Juvenile Justice System 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.

...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.

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.