Nationally, on any given night, approximately 81,000 youth are confined to juvenile facilities and 10,000 children are held in adult jails and prisons. Approximately 1 in 10 young male high school dropouts is incarcerated or in juvenile detention. For African Americans, that number is 1 in 4. Research shows that just over two million youth under the age of 18 were arrested in 2008. Of these two million, about 95 percent had not been accused of violent crimes. In 2010, of the nearly 100,000 youth under the age of 18 who were serving time in a juvenile residential placement facility, 26 percent had been convicted of property crimes only, such as burglary, arson, or theft. Access to education both stems the tide of incarceration and improves inmates chances of re-acclimating to society after their release.
“However, numerous studies have shown that children charged as adults are far more likely to reoffend than those who enter the juvenile system. One 2003 study in Pennsylvania found that children charged as adults were twice as likely to be rearrested within 18 months than children charged in juvenile court.“
The Appeal
June 27, 2019
Read More“The district attorney said police officers and Juvenile Court judges have been pressured to go easy on youthful offenders, although he declined to identify the sources of that pressure. He also criticized a shift mandated by the City Council to arrest fewer juveniles for low-level “status offenses” like truancy and curfew violations. “
The Advocate
May 16, 2019
Read More“Cannizzaro, who has served in the city since 2009, frequently speaks out about what he sees as an increase in violent youth. ‘The revolving door we complain about at the adult jail has nothing on the cartoonish speed of the one spinning at Juvenile Court,’ he said in February. His office opened 735 juvenile felony cases in 2018.“
The Appeal
April 26, 2019
Read More"One Sunday morning in April, a supervisor at New Orleans' Youth Study Center pulled out a lined notebook used to document activity inside the city's juvenile jail, and scrawled in black ink a brief description of what would be the first in a series of troubling incidents that day."
New Orleans Times Picayune
August 23, 2018
Read More"Can a violent adult jail teach kids to love school?"
The Marshall Project & This American Life
June 8, 2018
Read More