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1.Describe what a juvenile trial is like.

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1.Describe what a juvenile trial is like.

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2.What other options are there besides jail for 16-year olds that commit a crime?

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2.What other options are there besides jail for 16-year olds that commit a crime?

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4.Discuss at least two ways to prevent juvenile delinquency.

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4.Discuss at least two ways to prevent juvenile delinquency.

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5.Can 16-year olds get the death penalty?

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5.Can 16-year olds get the death penalty?

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6.How many juveniles got the death penalty?

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6.How many juveniles got the death penalty?

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7.Do you think race plays  a role in who gets the death penalty? Why or why not?

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7.Do you think race plays  a role in who gets the death penalty? Why or why not?

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8.Does New York have the death penalty? 

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8.Does New York have the death penalty? 

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The Center also produces groundbreaking reports on various issues related to the death penalty such as arbitrariness, costs, innocence, and race.

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Richard Ross/Juvenile in Justice

From ACEs Too High News:

There are three ways to look at how the juvenile justice system is using modern practices to reduce youth crime and violence.

One is what happens on the way to the detention center where a kid is held until trial - i.e., how the system decides which kids must be locked up, and who can live at home or in a group home until their trial date.

The second is inside detention center walls - what happens to kids inside these mostly county-run centers while they're awaiting trial.

The third is inside the correctional facilities where youth serve out their sentences. These are usually run by states.

There's a lot of progress in revamping what happens to kids on the way to detention centers - in fact, 300 sites in 39 states have changed their approach, with remarkable results, according to the 2014 Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative Progress Report.

There's also stunning progress in modernizing the institutions where youth serve out their sentences.

But inside the walls of detention centers that hold kids for 20 days, on average, before trial? That's another story, and it's part of this story. The main approach of the overwhelming majority of these detention centers is warehouse, control and punish. Only 10 percent to 20 percent of these facilities are making changes, according to one estimate, and most of those aren't using evidence-based practices based on the model programs guide put together by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

From superpredators to traumatized teens

In the 1990s, the United States was gripped in a national hysteria about teenage "superpredators" that had escalated with the rise in youth violence. Although juvenile crime took a nosedive in the 1990s, the number of kids in detention continued to skyrocket, more than doubling from 13,000 to 28,000 between 1985 and 1997, even though only 30 percent had committed violent crime, and many of those were misdemeanors.

The percentage of detained juveniles living in overcrowded detention centers zoomed from 20 percent to 60 percent, says Nate Balis, director of Casey's Juvenile Justice Strategies Group. "They were double- and triple-bunked, bursting at the seams," he says, "which I would argue would be trauma-inducing for kids."

Recognizing that throwing every kid into detention was a road to nowhere, the Annie E. Casey Foundation launched the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative in 1992.

The research was clear: Putting all kids who committed a crime, even if their crime was minor and they were of little or no threat to public safety, into a locked and crowded detention center increased the likelihood that they would end up serving time, and would torpedo any chance they had for turning their lives around. The get-tough policy was backfiring by ruining kids' lives.

"The work of JDAI was to argue, wait a minute, do we need to expand the footprint [of detention centers] or should we scrutinize why kids were being locked up in the first place?" says Balis. "Do they pose a safety threat? Are they at risk of failing to appear in court?"

JDAI began with five local jurisdictions and has spread during the past 22 years to 39 states and about 300 localities. The detention centers have seen an average decline in their daily population of 45 percent, Balis says.

By 2013, 56 sites had closed detention units with 2,050 beds, saving an estimated $143 million each year. And almost all jurisdictions have seen a decline in their crime rates, which means that allowing youth to stay at home or in a group home hasn't meant an increase in crime, he says.

In the past half-dozen years or so, the move to find detention alternatives has gained momentum and tracked closely the principles of JDAI - collaborating across agencies, using data-driven decision-making, developing objective admissions criteria, thinking carefully about detention alternatives that are available, working to expedite case processing, reducing racial disparities and paying close attention to special cases like parole violations.

While that list of principles governs whether kids are put in detention or stay home before their trials, JDAI also lays out standards within detention centers to reduce solitary confinement and to ensure that kids are held only as long as necessary, Balis says.

"The experience of being confined becomes more traumatic over time," he says. "The idea that while they're in detention, they are getting therapeutic services that could address trauma or anything else, is a good thing. The fear that we often have is that keeping kids in detention longer than necessary because they're getting services leads to an oxymoron of having the kid one day longer in detention to address trauma - yet detention is a naturally traumatic experience."

Research shows reasons for violence

One of the big changes between the early 1990s and now is research that shows how kids who get into trouble, including committing crime and violence, are usually acting out of their own traumatic childhoods.

High rates of childhood trauma can result in adult onset of chronic disease, mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence, according to the Kaiser-CDC Adverse Childhood Experiences Study ( ACE Study).

The study measured 10 types of childhood trauma: sexual, physical and verbal abuse, and physical and emotional neglect; and five types of family dysfunction - witnessing a mother being abused, a household member who's alcoholic or drug dependent, who's been imprisoned, or diagnosed with mental illness or loss of a parent through separation, divorce or other reason. Of course there are other types of trauma - such as bullying, community violence, homelessness, moving often, racism and gender discrimination - but the ACE Study measured only 10.

The study found that of the 17,000 mostly white, middle-class, college-educated, Kaiser health-insured adults who participated in the ACE Study, nearly two-thirds experienced at least one type of severe childhood trauma. About 40 percent had suffered two or more.

The study found that a person with four or more adverse childhood experiences is 12 times more likely to attempt suicide, 10 times more likely to inject street drugs, seven times more likely to be an alcoholic, 2 1/2 times more likely to have a stroke and twice as likely to have cancer. The lifespans of people with ACE scores of 6 are shortened by 20 years. ACE studies have now been done in 29 states and Washington, D.C., with similar results.

When children experience trauma, their brains instantly react by going into fight, flight or freeze mode. They produce an overload of stress hormones - such as cortisol and adrenaline - that harm the function and structure of their brain. This is called "toxic" stress.

If they have no safe adult living in a safe environment to rely on, children with toxic stress respond to the world as a place of constant danger. With their brains overloaded with stress hormones and unable to function appropriately, they can't focus on learning. They fall behind in school, fail to develop healthy relationships with peers or create problems with teachers and principals because they are unable to trust adults. Some kids do all three.

With despair, guilt and frustration pecking away at their psyches, they often find solace in food, alcohol, tobacco, methamphetamines, violence, crime, inappropriate sex, high-risk sports and/or work and overachievement. They don't regard these coping methods as problems. Consciously or unconsciously, they use them as solutions to escape from depression, anxiety, anger, fear and shame.

This doesn't excuse their behavior, ACEs experts say, but the solution to helping them heal so that they won't commit more crime is to help them resolve their underlying issues, instead of putting them in a system that further traumatizes them.

Those involved with JDAI say that creating trauma-informed systems has certainly meant a decrease in trauma, because fewer kids are locked up in the first place, Balis says. "If a system is truly going to be trauma-informed, that has to be a system that avoids the use of detention, incarceration and out-of-home placement at all costs," he says. Detention should be used "rarely, for short periods of time, and only when a young person presents a serious risk to safety."

And, for those who are incarcerated, they receive considerably more physical and emotional space. "With the depopulation, the safe reduction of using [detention] centers for kids, it is a lot easier to do right by the kids in a 60-bed detention center that has 20 kids in it, than one that has 90 kids in it," Balis says. "Imagine what you can provide and do for the young people in your care. Anyone would sign up for today's version."

Bernalillo County, N.M., signed up for JDAI early on, in the late 1990s, when its 78-bed facility housed 130 youth, says Gerry Bachicha, JDAI administrator. Since then, the average daily population has fallen by more than half and the average length of stay is "well below what we've started with," although it's inched up slightly the past couple years as the facility has become more tightly focused on higher-risk kids.

The county has embedded case managers in the process to help expedite both the court calendar and mental health evaluations, Bachicha says. And Bernalillo has focused on detaining youth who present a safety risk - but not necessarily those who are simply high-need, who can be helped through community mental health facilities.

