Blog Nov 11, 2009
Life sentences for kids?
The U.S. Supreme Court will once again take on the issue of excessive punishment for juvenile offenders. In 2005 they ruled that the death penalty for those under 18 was unconstitutional. This was the case of Roper v. Simmons where the court ruled that both the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments “forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed.” In the case before the court two juveniles — Joe Sullivan, who raped a…
Blog Oct 12, 2009
Kids Die all but invisibly
I thought that after studying and writing about juvenile justice for more than 30 years nothing would shock me, that I had seen and heard everything. I was wrong. The title of a recent story in the Los Angeles Times gives a hint to what it is about: “Flawed county system lets kids die invisibly.” The story begins with the death of 17-year-old Miguel Padilla, who had run away from a “licensed group home” (Leroy Haynes Center in La Verne, CA) in April 2008. He didn’t get very far. “Unknown…
Blog Sep 24, 2009
Dropping Out and Crime
It has become a truism that there is a close connection between school failure and juvenile crime, as demonstrated by literally hundreds of studies over the past 100 years. As if to remind us once again, here comes yet another study, this one by the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara. As reported in today’s Los Angeles Times , dropping out of school costs the state $1.1 billion each year and if we decreased the number of dropouts by half it would save $550 million per…
Blog Sep 2, 2009
The end of an era?
A story in the Los Angeles Times caught my eye. The title tells most of the story: “California to close its largest juvenile prison .” The institution is the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino. They will convert it to an adult prison and eventually transfer the young offenders to other programs in the state, mostly in county facilities closer to their families. Stark has been part of what most experts consider one of the “dinosaurs” of juvenile institutions, the California…
Blog Aug 15, 2009
Treating kids under 12 as adults
A new study released by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin illustrates once again the punitiveness that remains an essential feature of American society. The title of the study is “From Time Out to Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System.” To see the complete study go to the following web site: http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/news/images/file/From%20Time%20Out%20to%20Hard%20Time-revised%20final.pdf . The study began when the…