Mar 5, 2010
We don’t want this to happen to anyone else
We don’t want this to happen to anyone else PressDemocrat.com, March 5, 2010
Blog Feb 24, 2010
Abuse in the LA County Juvenile Justice System
In my previous blog I wrote about the endemic nature of abuse in juvenile institutions. No sooner had I written that blog than the following article appeared in the Los Angeles Times regarding the beating and molestation of youths under the custody of the Los Angeles Probation Department. The article’s authors highlighted incidents where staff were actually prosecuted for particularly egregious criminal acts including sexual exploitation and beatings of youth in their custody. In one instance a…
Feb 19, 2010
Juvenile Justice Reform in Hawaii
Daniel Macallair, Executive Director of CJCJ, recently presented on Juvenile Justice Reform in Hawaii at the Western Society of Criminology’s 37th annual conference . Meda Chesney-Lind and Brian Bilsky (University of Hawaii-Manoa) and CJCJ’s Senior Research Fellow Randall G. Shelden (University of Nevada-Las Vegas) were his co-presenters. Mr. Macallair’s presentation focused on CJCJ’s role in Hawaii’s juvenile justice reform. In 1989, the Western Regional Office of the…
Blog Feb 17, 2010
Abuse in Youth Correctional Institutions
One of the most common examples of widespread abuse in American juvenile correctional institutions is the callous and malicious treatment often employed by institutional staff. Institutional abuse can mean many things, but usually refers to the physical or emotional cruelty inflicted on youth by staff. This pernicious reality has been constant throughout American history since the opening of the nation’s first youth correctional facility in 1825 — the New York House of Refuge. Occasionally,…
Blog Feb 3, 2010
Three judges and the California prison system
The recent decision by the three judge panel in the Coleman/Plata case should be applauded as a short but positive step forward in forcing some degree of sanity upon the broken California prison system. Unfortunately, the fact that a panel of Federal judges was forced to step in and force the state to make long overdue policy decisions is simply another poignant reminder of our political systems dysfunctionality. California’s prison crisis is a political construct that an evil scheming mad…