolerance school policing “affected the delicate balance between the educational and juvenile justice systems, in particular, increasing schools’ use of and reliance on strategies such as security technology, security personnel, and profiling, especially in high-minority, high-poverty school districts.” 34 Children—black, indigenous, and Latinx children in particular—are overpoliced, especially within schools (more on this later). When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.

You get the sense that people here are rooting for defendants and litigants to get their lives in order. It's not uncommon for [the judge] to praise a defendant who has shown progress. …. According to independent evaluators, it reduced the recidivism rate of adult defendants by 10% and juvenile defendants by 20% and only 1% of the cases processed by the justice center result in jail at arraignment. [The judge said] I finally feel that I have a chance to really get to the problem that causes the person to come in front of me. The justice center team has been able to do this because they figured out the larger purpose of why they wanted to gather. They wanted to solve the community's problems together and they built a proceeding around that.

Everyone knows that our criminal justice system is broken. But before we look at the justice system in this country, we have to look at the juvenile justice system. It’s the same river. We just need to start farther upstream. At what point in these kids’ lives could they have been redirected into a different way of life? What can we do at these inflection points to divert them? We need to change the narrative.

I'm Above The Law (The Sonnet) Yes, I am above the law, So is every single world builder. It's only the apes without brain who, Are tamed by the medieval lawmaker. If you are to be a civilized being, It is your duty to rise above the law. If you can't tell right from wrong, It is common sense you lack, not law. It is nothing but a juvenile democracy, That is founded on spineless law-abidance. Civilized democracy instills accountability, What it doesn't demand is boneheaded obedience. You have a heart, brain and spine, why not use them! Stand up o citizen justice, and keep the law as servant.

The growing consensus among experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a recommendation in 1973 that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”17

The pervasive misunderstanding of trauma-related behavior has a profound effect on our educational, mental health, and juvenile justice systems.

In attempting to maintain the existing order, the powerful commit crimes of control. … At the same time, oppressed people engage in … crimes of resistance. —Meda Chesney-Lind and Randall G. Shelden, Girls, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice, 1992

I don't want to tax my mind to find perfect Iron Man line. ~ Aarush Kashyap

But in the through-the-looking-glass world of the juvenile prison, anything short of physical force or coercion is described by the Justice Department as “sexual relations”—a term that implies a kind of consent that minors are legally unable to grant. That the very agency charged with protecting the rights of incarcerated youth would misconstrue, or misrepresent, the law—which makes clear that there is no such thing as “sexual relations” between adults and minors over whom they have authority—speaks volumes about the culture of impunity and victim blaming that persists to this day, no matter how many new laws and regulations are put in place.

I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.

I do all I can to let my students feel as normal as possible, as far from institutionalized. I see how easy it is to allow this conveyor belt of incarceration bring them from my facility to an adult detention, often for the rest of their lives.

Society tells my students that people like them should aspire to prison the same way I understood I would go to college. They only listen to media that reinforces what they’ve been told all their lives: that they are worthless and that they will die or be incarcerated before they reach twenty-five.

I look at my students and have no trouble picturing just how successful they should be, if only we could remove them from the impetuses that brought them to the facility. If we could move them away from gangs. If we could get them into a rehab that stuck. If we could take them from people who abuse their trust, safety, and bodies.

Most of the time, all the separates a class president and a gang leader is numbers: a zip code, a paycheck, or a drug dealer’s phone number.

I have heard the predictable slew of insults, threats, epithets, and curses. Underneath all these, I hear their fear. They don’t want to hurt me, though I may serve as a stand-in for a man who they do want to hurt. They want to scare me because fear is the only way they have learned to feel powerful.

In an effort to gain acceptance, restorative justice programs are often promoted or evaluated as ways to decrease repeat crimes. There are good reasons to believe that, in fact, such programs will reduce offending. Indeed, the research thus far—centering mainly on juvenile offenders—is quite encouraging on this issue. Nevertheless, reduced recidivism is not the reason for operating restorative justice programs. Reduced recidivism is a byproduct, but restorative justice is done first of all because it is the right thing to do. Victims’ needs should be addressed, offenders should be encouraged to take responsibility, those affected by an offense should be involved in the process, regardless of whether offenders catch on and reduce their offending.

