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…
This text identifies the macroeconomic forces relevant to imprisonment — poverty and political powerlessness — and explores viable and humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge.
As every criminology student learns, the “Chicago School” brought us a tradition of research on a variety of topics guided largely by a methodology that looks at patterns of crime as they are related to social ecology. More specifically, this approach looks at how different types of crimes are distributed throughout urban areas. One of the most recent examples comes from a continuing series published by the Los Angeles Times on homicide . The latest in this series focuses on…
Blog Jan 10, 2010
Media Distortions of Youth Crime
I could not help but notice the first of a series of articles appearing in the Cape Cod Times shortly after I arrived for the holidays. The title itself (“Younger and twice as violent ”) conveys a message to the reader that is not uncommon in this day of media hype and distortion. The message seams to be that crime is being committed by people younger than ever before and, even more frightening, the crimes are getting more violent with each passing day. The appearance of this series is no…
Advocates for legal pot say time’s right in state Ventura County Star, January 9, 2010
(ISSN 1530 – 3012) From the editor The Limits of Preventive Detention: Habeas Corpus, Boumediene v. Bush (2008) and Comparative Preemption Policy Public but Opaque: The Problems of Tracking Homicide Charging in a California County Exit Exams, the Prison Pipeline and Getting Tough Anyway A Review of Conceptual Contributions to Juvenile Justice and Youth Development Arenas A Century of Losing Battles: The Costly and Ill-Advised War on Drugs in the United States From the editor…
Blog Dec 8, 2009
Children of war
I was simply going through my usual morning routine, scanning various media outlets on the Internet, when I checked Bob Herbert’s latest column in the New York Times . I suppose it was the title that prompted me to take a look: ” A Fearful Price .” Herbert started the column by reporting on a conversation he had with a bright young student at Columbia University who “argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way…
Blog Dec 7, 2009
War on Drugs Update
It’s time for another one of my end of the year drug war updates. I haven’t done this in a while, so it is overdue. To start with, as of December 7, 2009, we have spent more than $47 billion ($18.7 billion at the federal level and about $28.7 billion at the state level). These figures come from an excellent web site called the War on Drugs Clock , which is published by a web site called Drug Sense . The War on Drugs Clock also reports that so far this year more than 1.7 million…
Blog Nov 12, 2009
Life for kids: a follow-up
My previous blog concerned the current Supreme Court case about juveniles serving life without the possibility of parole. I neglected to mention that there are two cases being considered: Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida. When I wrote this blog I was not aware of a two-part report in AlterNet by Liliana Segura. I also was not aware of a report by Human Rights Watch and how both of these reports highlighted both the racial disparities of these sentences and the details of some…