I went back to the juvy prison last night. a new group of guys. 

one young man was NOT down with meditation at all, ("this is corny!") but I worked with it and kept the session going a bit longer. 

after we were drumming for awhile, the same young man threw down his drum sticks and said, "I'm retiring from drumming!" and I said "Okay, thanks for being here."  as soon as he left, the other guys relaxed and the energy opened up and then they wanted to rap over a beat I was…

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When most Americans hear the familiar constitutional phrase “cruel and unusual punishment” they can tell you what it means, at least to them. Hanging. Flogging. Chopping a hand off. Chain gangs.

 

Putting juvenile offenders in solitary confinement is high on my list of “cruel and unusual punishment.” What else do you call locking up fifteen, sixteen year olds, some even younger, in total isolation for 24 hours a day, in some cases for months at a time, never leaving their…

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“You don’t care about the victims. All you care about are those kids.”

It was a comment I’ve heard in one form or another at book events, at juvenile justice talks I’ve given, or in response to pieces I’d written about our national policy of retribution towards troubled kids. I have to admit, though, this guy…

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I didn’t expect my talk to a class of criminal justice majors at a local community college to be any different from the other workshops, presentations and classes I’d done. The students had read my book for class. I figured I’d talk about the book, about my 10 years teaching high school kids locked up in an adult county jail, and about juvenile justice issues in general. The usual topics. But when I asked the students to go around and say what area of criminal justice they wanted to pursue,…

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By Jeff Sistruck for the Lehigh Valley Live Express Times, February 27, 2012

A near-complete silence pervades the cinder-block room, broken only by slow, steady…

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Arizona’s legislature recently passed a law charging prison visitors a onetime $25 fee as a way to help close the state’s $1.6 billion budget deficit. Middle Ground Prison Reform, a prison advocacy group, challenged the law in court as a discriminatory tax, but a county judge upheld its constitutionality.

Fees like that, slapped on prisoners and their families, couldn’t be more…

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If anyone doubts that the young people locked up in our jails are children they should spend some time in one of those prisons around holiday time.

I did just that for the 10 years I taught high school students, some as young as fifteen, in an adult county jail, and every year it got tougher to deny the impact being locked up for the holidays had on these teens.

Jail’s a pretty isolating place. That’s one of the ideas. But in lockup they watched a lot of TV—that great purveyor…

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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…

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by David Chura 

Now that all the high school graduations are over and the backyard barbeques celebrated, I’m finally coming down from the contact high of all that youthful exuberance and optimism.

It’s easy to get swept up into those good feelings. But now as I move into summer’s quieter months, I can’t help thinking about the high school students I taught in a county penitentiary and what “commencement” meant for them.

Success never came easily to my students. Why…

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The statistics are grim, but the reality behind those numbers is even grimmer for the many young people locked up in US adult prisons. Since publishing I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, about my years teaching in a New York county jail, I spend a lot of time writing, talking and hearing from families, professionals, and the young people themselves about the failures of our child welfare and criminal justice…

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Over any teacher’s career—in my case, 26 years of teaching high school English to at-risk teenagers, the last 10 of those years in an adult county jail—you get asked lots of questions. Some about the topic

you’re teaching; others, well, it’s hard to know where they come from.

But there’s one question I heard a lot, most frequently from my jail

students, “Why don’t you teach in a real school?”

This usually happened when a lesson went well and a kid…

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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

“Zero tolerance.” It sounds like a good idea: “Put your foot down.” “Get tough.” “We’re not taking it anymore.”



The American public, worried about the purported drug and gun wars being fought in our cities in the 1990s, grabbed onto this concept. In turn, a number of states and municipalities adopted “zero tolerance” laws.



Since then “zero tolerance” has pervaded our culture.



Draconian drug laws impose harsh sentences on nonviolent offenders, glutting prisons… Continue

“Monster Factory” is a slang phrase for a prison, one that fits the popular view of a jail: a place where ruthless thugs are kept locked up by sadistic guards. These stock images surround us—in movies, television shows, music lyrics, and newspaper stories.



One such “monster factory” recently hit the media when the Department of Justice released a 42 page report accusing New York State’s Westchester County jail of violating prisoners’ civil rights. As Preet Bharara, the United States… 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

There are 109 inmates serving life sentences without parole for non-homicide crimes they committed when they were 18 or younger. Some, put behind bars when they were 13 or 14, have been locked up for twenty or thirty years.



Those 109-- minors then, adults now in their prime, or at least they should be, if they weren't facing a slow, cruel death in jail-- are a part of something that is uniquely American. According to Amnesty International, the United States is the only country that… Continue