The growing consensus among experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a recommendation in 1973 that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”17 This recommendation was based on their finding that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”18

The perception of children as tractable has been a hallmark of social justice; it has led us to seek rehabilitation for juveniles rather than simply punishment. According to this logic, a bad adult may be irrecoverably bad, but a bad kid is only a reflection of negative influences, the product of pliable nurture rather than immutable nature. There can be truth in that pleasant optimism, but to go from there to presuming parental culpability is a gross injustice.

80 percent of death row inmates in the U.S. are products of the juvenile justice system.

After all, there is in more stable, developed countries like the United States and Britain a quantifiably more vicious culture of child abuse. A report released in January 2010 by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics made clear that sexual abuse in juvenile detention is a national crisis. Some 12.1 percent of 26,550 children represented in the survey by a sample of 9,000 who were interviewed said they had been sexually abused at their current facility during the preceding year,

Balanced and restorative justice is a new approach to juvenile crime that conceives of crime as an act that not only harms people but also violates relationships in a community. Thus, rather than a retributive approach, in which the state punishes an offender, restorative justice practices emphasize healing of the victim, the offender, and the community.

juvenile justice policies has not relied on science or research regarding effective strategies for reducing delinquency, but instead has been influenced by two strikingly dissimilar and unrelated disciplines: adult corrections and child welfare.

this book will contribute to the national conversation about policies that actually succeed in preventing juvenile crime, practices that help to create long-lasting change among young offenders and their families, and alterations that the juvenile justice system can make in order to become a better steward of public funds.

it is never too early or too late to work successfully with high-risk youths and families. There are cost-effective prevention and intervention strategies for this demographic at every stage of development, regardless of whether youths are in the general community, the juvenile justice system, or some other institutional setting. The important thing is to identify those at risk, determine the level of that risk, and provide a well-researched response that matches that risk level.

Roughly 7 percent of the general juvenile population is referred to the juvenile justice department for criminal behavior. Of all those referred, about 15 percent become chronic offenders, and they commit the great majority of juvenile crimes.

one recent calendar year, 1,653 first-time juvenile offenders were referred to the court. A total of 878 (53 percent) of these offenders didn’t commit another crime over the next 12 months, and 501 (30 percent) committed only 1 or 2 crimes, which accounted for 31 percent of the repeat offenses. Two hundred and seventy-four of those offenders (17 percent) committed at least 3 more crimes after the first, and accounted for an incredible 69 percent of repeat offenses, a tally of 1,470 documented crimes. If a jurisdiction can reduce the rate at which a juvenile becomes chronic, in theory it can prevent thousands of crimes. For example, if the above jurisdiction had a chronic rate of 20 percent instead of 17 percent, it would have meant more than 600 additional crimes in a single year. But if by using valid risk assessment tools it had been able to reduce the chronic group by 4 percentage points, the area would have had 600 fewer juvenile crimes in that year, which translates to a cost avoidance of over $2.5 million. The cost avoidance model is used in juvenile justice to financially quantify the impact of preventing crimes.

The Lane County, Oregon, juvenile cost avoidance model, for example, looks at costs to victims, law enforcement, the courts, the juvenile justice system, and treatment, and calculates an average cost per juvenile criminal referral. Reducing those referrals yields an “avoidance” of that financial impact.

Her story also illustrates what doesn’t work in juvenile justice: her gateway to delinquency opened not because she was abused and began running away but because she, an abused low-risk girl, was placed in a living situation with high-risk, sophisticated criminal offenders.

