Youth incarceration in the United States
The act required that states holding youth within adult prisons for status offenses remove them within a span of two years (this timeframe was adjusted over time).
The act also provided program grants to states, based on their youth populations, and created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).
The following list highlights a few of these additions: 1975 – Programs were developed to assist children with learning disabilities who entered the juvenile justice system.
Status offenses include consensual sexual acts, truancy from school, smoking cigarettes, curfew violations, drinking alcohol, running away from one's residence, chronic disobedience of parents, guardians, and/or other authority figures, waywardness, and ungovernability.
The popular news media plays a crucial role in promoting the myth of a new generation of young "super-predators" threatening the public.
[16] The most infamous example of this trend is Cheltenham center in Maryland, which at one point crowded 100 boys into cottages sanctioned for a maximum capacity of 24, with only 3–4 adults supervising.
Social scientists call the phenomenon "peer delinquency training", and have found significantly higher levels of substance abuse, school difficulties, delinquency, violence, and adjustment difficulties in adulthood for offenders detained in congregated settings versus those that were offered treatment in another setting.
[21] Furthermore, prison administrative policy often intensifies the risk by responding to suicidal threats in ways that endanger the detainees, such as putting them in solitary confinement.
This lack of success in the workplace is a threat to personal well-being as well as to communities whose youth are incarcerated in large numbers, such as African Americans.
A study of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's arrest data for the 1990s reveals that the rise in detention was unrelated to crime rates.
[25] While there may be an individual need to incarcerate violent or high-risk youth, most of the young people in prisons, jails and detention centers today—up to 70%—are serving time for nonviolent offenses.
The cost effectiveness of detention and incarceration scores very low compared with alternative approaches to youth delinquency in a cost-benefit analysis.
[31] Movement goals include shutting down particularly bad prisons and detention centers, demanding better treatment for youth in the system, providing and demanding better representation for young people in court, affecting legislation to curb youth incarceration, working to abolish arrest warrants for young people, and promoting alternatives to incarceration.
Started in 1872 as the House of Reformation for Colored Boys, Cheltenham was home to a wildly overrepresented population of minority youth.
[32] The Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth in Louisiana had been open for only three years when it was first sued by the United States Department of Justice (in collaboration with local activists in the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana) for violating the civil rights of youth held in its confines—marking the first time in U.S. history that the federal government has actively sued a state over the conditions of its juvenile detention facilities.
That same year the filthy conditions, brutal violence and chronic understaffing earned the center a citation as "the worst in the nation.
"[33] In 1999, even after the federal government had taken over partial responsibility for improving conditions, things were so unsafe for the youth that the staff of the center walked out, leaving 400 boys completely unsupervised.
With the passage of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 (Act 1225), then Governor Kathleen Blanco and the Louisiana State Legislature ushered in a period of reform in which the notoriously brutal Tallulah prison for youth was shut down, conditions were improved in other abusive youth prisons throughout the state, and a commitment was made to both the increased use of alternatives to incarceration for youth and to revamping secure care prisons to be small, therapeutic facilities that were regionalized to keep children closer to their families.
Opponents to this law included activists from Californians for Justice, Critical Resistance, the Youth Force Coalition, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Advocates in the ACLU challenged many portions of the law, including a provision automatically sentencing youth 14–17 years old in adult court.
[37] Opposition to zero-tolerance policies, especially at the local level, focus on critiques including charges that the program is discriminatory, unconstitutional, harmful to schools and students, ineptly implemented, and provides harsh punishment (suspension of education) for minor offenses (possession of tobacco).
The Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice released a story in 2003 about a 13-year-old girl in Tuscaloosa, Alabama arrested and detained for 5 weeks for possession of what was thought to be marijuana, but turned out to be oregano.
Organizational leadership has been provided nationally by Amnesty International and the American Bar Association, who has officially opposed such policies since 2001.
The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) is a private-public partnership being implemented nationwide, with pilot programs in California, Oregon, New Mexico and Illinois.
[41] Alternatives for juvenile detention centers for rehabilitation and reentry processes for those already incarcerated requires the work of counselors who understand the psychology of these individuals.
Diversion programs could include everything from counseling to peer mentoring in order to improve the relationship in the community and remove the stigma of criminal youth.
Legislation work such as Colorado's Smart School Discipline Law work to implement prevention strategies in an early stage starting in school, revise and provide adequate training to police officers in order to find proper disciplinary practice when dealing with trouble students.