Lucas County became a JDAI site in 2009 and learned through the initial assessment that county government was attempting to do too much itself. "They pointed out that we were doing a lot of it in-house, in the traditional government methodology way," says Kendra Kec, assistant court administrator for Lucas County Juvenile Court. "We concentrated on, 'How do we grow what we do in-house to get community buy-in and partner with the many different entities in the community to develop broader and better programming?'"

The county has definitely benefited from the JDAI approach to not put youth into detention if they don't need to be there, Kec says. "If it's a low-level offense, we don't want to retraumatize kids by putting them in detention," she says. "You're inherently reducing the trauma by getting them that upfront evaluation. Instead of going to detention, they're sitting down and meeting with social workers and hopefully addressing their needs."

According to JDAI, before Lucas County was a JDAI site, it sent 76 youth into Ohio's youth prison system. By 2014, it sent just 18 kids to prison.

Carol Cramer Brooks, CEO of the National Partnership for Juvenile Services ( NPJS), credits the success of the broader movement in juvenile justice reform with helping to put mental health needs on the radar of detention center leaders.

"Detention centers realized the youth we were serving had a lot more mental health needs and a lot more co-occurring disorders ... and oh, by the way, they're also all suffering from some form of trauma," she says. "They have been very, very successful [in recognizing that connection], and we're thankful for that, in changing the population in our detention centers. Their terminology is getting the 'right kids' in detention."

Those who don't need the intensive services are "diverted to community programs," she says, "so youth who don't really need to be locked up have options in the community." Some are put on an electronic tether, or assigned to a day or evening reporting center, or assigned to probation. Some, who "don't really need anything" as they await trial, "are just encouraged to go to Boys & Girls Clubs."

Juvenile detention centers not as advanced

Although JDAI's Balis hopes that while kids are in detention, they're receiving therapeutic services that could address trauma, most juvenile detention centers - where youth under 18 charged with a serious crime are housed before trial - take a decades-old attitude of "We're detention, we're pre-adjudicated, we don't do treatment," says Brooks. In fact one of the key principles that JDAI is addressing is based on the fact that violence and maltreatment remain widespread in juvenile detention facilities nationwide.

A few juvenile detention centers have started to make some changes. "It's small," says Brooks, "10 to 20 percent of the total. One of the key reasons short-term detention centers have shied away from implementing a formal (trauma-informed) model is they feel, 'We don't have kids that long, so we couldn't possibly do that [program] with any sense of fidelity.'

"They screen for mental health, they screen for risk of suicide, but none of those screenings really cover the impact of trauma on a youth's life," she says.

Among the first facilities to move from strict punishment to a more therapeutic approach was the Randall County Juvenile Probation Department in Amarillo, Texas, which opened a new facility in 1993. It was dedicated to holistic programming rather than just "warehousing kids," says Barry Gilbert, director of training for the department.

Randall County uses the Rational Behavior Training methodology developed by psychiatrist and author Max Maultsby (a derivative of Rational Emotive Behavior Training, developed by Albert Ellis), which is based around the carrots of earned privileges like extra movie-watching time, rather than the sticks of punishment like solitary confinement.

"To increase positive behaviors, you must offer an environment that rewards those behaviors in a way that appeals to the young people; while at the same time teaching them new skills and ways to handle their very real and significant problems," says Jane King, director of probation in Randall County.

"We start teaching them about the connection between what you tell yourself and the way you feel, and the way you act," says Gilbert. "See if the things you tell yourself are rational. If not, do you want to change the way you feel? Do you want to change the way you act? And therefore change the outside consequences?"

RBT, which is not included in the model programs identified by the OJJDP in the U.S. Department of Justice, stops short of being trauma-informed. It's also not based on brain science, which shows that traumatized kids have to know that they're safe before they move out of survival mode and into thinking clearly. A situation that triggers their trauma can send them into their coping strategies, which may include violence and drug use.

As part of the facility's discipline management process, youth must complete an assessment of incidents that led up to them being sanctioned, Gilbert says. The purpose of that is "to look at what happened, what you told yourself, and how you can change the next time," he says. "It's a therapeutic process that's built into the disciplinary process. For a lot of kids, that's where they get the connection: 'I picked up a chair and threw it at a staff member and cussed him out because I was mad at the staff.' When they go back and look at it, they weren't mad at the staff, they were mad at something else." And they are prompted to ask themselves: "What do I need to change about my whole thought process?"

Randall County trains its staff with what Gilbert terms "the five universal truths of human communication," which help centers avoid retraumatizing youth, he says. These are:

People would like to be treated with dignity and respect.

People would like to be asked rather than told.

People would like to be told why they are being asked.

People would like to get options than threats.

People would like to get a second chance.

"That's the underpinning of what we do here," Gilbert says. "We've been challenging kids to rise above their circumstances for 22 years. We've been challenging kids not to revictimize themselves. We've been challenging kids not to blame their behavior on their past - which is not to say you aren't a product of your past."

He adds: "We want kids to change their thinking because you change the way you feel and the way you act. You can't go back and change the things that were done to you, but you can change how you think about those things, whether it is traumatization, generational criminal behavior within your own family, gang involvement, drug involvement."

The detention center in Lucas County, Ohio, which serves the city of Toledo, trained staff in RBT about a decade ago, says the county's assistant court administrator Kec. The county's system tries to not expose youth to additional trauma by using a thoughtful behavioral management system rather than solitary confinement, she says.

The facility will occasionally remove a youth to his or her room until acting out de-escalates, Kec adds, "but to say that a youth is sentenced to solitary for seven days, we do not do that. ... Youth do need to be removed [from the general population] to de-escalate certain behavior. Unit safety is always first."

The detention center uses a sequenced series of time-outs that encourage youth to take responsibility and own up to whatever got them in trouble in the first place.

"To take responsibility means to look at ... what triggered the situation and then the behavior and the consequence they received," she says. "And then they have to look at all the alternatives of what they might do next time, and evaluate how they might change their behavior. They review that with the detention officer prior to rejoining the program."

And if in that process an underlying issue is identified, the youth might be referred for therapy. This doesn't take place at the facility, Kec says, although a staff mental health social worker helps to make the referrals, of which more than 300 occurred in 2014.

If a youth's behavior becomes completely out of control, he or she can be placed into "administrative intervention," Kec says, which means the youth is overseen by a therapist and a detention administrator. Kids are provided behavioral plans they can follow to work their way back into the larger population of detainees.

"For the safety of the facility, the child might be placed on this plan until they can safely rejoin," she says. "But as far as room time or isolation as a form of punishment, we do not do that at all. Every time a child is placed in his or her own room, they are given instructions as to what they have to do to earn their way back into the programming." The time intervals for room placement start at 30 minutes and continue upward in 30- and 60-minute intervals, she adds.

And once they do so, they can continue earning privileges for good behavior, Kec adds. "They want to be able to earn their coupons to get extra things from the commissary," she says. "They want to be able to earn their points, to go to a pod party at the end of the week."

'180-degree shift in philosophy'

The Berrien County, Mich., Juvenile Detention Center also adopted the RBT approach about a decade ago. Director Richard Dama, a licensed mental health therapist, does not consider RBT to be trauma-informed care, although he definitely sees it as a vast improvement over the "custodial mentality" that he saw remnants of when he first arrived.

"We have, over the past several years, evolved from a detention center with a treatment program, to a treatment program that happens to detain kids - it's a complete, 180-degree shift in philosophy and programming," Dama says. "We tell the kids, 'It's our job to keep you here.' We also tell them, 'During that time, we are going to help you figure out what it is you did, and how it is you were thinking that led you to be here, so hopefully you don't have to come back.'"

Dama and his assistant director, Terry Martinek, who is president of the NPJS' Council for Detention, speak at conferences and trainings around the country about Berrien County's reforms. "The first thing we tell the group is, we are not in the punishment business; we are in the restorative justice business," Dama says. "We are trying to turn these kids around, so they think and act like responsible citizens."

In Berrien County, the RBT approach took hold after repeated fights among kids that staff had to break up, Martinek says. "We had a high number of staff injuries resulting in lost time at work. It got to the point where it was decided we needed to do something different."

