In 2010-2011, the Insight Out Project, the Mind Body Awareness Project and Stronghold Sound teamed up to produce two pilot 40-minute audio curriculum modules for youth in the California Juvenile Probation System. The impetus…

Continue

There’s been some good news in the media lately for anyone who cares about kids and justice. Federal statistics show that the number of juvenile offenders in jail has dropped by at least 25%. Along those same lines, the New York Times recently reported that New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman has called for moving most juvenile cases from criminal court to family…

Continue

She was pretty upfront about it: she didn’t want me there.

“It’s not you personally,” Marge explained. “It’s the book.”

Marge was the moderator, researcher, engine, really, of a local reading group. She was good at what she did, I was told, and I believed it. She was pretty thorough at listing all the reasons why she didn’t want to read or recommend to the group my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, about my ten years…

Continue

In a six by eight foot jail cell there’s barely room for a bunk, a seatless toilet, and a postage-sized sink. The only other space you have in jail is in your head, and even that gets crowded with all the people you carry around in there who you resent for the things they did to you.

The world is pretty small when you’re locked up, especially if you’re a kid doing time with a healthy body that needs to move, energy sizzling through you like high tension wires, your emotions…

Continue

Statewide test day and Damian was psyched. He didn’t sleep much the night before from worrying. Still, he was there on time, ready to go. Now he sat hunched over his desk, head down, lips moving as he read, his pen

carefully inching across the paper.

He was like any other kid in his grade taking the mandated English exam. The only difference was that he was locked up in an adult county jail in Westchester,…

Continue

I’ve done a number of interviews since publishing I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, and I find, like many authors, that I’m often asked the same questions. “I can answer them in my sleep,” I heard

one author grumble. I felt the same way until I started to really listen to the

questions and give them deeper thought.…

Continue

When you go to jail you feel like everybody’s in your business but nobody cares. You get cuffed, shoved into the back of a squad car.

The police blotter broadcasts to the world what you did. You get booked,

fingerprinted, photographed, everything about you fed into “The Man’s” hungry

computer. You’re watched—by correctional officers, wardens, nurses, other

inmates; even the kitchen workers warily scope you out. Bars instead of…

Continue

The numbers are disturbing. During 2008 through 2009, 12 percent or 3,220 of the kids locked up in state or privately run juvenile detention centers reported that they had been sexually victimized by another kid or by facility staff.



Even more disturbing is that 10.3 percent stated they had had sexual contact with an adult staff member. Of that number, 1,150 kids said that sex or sexual contact was forced on them. All this according to the recently released National Survey of Youth… Continue

"We are either going to spend the money now and provide the services that our children require or we are going to pay a big price at a later date when these children are part of the adult criminal justice system."



That's how Judge Edwina Richardson Mendelson, a New York family court judge, put it to NBC New York, commenting on a story about the need to help kids mired in the juvenile justice system.



Certainly other experts would agree. The lack of damage control for harm… Continue

In March 2007, the nonprofit Disability Law Center sued the state of Massachusetts over its treatment of hundreds of mentally ill inmates. Prisoners with emotional problems who are unruly in some way are kept in 23 hour solitary confinement, which, according to a November 10 Boston Globe article, has "led to self-mutilations, swallowing of razor blades, and numerous suicides."



In response to these grave concerns the Patrick administration, in an out-of-court negotiation, proposed… Continue

CNN Justice (11-13-2009) did an interesting and enlightening story on the United States aging prison population and the need for increased and more expensive health care.



Americans hold firm to their belief that the only way to deal with crime is to lock people up. It’s been a “successful” strategy as the PEW Trust reported in 2008. America now incarcerates 1 in 100 of its citizens. As expensive, and as dangerous as this policy is, the public still insists that adults and young… Continue