By Cara Tabachnick
Journalists and juvenile justice experts gathered to discuss covering the juvenile justice reform debate in 2012 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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By Antonio Howard
This letter, from Antonio Howard in State Correctional Institution in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, was originally published by The Beat Within, a juvenile justice system writing workshop, which has generously allowed The Crime Report to share.
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Hundreds of children are held around the world in secure and remote detention facilities, according to a new report by the The International Detention Coalition (IDC), which has formed a coalition to stop the detention of children.
Read full entry »University of Southern California law Prof. Thomas Lyon, a Harvard-trained attorney with a doctorate in psychology, has helped show that open-ended, nonjudgmental questions can prompt more detailed narratives from children, reports the Los Angeles Times. His federally funded research shows that getting a child to promise to be honest actually makes it more likely that they will tell the truth. Lyon, 52, says, "Actually I find abuse work often terribly depressing, but what keeps me in it is how great the kids are despite the abuse they suffer. They still tend to be really resilient, really interested in things, really excited about stuff. And that's inspiring."
His field has generated debate among psychologists and lawyers for decades. "Anyone who works with abused kids knows the kids are afraid and threatened and reluctant and ashamed," said Lyon. Critics say he tends to be too pro-prosecution. Lyon said he is not out to convict the innocent but wants the criminal justice system to understand how memories of childhood abuse can last through adulthood. Lyon is among the experts who have trained sheriff's deputies in interviewing methods that they've subsequently used in recent abuse cases in the Los Angeles schools.
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By Matthew T. Mangino
The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing cases on the issue of life without parole for juveniles. Commentator Matthew Mangino says that if recent trends are any indication, the court will restrict the use of life without parole for juveniles, but will not eliminate the practice.
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By Ryan Schill
Children who show a lack of ‘remorse’ often end up in adult courts. But it may be a misleading signal.
Read full entry »By Ryan Rios
A tragic case in Texas illustrates the dilemma faced by courts, police and child protective services in rescuing ‘medically fragile’ children before it’s too late
Read full entry »Families, or the lack of them, loom large in the following writings from teens in juvenile detention. They are participants in The Beat Within, a national writing workshop, which allows the imprisoned teens to express themselves in a safe place.
Two prominent scholars report on the preliminary conclusions of a new working group on the economics of crime.
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One in 25 white children born in 1990 had a parent who was imprisoned, while one in four black children born that year had a parent imprisoned, found researchers at Justice Strategies, in a new report, “Children on the Outside.”
The study details the harm experienced by some of the 1.7 million minor children with a parent in prison, a population that has grown with the explosion of the U.S. prison population.
Read the report here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on Prisons.
Read full entry »More than 1.7 million American children have an incarcerated parent, says California Watch, citing a new report by Justice Strategies, a nonprofit research group. As the United States’ prison population has surged, so too have the number of incarcerated mothers and fathers. “In particular, the number of incarcerated women, who are most likely to have been the primary caretakers of children prior to their incarceration, has skyrocketed by more than 400 percent since 1986,” the report states.
Justice Strategies’ overarching recommendation is simply to incarcerate fewer convicted felons. The consequences for children of inmates in our current system are legion: financial instability, compromised educational success, social stigma, and increased risk of drug abuse and criminal activity. These impacts are not felt equally across racial groups, the report states. The estimated risk of parental imprisonment for white children by the age of 14 is one in 25, while for black children it is one in four by the same age.
Link: http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/number-children-parent-prison-growing-8048
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The Urban Institute Press has put out a new handbook, Children of Incarcerated Parents, on best practices in dealing with the nearly 2 million children in the United States whose parents are in prison.
The handbook covers new research and policies for this rapidly growing subset that will hopefully improve these children’s life chances.
Access the book here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on incarceration.
Read full entry »More than 1.7 million U.S. children are separated from an imprisoned parent. Millions more have parents in jail. The risk of behavioral problems, attachment insecurity, poverty, cognitive delays, and other negative outcomes for these children is elevated. How many are able to overcome these challenges? And what public policies give them the best chance of persevering? The Urban Institute Press has published a book about the problem: "Children of Incarcerated Parents: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners."
Information on these children is not systematically collected by jails, corrections departments, schools, child welfare, or other systems. The Urban Institute Press says the book takes a fresh look across disciplines—including criminology, sociology, social work, family studies, education, nursing, psychiatry and psychology, and prevention science—to present a detailed view of exactly what we have learned about these kids. “In this volume, we have brought together key scholars from various disciplines who are experts regarding children, parents, caregivers, and systems associated with parental incarceration,” say coeditors Julie Poehlmann and J. Mark Eddy.