During the last 10 years, Martinek says, violent incidents have dropped between 70 percent and 80 percent. They try to praise and reward youth in their care at least four times as often as they experience a negative consequence, he says. "The staff spends a lot of time talking with young people. We give them respect. That's not to say they don't get defiant, but we try to do everything we can to center them."

The facility runs at least 21 groups per week on subjects ranging from anger management to accepting authority in which detainees are taught how to disagree agreeably. "Youth use those tools in communicating with staff," he says.

Similar to the system in Lucas County, those who need a negative consequence start with a five-minute time-out, where they're asked to sit in the corner and analyze their behavior, then report back to staff about how they plan to change their behavior in the future.

Those who resist doing so are given an additional 30-minute time-out, usually in a hallway in the staff office area, within view of a camera. But "they never get out of the five-minute consequence they earned at the beginning," Martinek says. "They know that. We teach that. They will tell other students, 'If you earn a consequence, just take it.'"

And if they become sexually or physically aggressive toward staff, they are locked in their room for 30 minutes, then given 30 minutes on a chair in the hallway before returning for their initial five minutes, Dama says. "We don't approach it as a punishment," he says. "It's just an opportunity for youngsters to de-escalate themselves: 'My behavior has gotten me into this situation. How did I get here, and what can I do differently next time?'"

Staff encourage this thought process, Dama says. "They'll challenge the youth: 'What are you thinking?' What's driving these behaviors?'" he says. "We also teach the staff and residents to ignore a lot [of acting out]." And staff attempt to "catch kids doing things right," he adds. "We will reward them with a coupon [toward a desired activity]."

"A lot of people believe you're giving up your staff authority. You're not. We're just asking the children to think about their behavior," Martinek says.

And the facility has prompted youth to reach that point without restraining them or putting them in solitary confinement for three days, which goes against trauma-informed principles, Martinek says. Even for those who are put in their rooms for 30 minutes, "It's not solitary confinement by any means," Dama says. "Clinical staff check with them several times. Teachers go back and give them worksheets and check in with them. Staff lay eyes on them every 15 minutes.

Tom Jarlock, executive director of Florida Parishes Juvenile Detention Center in Covington, La., steered his institution toward trauma-informed care based on the ACE Study after he arrived a decade ago.

"I could not believe that this institutional model I saw was being used on kids," he says. "We have 50 years of research in juvenile justice. We know boot camps don't work; they increase recidivism. Institutional models don't work. They prepare kids for institutionalization. I'm not afraid to think outside the box."

In evolving from an institutional to a caregiver model, Florida Parishes has implemented Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, an OJJDP model program in which staff encourage youth to closely examine their own behavior and think about how they could change, Jarlock says.

"CBT is the infrastructure that feeds the many things we do," he says.

The shift from an institutional model requires a move from tenets of structure, authority and a violent response to challenges, to asking staff to "take more of a shepherd's response," Jarlock says. "It's a lot easier to sit behind the desk and do the institutional model. It's more difficult to ask if there are alternative ways to provide this service, are there ways to preserve the dignity of the human beings in our care.

"The need to have children inside juvenile detention centers is always going to be with us," says Jarlock. "How do we protect these kids from becoming habituated to incarceration? ... I want kids to say, 'Those people helped me change my life.' Instead, you hear, 'I got my ass beat in there.'"

Florida Parishes' staff experienced about a 60 percent turnover in the first 18 months after instituting CBT, because some believed it was "psychological mumbo-jumbo and pined for the old days when you could just kick kids around," Jarlock says. "Instead of teaching kids a lesson through violence, we now teach kids social skills. ... We do teach kids lessons. It's just no longer the school of hard knocks."

Although not all practices trauma-informed, results are promising

Berrien County has seen a drop in youth readmitted a second time from 36 percent in 2003, the year before RBT was implemented, to 18.6 percent in 2013, although that number has fluctuated up and down somewhat and reached as high as 28 percent as recently as 2010. Third admissions have fallen from 23 percent in 2003 to 13.4 percent in 2013, fluctuating between 7 percent and 19 percent in the intervening years. However, the percentage of youth admitted four or more times has not fallen significantly.

In Florida Parishes, Jarlock has seen a significant drop in time lost to staff injuries as a result of "tussles" with youth. Ten people were out with injuries when he was first hired, some as a result of trying to break up fights among detainees. "After teaching our staff how to de-escalate behaviors, and understanding what comes next, the reduction has been very notable," he says.

"Ten years ago, there would be at least one full-on restraint, fight between kids, or fight between kids and staff, every day," Jarlock says. "Now it's one or two times per month. Before we resorted to force; now we find out what's going on and spend 30 or 45 minutes with them. The kid is obviously asking for help - how can we find out what he needs? Ten years ago, we used pepper spray and made liberal use of handcuffs. That's all gone now."

Jarlock says one staff member at Florida Parishes first came to know the facility as a detainee in 2005 and 2008. "He can tell you how it was at the beginning [of the reform], how it was midway through, and now how it is as an employee," he says. "It was really rough at first, and by the second visit he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He's the staff member the kids love the most because they identify with him."

When youth in Florida Parishes' care know they can get help, that's when juvenile detention centers know they've made headway, Jarlock says. "We don't want kids to lash out and get pissed off," he says. "When you get a kid to stop and think, you've won the battle. That's a human being who's considering his options, rather than reacting to stimuli. Most of these kids have experienced adverse childhood events. We're seeing them through the eyes of someone who understands trauma."

"The crux of the matter is that these youth are intrinsically valuable human beings who have made some incredibly bad choices, and therefore they should be treated with dignity and respect while holding them accountable for those choices," King says.
This article was originally posted by ACEs Too High News.

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Juvenile Detention Centers: On the Other Side of 'Lock 'Em Up,' but Not Quite Trauma-Informed

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There's a lot of progress in revamping what happens to kids on the way to detention centers - in fact, 300 sites in 39 states have changed their approach, with remarkable results, according to the 2014 Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative Progress Report.

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History of the JJDPA

Established in 1974 and most recently authorized in 2018 with bipartisan support, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) is based on a broad consensus that children, youth, and families involved with the juvenile and criminal courts should be guarded by federal standards for care and custody, while also upholding the interests of community safety and the prevention of victimization.

Click if you'd like to learn about recent efforts to reauthorize the JJDPA.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) provides for:

A nationwide juvenile justic e planning and advisory system spanning all states, territories, and the District of Columbia;

Federal funding for delinquency prevention and improvements in state and local juvenile justice programs and practices; and

The operation of a federal agency, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which is dedicated to training, technical assistance, model programs, and research and evaluation, to support state and local efforts.

The JJDPA has four Core Requirements:

A status offender is a juvenile charged with or adjudicated for conduct that would not, under the law of the jurisdiction in which the offense was committed, be a crime if committed by an adult. The most common examples of status offenses are chronic or persistent truancy, running away, violating curfew laws, or possessing alcohol or tobacco. This JJDPA requirement focuses on alternatives to placing juveniles into detention facilities for status offenses.

This requirement focuses on removing juveniles from adult jails and detention facilities.

This requirement ensures that accused and adjudicated delinquents, status offenders, and non-offending juveniles are not detained or confined in any institution where they may have contact with adult inmates.

This requirement focuses on helping states address and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities within the juvenile justice system.

The Importance of a Federal-State Partnership with State and Local Jurisdictions

Given that there are hundreds of different juvenile justice systems throughout the U.S. states and territories, it is critical that juvenile justice have a dedicated focus and a "home" within federal government. This department would serve the purposes of developing national policies, objectives, priorities, and plans, and for providing guidance, support, and oversight to states/territories in implementing the JJDPA. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is the agency charged with responsibility for juvenile justice at the U.S. Department of Justice. OJJDP carries out its purposes through research, policies, and grants to states and localities. These grants assist them in planning, establishing, operating, coordinating, and evaluating projects for the development of more effective education, training, research, prevention, diversion, treatment, and rehabilitation in the areas of juvenile delinquency prevention and systems improvements.

Similarly, it is imperative that the states be in constant and collaborative contact with the federal government in order to develop strategies that work for the states, meet local needs, and lead to best and promising practices for children, youth, and communities across the nation. The SAGs fulfill this role, individually and collectively, by:

Embodying models for collaborative systems change;

Providing real-world advice and counsel to their respective Governors and state legislatures, as well as the President and the U.S. Congress; and

Serving as incubators for cost-effective innovations that create optimal outcomes for the prevention of delinquency.

