I’m Proof Kids Don’t Need Extreme Sentences to Pay Debt

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I work with children who have parents in prison and with parents who are serving time. Much of my work focuses on effective parenting and child abuse prevention. When we reduce the occurrences of child abuse, we also help prevent violence by these same children later in life.

I do this through my job with PB&J Family Services, a New Mexico nonprofit organization. My main responsibility is to manage a home visit parenting program for families with young children. In the evenings and on weekends, I work in a new program that provides children with developmentally appropriate activities and their parents with resources while they are waiting to visit someone who is incarcerated.

I’m passionate about these issues because I grew up behind bars. I entered the juvenile justice system when I was just 13 after I was accused of participating in the murder of another girl my age in my hometown of Clovis, N.M. Despite the difficulties of that experience, I grew from a child, acting out impulsively as a result of my own unresolved trauma, into a responsible, working mother active in my community. I was released at 18 and have never looked back.

As we observe the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Miller v. Alabama, which found it is unconstitutional to impose a mandatory sentence of life without parole for a crime committed by a person younger than 18, it is a good time to think about how we hold accountable children who are accused of serious crimes. This accountability should be age-appropriate and trauma-informed.

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By Francesca Duran-Lopez June 24, 2015

Javier Stauring learned that troubled youths 'weren't so different' from him

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LOS ANGELES — In 2005, Javier Stauring was giving a presentation about the American juvenile justice system to an international conference in Germany when one of his comments caused a stir.

“I had said, ‘In California we give life sentences to 14-year-olds,’ and since it was being translated to everyone wearing headphones, they all turned around to ask the translators for a repeat, as if they had mistranslated,” he says. “After they found out I had not misspoken, they gathered around me dumbfounded to press me, ‘How can this be?’

“One woman said, ‘We live in the land of the Holocaust, and we look to the US as the model of what can and should be achieved in people being able to turn their lives around. How sad that you cannot give your own children that chance.’ ”

The story reminded Mr. Stauring of his shock the first time he visited a children’s unit at the Los Angeles Central Jail in 2001. He found 14-year-olds in isolation in dark cells, almost 24 hours a day, for months at a time.

After having a conversation through a thin hole with a young girl in solitary confinement who was curled up on a bunk next to a stainless steel sink and toilet, he told her he would do whatever it took to get her out of there.

But when he began trying, he found a judicial detention system that for years had been increasing penalties for youths.

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By Daniel Wood June 18, 2015

What It's Like To Spend Father's Day In Prison

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Father’s Day produces a complicated mix of emotions for the thousands of fathers in the U.S. who are imprisoned.

“Father’s Day is a uniquely difficult time of the year for me,” dad and prisoner Bruce W. Harrison wrote in a note sent to The Huffington Post via nonprofit organizationFamilies Against Mandatory Minimums. “It reminds me of the fact that I’ve served more than 20 years in federal prison. Decades of my life spent behind bars instead of time I should have been spending with my family.”

Harrison and three other dads shared their feelings of pain, remorse and hope with HuffPost in the heart-wrenching notes below, which have been edited for length and clarity.

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By Simon McCormack June 20. 2015

56 youthful offenders may get hearings after court ruling

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LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas’ highest court ruled Thursday that an inmate serving life without parole for a killing he was convicted of as a juvenile deserves a new sentencing hearing, a move that opens the door for new sentences for 55 other former youthful offenders.

The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld a Lee County judge’s order granting a new sentencing hearing for Ulonzo Gordon, who was convicted of capital murder in the 1994 slaying of a West Memphis man. In the unanimous ruling, justices ruled that a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibiting mandatory life without parole sentences for youthful offenders should apply retroactively.

An attorney for Gordon said the ruling means all 56 inmates in Arkansas serving life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles are entitled to new sentencing hearings.

“It should affect all the others. All the others were being held up pending the decision on retroactivity,” said Jeff Rosenzweig, who is representing most of the 56 former juvenile offenders.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge’s office said it was reviewing the court’s decision.

“Only those inmates who were juveniles when they were sentenced to serve a ‘mandatory’ life sentence are affected by today’s decision in Kelley v. Ulonzo Gordon,” Rutledge spokesman Judd Deere said in an email. “The attorney general’s office continues to review this decision from the State Supreme Court.”