Employees of the juvenile justice system tend to be offender driven, often focusing attention on helping kids and families get the skills they need to prevent crime. In this way we hope to keep the community safe. The focus is clearly not on the individual needs of victims. Stephanie’s primary contact with victims was a result of damage to their property.

special dedication and tribute goes out to Jyoti Singh. She was brutally beaten, gang-raped, tortured, and killed. All of this occurred while Ms. Singh was traveling with her male friend on a bus. Jyoti had an iron rod rammed into her vagina. Her intestines were pulled out of her body and she was thrown off of a moving bus. The incident occurred in Munirka (a neighborhood in South West Delhi, India) on December 16, 2012. Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Akshay Thakur, Ram Singh (the bus driver), and Mohammed Afroz were convicted. The “juvenile”, Mohammed Afroz, was the rapist who shoved an iron rod inside of her vagina. Since he was 17 years old and six months old at the time of the crime, he was NOT TRIED AS AN ADULT. He was given a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment in a “reform facility” due to the Juvenile Justice Act. He is now a cook at a hotel in South India. Why does he get to be pampered while Jyoti suffered such a cruel fate?

A special dedication and tribute goes out to Jyoti Singh. She was brutally beaten, gang-raped, tortured, and killed. All of this occurred while Ms. Singh was traveling with her male friend on a bus. Jyoti had an iron rod rammed into her vagina. Her intestines were pulled out of her body and she was thrown off of a moving bus. The incident occurred in Munirka (a neighborhood in South West Delhi, India) on December 16, 2012. Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Akshay Thakur, Ram Singh (the bus driver), and Mohammed Afroz were convicted. The “juvenile”, Mohammed Afroz, was the rapist who shoved an iron rod inside of her vagina. Since he was 17 years old and six months old at the time of the crime, he was NOT TRIED AS AN ADULT. He was given a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment in a “reform facility” due to the Juvenile Justice Act. He is now a cook at a hotel in South India. Why does he get to be pampered while Jyoti suffered such a cruel fate?

A growing body of research is also showing that children who are exposed to domestic violence are also more likely to experience physical abuse themselves. The result of these traumatic experiences for children is an increased level of aggression and violence. These children are more likely to enter the juvenile justice system and have an increased propensity to perpetuate the cycle of domestic violence as survivors or perpetrators.

As I learned more about the juvenile and criminal justice systems, I was reminded of all those jail and prison visits I'd made in my life. What struck me was just how regular it was. We have to take a second to process how messed up that is. We have normalized the abnormal so completely we don't even realize it. Why was this part of Black boys' coming-of-age? Why are some things praised and aspired to? Why are certain things like serving time held up as a badge of honor when they only lead to ruin?

No one wakes up and says they want to be a gangbanger or a drug dealer- that's the last stop on the train. That what you do when you're drowning and reaching out for something- anything- to survive. By the time they get to the corner, there has been a series of things that led to that decision. No one wakes up at the top of the mountain and decides they would like it better down there on the bottom. They end up there out of desperation. We don't spend enough time examining the wider picture, the steps that get them there. We don't tell that part of the story. And to tell half the story is to spread a lie.

How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

One large American study examined the cases of nearly one hundred thousand teens who had their first contact with the juvenile justice system between 1990 and 2005. Fifty-seven percent of these youths were black; the overwhelming majority were male and their average age was fifteen. Most had been arrested either for drug crimes or for assault; all were studied at the time of their first offense. The researchers found that, regardless of the severity of the initial offense, teens who were incarcerated were three times more likely to be reincarcerated as adults1 compared with those not incarcerated for similar offenses. Being locked up hadn’t deterred them; rather, it had forced them to spend time with criminals, had possibly taught them more about how to commit different types of crime, and ultimately set them up to be reincarcerated.

Juveniles, for their part, can be transferred to adult court, where they can be sent to adult prison. Angela J. Davis, in her authoritative study Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor, observes that “the most remarkable feature of these important, sometimes life-and-death decisions is that they are totally discretionary and virtually unreviewable.”59 Most prosecutors’ offices lack any manual or guidebook advising prosecutors how to make discretionary decisions.