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Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act

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History of the JJDPA Established in 1974 and most recently authorized in 2018 with bipartisan support, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) is based on a broad consensus that children, youth, and families involved with the juvenile and criminal courts should be guarded by federal standards for care and custody, while also upholding the interests of community safety and the prevention of victimization.

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Frequently Asked Questions about Juvenile Justice System Structure & Process

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) provide the latest answers to commonly asked questions about Juvenile Justice System Structure and Process. Here you will find information on the jurisdictional boundaries for delinquent and status offenders, the organization and administration of delinquency services, and state provisions for trying certain juveniles as adults in criminal court.

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Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention Act

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Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.Youth at Risk

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PIX11 News was granted rare access Thursday inside the Crossroads Juvenile Detention Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The teens at Crossroads come from all five boroughs and are accused of serious crimes, but they are too young to go to the Rikers Island Jail as they await trial.

"We are not their judge and jury," explained Louis Watts, the executive director of Crossroads. "Our job as human service agents is to be able to service our young people."

The city's youth detention centers have faced scandal after scandal in the last few years, with accusations of physical and sexual abuse. Thursday, the city tried to paint a very different image, showing PIX11 newly renovated units, motivational sessions and literature classes.

"Juveniles should be treated as juveniles. Young people should be treated as young people," David Hansell, the commissioner for the Administration for Children's Services, said. "We in New York are on the cusp of one of the most far reaching and progressive reforms in juvenile justice in decades and that's Raise the Age."

Before Governor Andrew Cuomo signed Raise the Age legislation last year, 16 and 17 year olds were automatically prosecuted as adults in city jails. But in less than six weeks, 16 and 17 year old on Rikers Island will be moved to a city detention center in the Bronx, much like Crossroads.

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An inside look at an NYC juvenile detention center

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PIX11 News was granted rare access Thursday inside the Crossroads Juvenile Detention Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The teens at Crossroads come from all five boroughs and are accused of serious crimes, but they are too young to go to the Rikers Island Jail as they await trial.

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Arbitrariness

Defense attorneys for Sayfullo Saipov (pictured), the man accused of killing eight people by driving a truck onto a Manhattan bike path on October 31, 2017, have asked a New York federal district court to bar the U.S. government f...

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History of the Death Penalty New York's hisory of capital punishment goes back to colonial times, with the second most executions of any state from 1608 to 1972, after Virginia. The State of New York had assigned a committee to develop a more humane method of execution. New York's death penalty was...

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In 2006, Cyntoia Brown was convicted of murdering a man who hired her for sex and sentenced to life in prison. She was sixteen years old. Brown testified that she killed the man in self defense, that she was forced into prostitution by an abusive boyfriend after escaping an abusive home. None of that mattered in the Tennessee court where she was tried as an adult.

Brown is far from alone. She is one of about 10,000 Americans serving life sentences for offenses committed as a child, meaning under the age of eighteen. Of them, approximately 2,500 are serving an even more dire sentence-life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). The United States is the only country in the world that sentences people to die in prison for offenses committed as children.

The U.S. has been grappling with how to address crimes committed by children for centuries. As early as 1899, U.S. jurisdictions began creating the world's first juvenile courts, which held children less culpable for their crimes, diverting many away from adult prisons. Within decades, however, these courts found themselves under attack by prosecutors and others who feared they were too lenient on dangerous underage murderers. During the 1980s and 90s, the power of juvenile court judges was greatly reduced, with a corresponding increase in power for prosecutors and criminal trial courts, allowing thousands of teenagers like Cyntoia Brown to receive life sentences.

Since 2005, several key Supreme Court decisions and individual state laws have sought to protect children from the most extreme sentences, but even these reforms have faced significant resistance from prosecutors and lawmakers.
* * *
"The past decade marks a revolution in the attitude of the state toward its offending children," proclaimed a 1909 Harvard Law Review article by Julian W. Mack. Until then, Mack wrote, "our common criminal law did not differentiate between the adult and the minor who had reached the age of criminal responsibility," leaving child offenders "huddled together" with adults in jails and workhouses. Before the juvenile justice "revolution" he described, the age of criminal responsibility in U.S. states ranged from 7 to 12.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, reformers pushed for the creation of juvenile court systems that would seek to rehabilitate child offenders.

This harshness toward children derived from traditional English common law, which convicted and punished 7- to 14-year-old children as long as they appeared to understand the difference between right and wrong. There are records of children as young as 10 put to death in eighteenth century England.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, U.S. reformers pushed for the creation of juvenile court systems that would seek to rehabilitate-not just punish-child offenders. As the legal scholars David S. Tanenhaus and Steven A. Drizin outline in a 2002 paper in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the first juvenile court opened in 1899 in Cook County, IL (home of Chicago), thanks to reformers Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop. By 1909, more than 30 American jurisdictions adopted similar legislation, as did Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.

Writing in 1909, Mack captured the prevailing view toward reform over punishment: "the child who has begun to go wrong, who is incorrigible, who has broken a law or an ordinance, is to be taken in hand by the state, not as an enemy but as a protector, as the ultimate guardian." Ideally, he wrote, convicted children should be placed on probation, assigned a guardian, and allowed to remain in their own homes and communities. In cases where removal from the home was deemed necessary, the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered that "a real school, not a prison in disguise, must be provided."

"What they need, more than anything else, is kindly assistance," wrote Mack. "The aim of the court in appointing a probation officer for the child, is to have the child and the parents feel, not so much the power, as the friendly interest of the state." He quoted a Supreme Court of Utah decision, which declared that a juvenile judge must be "a man of broad mind, of almost infinite patience, and one who is the possessor of great faith in humanity."

As the movement toward mercy and reduced culpability for children swept the nation, in 1920 criminal law journal article, Arthur Towne, the superintendent of the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, considered whether New York State should follow other states in increasing its age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18, asking:

Does he go to bed the night before his sixteenth birthday, a tender boy in need of the state's solicitude, and awaken the next morning a bearded man, full-fledged in experience and self-control, and in ability to fulfill his obligations as a citizen? Upon donning his long trousers does he forthwith become a man; or in spite of his somewhat lengthened years and clothes, may he still be in his short "pants" mentally and morally?

Writing in 1920, Towne said adolescence continues through age 25, and that treating 14- or 16-year olds as functioning adults "simply flies in the face of present-day psychology and the hard facts."
***
Despite Towne's advocacy, New York State did not stop automatically charging 16- and 17-year-olds as adults until April 2017. Juvenile courts faced decades of backlash, as prosecutors argued for discretion over whether individual cases should be heard in juvenile or criminal court. In a series of decisions, the Illinois Supreme Court stripped power from the juvenile courts, granting the state's attorney the authority to decide in which court a child would be tried.

Beginning in the 1930s, prosecutors pushed for more power, claiming that the nation faced a dangerous new class of child murderers. In 1935, the Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court declared that juvenile courts were intended for "bad boys and girls who have committed no serious crime," but were being used to protect "highly dangerous gunmen and thieves, or even murderers." But even as juvenile courts were being undermined, they were simultaneously legitimized. In the 1960s, U.S. Supreme Court decisions guaranteed due process protections in juvenile court, including the right to counsel.

In 1978, the "automatic transfer law" was born. A 15-year-old New Yorker named Willie Bosket was convicted of killing two men on the subway. He was tried in juvenile court and received the maximum juvenile sentence of five years. Two days later, New York Governor Hugh Carey (in the middle of a tight re-election battle) called a special session of the legislature to produce the Juvenile Offender Act. This "automatic transfer law" required children as young as 13 to be tried as adults for murder.

Attacks on the power of the juvenile court intensified in the 1980s and 90s. "These cries grew to a fever pitch with the birth of the ' superpredator ' myth in late 1995," wrote Tanenhaus and Drizin. Academics, prosecutors, and lawmakers criticized juvenile courts, using "the sound bite 'adult time for adult crime' as their mantra."