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The following essay received an Achievement Award in the PEN 2009 Prison Writing Contest. Mr. Dole has allowed us to share his work.
The United States is unique in the world for its overzealous love affair with life without parole sentences (LWOP). It is one of the few western countries to have LWOP sentences and the only country in North America to have them. Even the other western countries that do have LWOP sentences reserve them for only the most extreme circumstances (e.g. acts of treason or serial murder). In contrast the U.S. uses this sentence prolifically, currently having almost 35,000 people serving LWOP. More embarrassing is the fact that we are the lone, adamant, upholders of the right to sentence juveniles to die in prison, which the rest of the world views as barbaric.
There is a near universal consensus in the international community that it is immoral and reprehensible to execute or incarcerate a juvenile for life without parole. The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledging these views finally abolished the death penalty for those under 18. Unfortunately we are still one of the last holdouts who currently have juveniles sentenced to die in prison by way of LWOP. According to a study by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in October 2005, only 4 countries have juveniles serving LWOP: Tanzania has one, South Africa has four, Israel has seven, and the U. S. (the “land of the free”) has over 2,200. Even this number is deceiving though as it fails to take into account the thousands more who have sentences so long that they constitute LWOP (e.g. 100 years at 100 percent).
There are numerous calls to abolish LWOP sentences for juveniles worldwide. The U.S. stands unabashed against them all. In 1989 there was the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 37(a) of this Convention provides, “Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without the possibility of release shall be imposed for offenses committed by persons below eighteen years of age," and Article 37(b) states, “detention or imprisonment must be used as a last resort and for the shortest appropriate period." Throughout history no other human rights treaty has been ratified by so many so quickly. To date 191 out of 193 countries have ratified it. The U.S. and that other stalwart protector of human rights, Somalia, are the only two to refuse to do so. In 1992 the United States became a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This prohibits LWOP sentences for juveniles. More recently the United States was the lone opposition (176-1) against a resolution in the U.N. General Assembly calling to “abolish by law, as soon as possible, the death penalty and life imprisonment without possibility for release for those under the age of 18 years at the time of the commission of offense."
In a 185 to 1 vote (again U.S. v. World) in December of 2006 the U.N. again took up a resolution calling to abolish LWOP for juveniles. The U.S. State Department’s defense of this position was that it’s mostly a matter of state law and that the juveniles, some as young as 13, were “hardened criminals who had committed gravely serious crimes." Regardless of the fact that brain research has shown that a person’s brain doesn’t fully mature until the mid-twenties, how hardened of a criminal can a 13 year-old be? What was he doing, sticking his mother up for breast milk as a baby? Maybe robbing the cookie jar as a toddler? The ignorance of the State Department is astounding when you consider that close to 60% of these juveniles serving LWOP have no prior convictions.
Approximately 10 percent of the 73 kids age 13 or 14 who were sentenced to die in prison were sentenced for crimes where no one even died. In one instance no one was even injured. More than a quarter of juvenile lifers were not the actual perpetrators of the crimes, but were rather found guilty by way of accountability or felony murder statutes, in the classic “getaway driver is just as guilty” reasoning.
Rather than seeing a decline in the use of LWOP sentences we’ve seen an expansion. LWOP sentences are more prevalent overall and those for juvenile offenders are now used three times more often than 15 years ago.
Part of this love affair with LWOP sentences is due to the shortsightedness of the anti-death penalty movement. (The death penalty is another issue the U.S. stands steadfast in support of). In their rationalization of the lack of need for a death penalty, they push LWOP as the “perfect alternative." A couple of decades ago only a handful of states had LWOP sentences. Now almost all of them do. As has been shown time and again, our criminal justice system is broken and more than 100 people have been put on death row for crimes they were later found to be innocent of. In Illinois more people were exonerated from death row than executed when former Governor Ryan finally had enough and called a moratorium. People sentenced to LWOP (there are over 1,400 in Illinois alone) went through this same broken system, but without the added safeguards afforded to people sentenced with the death penalty. Thus it is much more difficult for a lifer who was wrongly convicted to get his conviction overturned; ergo many more innocent people are almost definitely serving LWOP sentences than were sentenced to be executed. Especially when considering there are many more people sentenced to LWOP than to death each year.
