Juvenile Probation Quotes

Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jailor prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. 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.

From then on, I wanted to be a police officer like her. What she did was really probation work. I never did become a police officer, but I did earn my master’s degree in social work, and my dream changed. I have always felt strongly that people need to be held accountable for their actions, but in a way that helps them not repeat the past.

When children in detention at the San Bernardino County Probation Department in California become violent, they are moved to a cell with the walls painted in bubble gum pink. Paul E. Boccumini, director of clinical services for the department, said, “The children tend to relax, stop yelling and banging and often fall asleep within ten minutes.” The use of brute force was previously used to calm psychotic and manic juveniles. “We used to have to literally sit on them,” said Boccumini. “Now we put them in the pink room. It works.