Between 1990 and 1996, forty states passed laws making it easier for juveniles to be prosecuted as adults, often by transferring power from juvenile judges to prosecutors. Other new laws prevented the sealing of juvenile records, set mandatory minimum sentences, or removed phrases like "rehabilitation" and "the best interests of the child" from statutes, replacing them with "punishment" and "the protection of the public."

While attorneys and politicians panicked about the rise of the "superpredator," juvenile crime actually declined between 1994 and 2000.

The new laws kept coming, with 43 states passing similar changes between 1996 and 1999. A 1999 report found that when juveniles were transferred to adult court and convicted of murder, they received, on average, longer sentences than adults convicted of the same crime. In 1998, close to 200,000 kids were tried as adults and 18,000 were housed in adult prisons.

"Teenagers account for the largest portion of all violent crime in America," declared then-Florida representative Bill McCollum in 1996. "They're the most violent criminals on the face of the earth." He was arguing in support of an ultimately failed federal bill that would have required some 13-year-olds to be tried as adults.

As children were increasingly tried as adults, racial minorities suffered the most. In 1997, white children made up 57 percent of juvenile cases involving offenses against others, but just 45 percent of the cases transferred to adult court. And while white youth constituted 59 percent of juvenile drug cases, they made up just 35 percent of the cases transferred to adult court.

Clinging to the "superpredator" myth, prosecutors parroted colorful claims about the nineteenth century mischief-makers that juvenile courts had been created for. According to various District Attorney's offices, the courts were created "when kids were throwing spitballs," "when kids were knocking over outhouses," and "at a time of more 'Leave it to Beaver' type crimes."
***
While attorneys and politicians panicked about the rise of the "superpredator," juvenile crime actually declined between 1994 and 2000. A 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report found that "there is not evidence that the young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youth in earlier years."

As it turns out, there have always been murders by children. Using the Chicago Homicide Database, Tanenhaus and Drizin located the cases of 24 children tried for homicide by juvenile courts in the early 1900s. They wrote that these cases "reveal that the juvenile court was created at a time when kids were not only throwing spitballs and knocking over outhouses, but they were also killing people." These cases show how children were protected from the adult criminal system, thanks to multiple checks on the power of prosecutors.

In one 1910 case, a 12- or 14-year-old girl (accounts differ) was accused of beating an 8-year-old girl to death with a baseball. A "coroner's jury" was summoned: a group of citizens convened to determine cause of death. "Owing to the extreme youth of the accused," declared the coroner's jury, "the Jury recommend that she be permitted to remain in the custody of her parents for the present until the case is taken up by the Juvenile Court." The authors note that coroner's juries were rife with corruption and graft. Yet in this case and others, they did serve as a check on prosecutors, helping keep children out of adult court.

In a 1908 case, twin 13-year-old boys were tried for stabbing a schoolmate to death with a letter opener. Although the coroner's jury recommended the boys go before an adult court, they were protected by other checks on the system: The grand jury ruled there was insufficient evidence to prosecute one twin, and the state officially declined to prosecute the other.

In a third case, in 1926, four 15- and 16-year-old boys were arrested in a shooting death. They took various paths through the court system, with some starting in the adult criminal system and some in the juvenile-yet ultimately, none were prosecuted as adults.

The 24 cases studied by Tanenhaus and Drizin are a small sample, but demonstrate that murders by children were far from new in the 1980s and 90s. What was new was the state's harsh punishments.
* * *
In the 2000s, criminal justice reform gained traction. According to the ACLU, "after decades of punitive 'tough-on-crime' responses to youth crime and misbehavior, there has been a perceptible shift in recent years surrounding juvenile justice issues in the United States. Policymakers are slowly returning to the first principles of juvenile justice by recognizing that young people are still developing and should be given opportunities for treatment, rehabilitation, and positive reinforcement."

An early turning point came in 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court determined that death sentences for children violate the 8th amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment in Roper v. Simmons. Over the next 10 years, the Court expanded on Roper, chipping away at the sentences that children may receive. First, in 2010, Graham v. Florida made it unconstitutional to sentence a child to LWOP for any crime other than murder. Two years later, Miller v. Alabama made it illegal for states to impose mandatory sentences of LWOP for juveniles (judges may still use their discretion to give the sentence in rare cases of "irreparable corruption," but the sentence cannot be mandated).

The Supreme Court based these decisions on fundamental scientific differences between adult and child brains. The Court's Miller decision quoted a brief from the American Psychological Association: "It is increasingly clear that adolescent brains are not yet fully mature in regions and systems related to higher-order executive functions such as impulse control, planning ahead, and risk avoidance."

In yet another groundbreaking case, the Supreme Court made the Miller decision retroactive in 2016's Montgomery v. Louisiana. As a result, the roughly 2,500 people serving LWOP for crimes they committed as children are eligible for resentencing hearings.

Montgomery does not reduce anyone's sentence automatically. Each county is responsible for its own resentencing, and District Attorneys around the U.S. have interpreted the Supreme Court's order differently. In Philadelphia County, which previously held the record for the most people serving juvenile LWOP, resentencing hearings are moving relatively quickly. At least seventy people have already been resentenced, paroled, and released. In Michigan, meanwhile, county prosecutors have announced their intentions to re-seek LWOP in 247 out of 363 juvenile cases, essentially claiming that 68 percent of kids sentenced to life without parole fit the "rare" label of "irreparable corruption." And in Louisiana, 71-year-old Henry Montgomery, the man for whom the case was named, remains incarcerated after getting a new sentence of life with the possibility of parole.

Miller and Montgomery do nothing for children serving other extreme sentences. Cyntoia Brown, who is unaffected by Montgomery because she is serving a regular life sentence, recently applied for clemency to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam. She could become immediately parole-eligible if the governor commutes her sentence to time served. Without clemency, Brown will have her first shot at parole in 2055, when she will be 67 years old.

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Why Does the U.S. Sentence Children to Life in Prison? | JSTOR Daily

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In 2006, Cyntoia Brown was convicted of murdering a man who hired her for sex and sentenced to life in prison. She was sixteen years old. Brown testified that she killed the man in self defense, that she was forced into prostitution by an abusive boyfriend after escaping an abusive home.

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Education

Model programs have assisted families and children by providing them with information. Some programs inform parents on how to raise healthy children; some teach children about the effects of drugs, gangs, sex, and weapons; and others aim to express to youth the innate worth they and all others have. All of these programs provide youths with the awareness that their actions have consequences. This is particularly important in an era where youth are barraged with sexual and violent images. Educational programs have the underlying intent of encouraging hope and opening up opportunities for young people.

Recreation

One of the immediate benefits of recreational activities is that they fill unsupervised after-school hours. The Department of Education has reported that youths are most likely to commit crimes between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., with crime rates peaking at 3 p.m. Recreation programs allow youths to connect with other adults and children in the community. Such positive friendships may assist children in later years. Youth programs are designed to fit the personalities and skills of different children and may include sports, dancing, music, rock climbing, drama, karate, bowling, art, and other activities.

Community Involvement

Girl scouts, boy scouts, church youth groups, and volunteer groups all involve youth within a community. Involvement in community groups provide youth with an opportunity to interact in a safe social environment.

Prenatal and Infancy Home Visitation by Nurses

Nurses involved in the "Prenatal and Infancy Home Visitation by Nurses" program pay visits to low income, single mothers between their third trimester and the second year of their child's life. During these visits, nurses focus on the health of the mother and child, the support relationships in the mother's life, and the enrollment of the mother and child in Health and Human Services programs. A 15-year follow-up study found that mothers and children involved in the program had had a 79 percent lower child abuse rate, a 56 percent lower child runaway rate, and a 56 percent lower child arrest rate. Maternal behavior problems also dropped significantly in the studied group.

Parent-Child Interaction Training Program

The "Parent-Child Integration Training Program" takes parents and children approximately 12 weeks to complete. It is designed to teach parenting skills to parents of children ages two to seven who exhibit major behavioral problems. The program places parents and children in interactive situations. A therapist guides the parents, educating them on how best to respond to their child's behavior, whether positive or negative. The program has been shown to reduce hyperactivity, attention deficit, aggression, and anxious behavior in children.