Justices said Gordon was entitled to the same relief as Kuntrell Jackson, an Arkansas inmate who was given a new sentence as a result of the 2012 U.S. high court ruling.

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By Andrew Demillo The Associated Press June 18, 2015

Jacqueline Sparks: Don't throw away key on young

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As it stands, children and adolescents under age 18 in the state of Rhode Island can be sentenced to life without parole. This defies both common sense and science.

It is well known that the brains of children and adolescents are not fully developed. Specifically, the pre-frontal cortex, that portion of the brain responsible for weighing consequences of one’s actions and making calm and considered decisions, does not mature until the early 20s. Any parent of a teenager knows what this means. However, the part of the young brain that develops earliest is the amygdala. This is the more primitive, “emotional” part that reacts to stress and seeks excitement and immediate reward.

Given these neurological factors, it is easy to see why young people, in particular adolescents as they move away from parental oversight and come under the influence of peers, are prone to risky behaviors.

Complicating the picture is the fact that as many as 80 percent of juvenile lifers have reported witnessing violence. In many instances, this occurs from early ages and extends into adolescence. Witnessing violence is a known cause of childhood trauma with serious consequences for children’s emotional, social and physical development. Research indicates that immature brains develop hyper-arousal adaptations to trauma that can become maladaptive in different life contexts. Exposure to violence not only traumatizes, it teaches the young person that violence is a way to solve problems.

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By Jacqueline Sparks June 16, 2015

60 Organizations Pen Open Letter to NY Governor and Legislature: Raise the Age Now

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(June 15, 2015) In an open letter to be hand-delivered to Albany today, sixty state-wide and national organizations including international human rights groups, social workers, faith-based organizations and children’s advocates, strongly urged the passage of Raise the Age legislation before the session ends this week.

Currently, New York remains one of only two states that still prosecutes all 16- and 17 –year- olds in the justice system as adults. New York also houses 16- and 17-year-olds in adult jails and prisons, where they are at grave risk of suicide, rape, and physical abuse, and often do not receive appropriate services.

With days remaining until the 2015 legislative session ends, it is imperative that there be no further delay in raising the age.

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June 15, 2015

States that ban JLWOP

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Alaska
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Hawaii
Kansas
Kentucky
Massachusetts
Montana
Nevada
Texas
Vermont
West Virginia
Wyoming

 

Paroled After Life Sentence For Juvenile Crime, Joe Donovan Works Towards His Release

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BRIDGEWATER, MASS. Around the country, states are beginning to release people from prison who thought they would be there for life.

Following a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision that it’s unconstitutional for juveniles convicted of murder to automatically be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, some 2,500 cases across the country must be reviewed.

Here in Massachusetts, the state Parole Board has reviewed 20 juvenile cases so far — granting parole to nine people so long as they meet certain conditions before they’re released.

One of the most well known cases is that of Joe Donovan, who threw a punch that led to the murder of MIT student Yngve Raustein. Donovan has been incarcerated for murder since 1992, when he was 17 years old. Last year he was granted parole. This August he turns 40.

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By Deborah Becker June 9, 2015

Kalief Browder’s suicide and the high cost of violence and delay at Rikers

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There was a time when Kalief Browder was given a choice: Admit to a crime he didn’t commit and leave prison after already spending three years there, or maintain his innocence and potentially face 15 years behind bars.

Browder chose innocence.

“I felt like I had to fight, I had to fight,” Browder told HuffPost Live in 2013.

Browder was just 16 years old when he was picked up by police, accused of stealing a backpack and sent to Rikers Island without a trial or a conviction. There, life was a never-ending cycle of violence, hunger and fear perpetrated by his fellow inmates and wardens.

“It was like hell on Earth,” Browder told ABC News. “We were beaten, stomped by the correction officers. Hit with weapons.”

Browder’s court date kept getting pushed back indefinitely. The entire time, he insisted on his innocence.

His case never went to trial. The charges were eventually dismissed.

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By Abby Phillip June 8, 2015

Kalief Browder, 1993–2015

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Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

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By Jennifer Gonnerman June 7, 2015