The courts have amazingly decided that sentencing a juvenile to LWOP does not violate the 8th Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. The hypocrisy of many LWOP sentencing schemes and court rulings is glaring. Take Illinois as an example again: Article 1, Section 11 of the Illinois Constitution specifically states, “All penalties shall be determined both according to the seriousness of the offense and with the objective of restoring the offender to useful citizenship," and part (d) of the purposes of the Illinois Code of Corrections is likewise to “restore offenders to useful citizenship." Nevertheless, in 1978 the Illinois legislature passed a law making all life sentences in Illinois LWOP. Prior to this a life sentence allowed for parole eligibility after 11 years. The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that a LWOP sentence does not violate the Illinois Constitution due to the “fact” that an offender still has a chance (theoretically at least) to get out of prison by way of clemency from the governor. Unfortunately this is not realistic in today’s tough on crime rhetoric, inflamed fear mongering, political world. No governor with political aspirations (which is all of them) will risk granting clemency and being painted as a bleeding heart liberal, soft on crime, or even worse, be blamed for letting someone out who re-offends upon release.
Compared with the rest of the world the United States incarcerates more of its citizens per capita than anyone else, and for much longer than any other industrialized country. An entrance requirement to the European Union is that the death penalty be outlawed in the joining country. Concerning life imprisonment, the Council of Europe in 1995 stated, “A crime prevention policy which accepts keeping a prisoner for life even if he is no longer a danger to society would be compatible neither with modern principles on the treatment of prisoners during the execution of their sentence nor with the idea of reintegration of offenders into society." Both the European Court of Human Rights as well as the German Constitutional Court have held that a term of life imprisonment must include the possibility of release. Both Brazil and Portugal have banned LWOP sentences. In Spain the maximum sentence one can serve is 40 years. While in Slovenia it’s 20 years.
The United States cannot continue to demand compliance with human rights principles and norms abroad while it refuses to apply them here at home. We have an obligation to implement humane principals embraced by the rest of the world for our own people if we are going to admonish other nations about the inhumane practices of dictators, despots, and others (many of whom we all too often support).
In a country where three-fourths of the population describe themselves as Christians, it is astonishing how few seem to believe in forgiveness and redemption, and how many champion punishment and retribution.
In the words of United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, “Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long . . . Courts may conclude the legislature is permitted to choose long sentences, but that does not mean long sentences are wise or just . . . [A] people confident in its laws and institutions should not be ashamed of mercy." Well said, too bad few are listening.
Mr. Dole is serving a life sentence in Tamms Correctional Facility in Illinois.
For more information about the PEN foundation prison writing program click here.
This is the second to last post in our occasional series of essays, poems and artwork by young people incarcerated in Illinois where youth write about a future outside of prison walls. “Looking In, Looking Out: Reflections of Youth Changing Their Lives” was compiled by the John Howard Association of Illinois . This week D.R., 16, reflects on the future with an essay entitled “What To Be When You Grow Up”
What To Be When You Grow Up
When you were a kid you always wanted to be something you thought was cool,
maybe like an actor, rapper, astronaut, or some kind of professional athlete. When you
start going towards adulthood you realize that you need to think of a more realistic career
plan. When I was young I wanted to be a professional football player, but then I realized
the difficulty of the sport, the probability of making it into the sport, and realizing that I
needed to think of something to do with my life.
One of the things that changed my mind was realizing the difficulty it took to
play this sport at a professional level. The NFL requires commitment to the sport all year
round. The practices you have to go to and all the energy you have to put into it. Also
it requires a large amount of talent. You must be fast, big, strong, and you must be able
to take hits. It also requires extreme knowledge of the game and you must memorize
hundreds of plays and be able to make quick changes during the pre-snap.
I also realized the probability of making it into the NFL. The chances of someone
making it into the NFL are about 1/3000 which is very dim. Many college football players
work all their life so they can make it through training camp and usually most of the
rookies get cut. Which really brought my hopes down.
Finally I realized that I needed a more reasonable career. I knew that I wanted to
own my own home, and care and all those other nice things. Also I knew that I needed to
be able to support a family, and in order for me to accomplish all these things I needed to
have a steady income. So that’s when I decided that I should start looking for a career to
study in college so that I can have a good life.
Always let a child believe that he/she will become what they want to. You should
always encourage them to follow their dreams, but when times comes for them to man up
and really figure out what they want to do in life that’s when parents and friend should do
everything they can so they can have a successful life.
D.R., 16