Bullying Prevention Program

The Bullying Prevention Program is put into place in elementary and junior high school settings. An anonymous student questionnaire fills teachers and administrators in as to who is doing the bullying, which kids are most frequently victimized, and where bullying occurs on campus. Once teachers and administrators have learned about how and where bullying occurs at their school, they set up class rules and facilitate discussions that address the problem. Individual bullies and victims receive independent counseling. The program succeeds in creating a safer, less hostile environment for students at minimal cost.

Prevention Programs within the Juvenile Justice System

A youth entering the Juvenile Justice System has the opportunity to receive intervention assistance from the state. In the care of the state, a youth may receive drug rehabilitation assistance, counseling, and educational opportunities. The success of the Juvenile Justice System is measured by how well it prepares youth to re-enter the community without committing further crimes. Optimally, all juvenile detention facilities would catch youths up on their education, provide them with job training, give them the experience of living in a safe, stable environment, and provide them with assistance to break harmful habits.

The Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility

The Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility (NCYF) is an example of a successful juvenile detention facility that gears its programs toward restoring delinquent youth. The facility holds young adult violent offenders and juvenile delinquents who have been tried in adult court for committing violent crimes. The youngest inmates are 15 and the oldest are 21. NCYF is a "maximum security institution" that was designed to separate young violent offenders from adult offenders, and to assist young inmates by providing them with the help they need to change their behavior.

All inmates are required to participate in the educational opportunities provided by the facility. They are required to meet standards that are set forth by the prison on a person-by-person basis. Each inmate has the opportunity to earn a GED and to take community college level courses. The parents of inmates may follow their child's progress through communication with staff. While at NCYF, inmates are given the opportunity to work as teacher assistants, gardeners, recreational leaders, and kitchen staff. The facility's recreation program also provides an array of activities, from basketball leagues to ping-pong tournaments. An annual 10k is held, in which the inmates race with staff members. NCYF monitors the health of its occupants, in part, by providing drug rehabilitation counseling and by performing weekly drug tests.

A program unique to NCYF is "Project HEART." Prisoners who have met specified behavioral and educational requirements may train a pet dog. The dogs, deemed unfit for adoption because of behavioral problems, are given a home in the prison yard. A qualified inmate may be given a dog to take care of for a period of time. He (NCYF only holds male inmates) may bring the dog with him to his classes and activities. He is ultimately responsible for teaching the dog. After a period of training, the dogs receive "Good Canine Citizen Awards" and are set up for adoption through the Nebraska Humane Society. Inmates whose dogs are placed with a family, are given the opportunity to talk to the family, via phone, and give them tips on how the dog has been trained.

As a measure of the success it has experienced in rehabilitating violent offenders, NCYF received a 99.7 percent initial accreditation in August of 2000 from the American Correctional Association (ACA), formerly the National Prison Association.

Ending Repeat Offenses

Once out of detention, youths face the challenge of readjusting to "free" life. For many, youth detainment places a halt in a pattern of destructive behavior. Once out of prison, the youth must create a pattern of life separate from criminal activity. To assist in this process, courts have attempted to implement helpful social services for former inmates and their families. Some of these are job placement, school follow-up, extended counseling, and extended drug rehab. The Functional Family Therapy (FFT) program assists youth on parole by helping them and their families communicate in more effective, positive ways.

Functional Family Therapy (FFT)

The Functional Family Therapy program helps adolescents on probation - and their families. A family therapist works with the family and helps individual family members see how they can positively motivate change in their home. The program works in three phases. During the first phase, the therapist attempts to break down resistance to therapy and encourages the family to believe that negative communication and interaction patterns can be changed. In the second phase, family members are taught new ways to approach day-to-day situations; they are shown how to change their behaviors and responses to situations. During the third phase, family members are encouraged to move new relational skills into other social situations (school, or the workplace, for instance). FFT reduces recidivism rates and juvenile delinquency at a low cost. Twelve FFT sessions cost approximately one-sixth the cost of detaining a youth for one month. Another positive effect of the program is that the siblings of the youth on parole are less likely to commit crimes because of the help their family has received.

Ineffective Prevention Strategies

Scare Tactics

Currently, Americans are steering away from this tactic, as it has proven rather ineffective, but during the 1990s it was a technique that politicians and the greater community put much confidence in. Slogans such as "get tough on crime" and "adult time for adult crime" spoke to the common-sense core of many people who worried about rising juvenile crime rates. The basic ideology centered on the idea that crime rates were high because youth were not afraid of facing juvenile detention. General opinion held that the system had become too soft; the threat of confinement was not deterring youth from criminal activity.

Several major shifts occurred during this time:

Juvenile courts gave increased jurisdiction to adult, criminal courts. Courts authorized easier transfers of juveniles into the adult criminal court and, in some states, waived their authority over specified crimes.

Youths were sent to adult prisons in increased numbers. Younger offenders were sent to adult prisons as states tightened their definition of who was a child, and more court decisions placed youth in adult confinement.

Youths were issued longer prison sentences in the adult system than they would have been given in the juvenile justice system. Most of those sentenced, however, were not required to serve the full length of their prison terms.

The harsher penalties that came with the era of hard-time scare tactics were intended to lower crime rates and to express to youth that crime would not be tolerated. These penalties, however, did not achieve their intended effects. The approach was grounded in the idea that youth could be managed through fear. But fear was not a forceful impetus to motivate youth toward positive behavior. No direct correlation was witnessed between harsher sentencing and fewer first-time arrests, and youth that had been placed in the adult system actually had a higher recidivism rate than similar juveniles placed in juvenile detention facilities.

"Juvenile Boot Camp" and "Scared Straight"

In the years that "get tough on crime" policies were being established, various new programs were also attempted. One such program, Juvenile Boot Camp, received high publicity but had little success. "At risk" youth were placed into intense, structured, severe environments that were modeled after military boot camps. The Juvenile Boot Camps were intended to teach youth about structure and discipline but their success rates, which were measured based on their ability to prevent kids from committing future crimes, were low. For some youth, the programs were actually counter-productive. Another program, "Scared Straight," brought parole/probation youth into interactions with adult prisoners through meetings or short-term incarcerations. The program was designed to make young offenders frightened of the violent adult prison system. According to the Surgeon General at the time, the program was not effective.

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Model programs have assisted families and children by providing them with information. Some programs inform parents on how to raise healthy children; some teach children about the effects of drugs, gangs, sex, and weapons; and others aim to express to youth the innate worth they and all others have.

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Parens Patriae

[Latin, Parent of the country.] A doctrine that grants the inherent power and authority of the state to protect persons who are legally unable to act on their own behalf.

The parens patriae doctrine has its roots in English Common Law. In feudal times various obligations and powers, collectively referred to as the "royal prerogative," were reserved to the king. The king exercised these functions in his role of father of the country.

In the United States, the parens patriae doctrine has had its greatest application in the treatment of children, mentally ill persons, and other individuals who are legally incompetent to manage their affairs. The state is the supreme guardian of all children within its jurisdiction, and state courts have the inherent power to intervene to protect the best interests of children whose welfare is jeopardized by controversies between parents. This inherent power is generally supplemented by legislative acts that define the scope of child protection in a state.

The state, acting as parens patriae, can make decisions regarding mental health treatment on behalf of one who is mentally incompetent to make the decision on his or her own behalf, but the extent of the state's intrusion is limited to reasonable and necessary treatment.

The doctrine of parens patriae has been expanded in the United States to permit the attorney general of a state to commence litigation for the benefit of state residents for federal antitrust violations (15 U.S.C.A. § 15c). This authority is intended to further the public trust, safeguard the general and economic welfare of a state's residents, protect residents from illegal practices, and assure that the benefits of federal law are not denied to the general population.

States may also invoke parens patriae to protect interests such as the health, comfort, and welfare of the people, interstate Water Rights, and the general economy of the state. For a state to have standing to sue under the doctrine, it must be more than a nominal party without a real interest of its own and must articulate an interest apart from the interests of particular private parties.

Cross-references

Antitrust Law; Child Abuse; Children's Rights; Infants.

parens patriae

(paa-wrens pat-tree-eye) n. Latin for "father of his country," the term for the doctrine that the government is the ultimate guardian of all people under a disability, especially children, whose care is only "entrusted" to their parents. Under this doctrine, in a divorce action or a guardianship application the court retains jurisdiction until the child is 18 years old, and a judge may change custody, child support or other rulings affecting the child's well-being, no matter what the parents may have agreed or the court previously decided. (See: divorce, custody, child support, guardian, ward)

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Latin, Parent of the country.] A doctrine that grants the inherent power and authority of the state to protect persons who are legally unable to act on their own behalf. The parens patriae doctrine has its roots in English Common Law.

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On a recent Friday afternoon in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, one of the poorest Congressional districts in the U.S., 25-year-old Tyree Hicks was catching up with friends from a local youth mentoring program. They traded jokes and listened to a new song that 21-year-old Lamell Carrington had composed and played for them on his phone.

"It's called 'Motivation,' and it's pretty much a rap ... of how I got here today," said Carrington. The lyrics are about a young man from "the hood" who wants to provide for his family, as he internalizes their daily struggles, financial and otherwise. Carrington was born and raised in East Harlem's Wagner House projects before moving to Queens as an adolescent. He joined a gang when he was 10 years old.

Hicks' story is similar: at age 13, he got involved with the Crips gang until his late teens, when he was sent to New York City's Rikers Island correctional facility.

"I came from Jersey to New York in '09, around the time I had my son," said Hicks. "Pampers and stuff was coming up, I felt like my back was against the wall, so I went back into the street, selling drugs ... playing with guns, selling them. ... I got into a situation, where I had to do what I had to do, and one day I got stopped by the cops. They caught me and gave me eight months in Rikers Island."

Both Hicks and Carrington were in and out of the system until probation officers referred them to a mentoring program that was part of the city's Young Men's Initiative. They were subsequently hired as peer mentors at Community Connections for Youth, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Mott Haven that champions diversion programs, engaging youth involved in the criminal justice system in productive neighborhood activities.

"Here today I work for CCFY [Community Connections for Youth] as a mentor to be able to give back to the youth," said Carrington.

There are around 500,000 youths in the U.S. criminal justice system - adult prisons and jails, juvenile facilities and probation - according to latest data compiled from several Department of Justice reports. A tenth of those are in New York, one of only two states - the second is North Carolina - that treats 16- and 17-year-olds, who comprise the bulk of all juvenile cases, as adults and not juveniles, regardless of the crime.

"Here is the problem: In New York you're criminally responsible at age 16. ... They're not adults!" Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, told CBS News.

Lippman has been advocating for juvenile justice reform in the state, namely raising the age of criminal responsibility, for the past five years. The "Raise the Age" movement has recently gained momentum in Albany, after New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo launched a campaign in early March to rally support for his bill to raise the age of criminal responsibility in the state.

"Any expectation that you're going to put a 16- or 17-year-old in a state prison and you're going to rehabilitate them or you're going to teach them or they're going to come out better than they went in is totally unrealistic," Cuomo said in his 2015 State of the State address.

In a 164-page report, the Governor's Commission on Youth, Public Safety & Justice said its recommendations, including raise the age of criminal responsibility, would reduce crime statewide and actually save taxpayer dollars.

"To take a child - and I underline that word child - and treat some mistake in judgment that they make as equally culpable as an adult criminal is counterproductive," said Lippman. "You're ruining these kids' lives before they've had a chance to be part of the American Dream."

"Incarceration [for] children should be the last possible resort."

A key focus of the growing Raise the Age movement is housing youths and adults in separate correctional facilities. Youth in adult facilities are: five times more likely to commit suicide than the general population and eight times more likely than youths in juvenile facilities; 50 percent more likely to face an armed attack than those in juvenile facilities; five times more likely to be sexually assaulted than in youth facilities; and around 25 percent more likely to reoffend than youth in juvenile facilities, according to data cited in the governor's commission. The reports also identifies that, on any given day, there are approximately 700 youths in local jails and 100 in state prison. Sixteen- and 17-year olds who are routinely sent to adult jails and prisons are often housed and contained in separate units.

Yet even separated from adults, violence is common among teen inmates.

A recently retired corrections officer who worked at New York City's Rikers Island facility told CBS News how "constant fights" occur between youths at the jail, because they're contained to certain areas within it.

"The mindframe is that they have to put up this front that 'I'm a big man or big woman about town, and I can handle this,' when, actually, they're still children," said the former guard who asked not to be named.

The CCFY youth mentors in Mott Haven, including Hicks and Carrington, echoed this idea.

"It just felt like it was more vicious than the street," said Hicks. "I had to fight with COs [correctional officers], I had to fight with other gangs, with older people, just for dumb things, like my bed or my tray - or [you're a] Blood, I'm [a] Crip."

Inside look at a juvenile justice facility

Raise the Age reform would strictly limit 16- and 17-year-olds to incarceration in juvenile facilities. Columbia Girls Secure Facility in Columbia County, about two hours north of New York City, is considered a model detention center by Raise the Age advocates. A small, two-building facility enclosed in barbed-wire, Columbia Girls is more boarding school than prison, especially compared to the much larger boy's juvenile facility next door, Brookwood Secure Center.

"We have a capacity for 16 girls and right now our population is 15," said Anita Sapio, former facility director at Columbia who now oversees all girls' facilities in New York State.

At lunchtime on St. Patrick's Day, the girls at Columbia were baking cookies topped with green icing. Earlier that morning, they had cooked corned beef and cabbage for lunch, before attending a group therapy session, where the main topic of discussion was self-validation.

"We currently service the 16- and 17-year-olds," Sapio said as she walked to the girl's afternoon volleyball session with two personal trainers hired to come into the facility at least once a week.

"The Raise the Age model will work best with a smaller facility where there is a larger resident-to-staff ratio," said Sapio. "Most of them [the girls] end up transitioning back to the community and back to their families."

If approved, Cuomo's bill would shift jurisdiction for about 86 percent of offenses committed by 16- and 17-year olds to Family Court, which is a problem-solving court aimed at rehabilitative sentencing. Family courts were set up 50 years ago, pioneered by New York's legislature, and they provide services that currently are not available to youth in the adult criminal justice system.

For more serious, cases, including violent crimes, the proposal would provide for specific sections in adult court with judges trained in adolescent development and crime prevention techniques.

"One of the things to remember is these kids, they're adolescents, they're growing, they're learning, and this is our chance to have a positive impact on them for the time that we have them," said Sapio. "And I think we do a successful job at that."

"Statistics show us that children who are treated with the family court model are much less likely to again commit crimes than if we treat them like adults," said Lippman. "The goal is not to punish, the goal is to get these kids to live a useful and meaningful life."

"Fifty years after the Family Court Act, the bottom line is - raise the age of criminal responsibility in New York. Period."

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"They're not adults": N.Y. seeks new approach to juvenile justice

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On a recent Friday afternoon in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, one of the poorest Congressional districts in the U.S., 25-year-old Tyree Hicks was catching up with friends from a local youth mentoring program. They traded jokes and listened to a new song that 21-year-old Lamell Carrington had composed and played for them on his phone.

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Should teenagers go to a juvenile detention center or a regular prison with adults criminals?

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Should teenagers be given the death penalty for serious crimes?

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Why do you think so many young teenagers are ending up in jail?

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List 3 shocking facts you learned from either an article, infographic, or video clip. Please be ready to share your facts and why they were shocking to you!

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Ivette Feliciano and Zachary Green, PBS NewsHour: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/juveniles-incarcerated-adults/
January 8, 2017
While all states can charge juveniles as adults, often for the most serious crimes, North Carolina and New York do so for every 16- or 17-year-old, regardless of the offense. People who want to raise the age of adult responsibility in New York say that research shows a high social and economic cost of incarcerating youth. NewsHour Weekend's Ivette Feliciano reports on the debate.

IVETTE FELICIANO: 22-year-old Asad Giles feels lucky to have his job as an administrative assistant in this Midtown Manhattan hotel. He says life could be drastically different right now. Five years ago, at 17, the NYPD arrested Giles for allegedly shooting a female classmate after they'd both left a school fundraiser. His name and address were all over local news reports. And then, he was incarcerated in New York City's main jail for pre-trial suspects on Rikers Island.

ASAD GILES: I couldn't believe it was happening. It was my senior year in high school. I was about to go to college in Atlanta. It was like a bad dream.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Giles denied the charges, but his working class family in Jamaica, Queens, could not afford his bail, set at $100,000. He spent his 18th and 19th birthdays - what would have been his first two years of college - behind bars. He says on his first day inside, he witnessed a teen getting beat up.

ASAD GILES: It's pretty vicious in there. You got rapists, murderers. You got all type of people in there. You never know what can happen. You could be asleep, somebody beating on you.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Finally....after 28 months on Rikers, Giles, seen here with his nephew, got his day in court, and a judge acquitted him of all charges. To this day, no one has been convicted in that shooting. Giles says he's still traumatized.

ASAD GILES: If I walk into a store and there's a group of cops in there, I would leave the store. Just because I got incarcerated for something I didn't do. So it's like, are they going to do it again?

IVETTE FELICIANO: Giles says his residual fears stem from the fact that at 17-years-old, he was held at an adult jail, rather than a juvenile detention center.

North Carolina and New York are the only states that, automatically detain, prosecute, and incarcerate all 16 and 17 year olds as adults... regardless of the crime.

In New York, more than 27-thousand 16 and 17-year-olds were arrested in 2015, More than 2 thousand of them were convicted and spent time incarcerated. On any given day, some 700 16 and 17 year olds in New York are locked up in adult jails awaiting the outcome of their cases...about 200 of them, mostly Black and Latino, are at Rikers.

Upon Asad Giles' release, the organization "Friends of Island Academy," helped him enroll in college and find his hotel job.

ASAD GILES: They definitely put me on my feet. A good jump. A good transition.

IVETTE FELICIANO: For almost three decades, the organization has provided post-incarceration services to juveniles not offered by New York State.

MESSIAH RAMKISSOON: I've watched people grow up in the prison system.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Messiah Ramkissoon works with the group as a Program Director and believes a successful transition back into society is essential in reducing recidivism.

He also points to studies showing that the human brain is highly malleable up until your mid-twenties. and that, until that age, the parts of our brains responsible for decision-making and impulse control aren't fully developed.

MESSIAH RAMKISSOON: That 16, 17-year-old age bracket, 18, sometimes older, the brain is still developing. So what this environment does is shapes the nature of the being. So you have young people who come out and they tell you, "I'm not afraid to go right back," because part of their psyche and the way they think and development of the brain has been composed behind these bars.

MESSIAH RAMKISSOON: He's been through a lot during the 16 months he's been incarcerated

IVETTE FELICIANO: On a recent Tuesday morning at the group's headquarters in Harlem, the staff meet to discuss other cases as part of their new "youth reentry network," funded by a 3-million dollar a year grant from the New York City Department of Corrections.

MESSIAH RAMKISSOON: He's not in contact with anyone in terms of family.

IVETTE FELICIANO: As part of this new program launched in November, these youth advocates act as the point person for every 16 and 17 year old incarcerated at Rikers offering them support by helping their lawyers expedite their cases, or re-connecting them to family members and keeping tabs on teens if they get released.

CHRIS PAHIGIAN: Any time a child is arrested, cuffed and held, whatever system you're in, it's traumatizing.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Chris Pahigian is executive director of Friends of Island Academy.

CHRIS PAHIGIAN: The role of the reentry network or any system of aftercare support is that we know coming out of the box where it is you're going to go home to. And// to have a plan in place and to help navigate and implement that plan once they get home.

IVETTE FELICIANO: There's also emotional and mental health counseling. On a typical night here, formerly incarcerated people meet to discuss their experience being locked up as an adolescent.

CHRIS PAHIGIAN: For decades we have been criminalizing young people, locking young people up in masses So now, we have generations of people who carry the stigma and who carry the trauma of that process.

IVETTE FELICIANO: That stigma and trauma has been on the rise since the 1970s, when the federal government and states began adopting harsher sentencing laws for drug crimes, including for juveniles. In the 1990s, the advent of mandatory minimum sentences and the expansion of juvenile transfer laws increasingly shifted control of juvenile cases from family courts to regular criminal courts.

That decade, the number of juveniles incarcerated in adult jails quadrupled. But since 2000, spurred by the research on the social and economic costs of incarcerating youth, like increased suicide rates and recidivism, state legislatures changed their laws and, by 2014, those numbers decreased by more than half.

CHRIS PAHIGIAN: The fundamental difference is that in the family court, that child who is charged with a crime is viewed as somebody who is a child, for whom elements of rehabilitation and support must be put in place because they're still a kid. But the difference of a few months puts that same kid for the same crime in the adult system.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Three-quarters of 16 and 17 year olds who are arrested in New York State face misdemeanor charges for offenses like possession of marijuana or vandalism. But one quarter are prosecuted as adults for more serious felony charges like robbery and drug trafficking.

Arguments for "raising the age" of adult criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 have fallen flat in the New York State legislature each time proposals have come up for a vote in the past three years.

PATRICK GALLIVAN: What I'm suggesting is that we just don't change an entire system until we know more.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Patrick Gallivan chairs the Crime, Crime Victims, and Corrections Committee in the New York State Senate. He's also the former Sheriff of Erie County, which includes Buffalo. He's voted against raising the age.

PATRICK GALLIVAN: People are saying that, jeez, our young people shouldn't be incarcerated. Our young people deserve a chance. Children should be treated different than adults. Who can say no to that, just on the premise. Anybody who raises questions can be looked at as a big bad ogre when they're raising questions but that isn't the case at all.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Gallivan argues that incarcerated 16 and 17 year olds are often treated differently than adults in that their criminal records can be sealed.

And due to the Prison Rape Elimination Act passed by Congress, all federal and state prisons must separately house juveniles under 18 from adults.

IVETTE FELICIANO: The argument that I've heard from raise the age advocates is that just touching the adult criminal system can have a long-lasting impact. Being housed at a place like Rikers for 18, 19 months while you're waiting for your trial to start.

PATRICK GALLIVAN: The bullet has the same impact. Recently- in this Erie County area, an individual was convicted of crimes that were committed when he was over 16 but under 18 years old. He killed two people. Shot six others. Well, my gosh, should an individual like that be subjected or get a lesser sentence?

MICHAEL FLAHERTY: Some of our most violent offenders are teenagers.

IVETTE FELICIANO: Michael Flaherty, who just stepped down as the acting District Attorney for Erie County, says requiring all juvenile cases to be heard in family court would strip away a prosecutor's tools to adequately try teens in criminal court when needed.

MICHAEL FLAHERTY: Under the current system I have a voice, I have a say, I get to use my professional judgment. What we don't need is a uniform policy which presumes that the best interests of the offender trump public safety, or trump the justice system. we dismiss charges all the time, just on reviewing the papers, and the facts. I have no control over what happens in family court.

IVETTE FELICIANO: With no forthcoming changes in State law, and as part of reforms in response to a federal investigation documenting widespread abuse at juveniles at Rikers, New York City Mayor De Blasio announced last year that 16 and 17-year-olds would be moved off Rikers by 2020, and he ended solitary confinement for anyone younger than 21.

The New York City Department of Corrections is subjecting Rikers guards to more rigorous training, in addition to the jail's partnership with Friends of Island Academy, it recently increased educational programming for juveniles.

Friends of Island Academy plans to push this year for the State to raise the age of adult criminality to 18.

For now, the organization will continue supporting youth transitioning out of incarceration with adults, like Asad Giles, something he believes helped keep him from ever being arrested again.

ASAD GILES: I could have gotten out with a jail mindset like F everything. I don't want to go back to school I just want to stay in the streets...But I didn't want that for myself, so I contacted Friends and just got ready to make my life better

You can read the full story, get an audio and video version on the PBS NewsHour site.

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Should Juveniles Be Incarcerated With Adults?

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Ivette Feliciano and Zachary Green, PBS NewsHour: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/juveniles-incarcerated-adults/ January 8, 2017 While all states can charge juveniles as adults, often for the most serious crimes, North Carolina and New York do so for every 16- or 17-year-old, regardless of the offense.

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Based on everything you know so far in Monster, what do you think will be the outcome of Steve Harmon's case?

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acquaintance
taint
perpetrator
menace
conviction
technician
accusation
transverse
consign
verdict
exonerate