News

By Shafaq Hasan

October 23, 2014

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, nearly 10,000 children across the country have been sentenced as adults and are serving time in adult prisons. Pennsylvania, which has the highest number of incarcerated children serving life sentences and no minimum age to try a child as an adult, is now also home to the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), a new nonprofit dedicated to aiding Philadelphia’s children who have been prosecuted and are carrying out their sentences in the adult criminal justice system. The nonprofit was founded over the summer and has been steadily gaining traction and support over the last few months.

Founded by attorneys Lauren Fine and Joanna Visser Adjoian, the nonprofit’s aim is to change the criminal justice system’s approach to sentencing children through equipping their defense attorneys with the support they need at the trial and sentencing phase, specifically research surrounding child brain development and applicable Supreme Court precedents, according to their article in the Legal Intelligencer.

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By Rev. Ruben Austria

October 21, 2014

What would happen if community stakeholders in U.S. urban neighborhoods plagued by the highest rates of youth crime and incarceration were given the opportunity to intervene early— and often— on behalf of young people caught up in the juvenile justice system?

One answer to that question has now been provided in New York’s South Bronx neighborhood, where Community Connections for Youth (CCFY), a local non-profit organization, received a $1.1 million grant three years ago from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DJCS), under the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA).

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By Carrie Johnson

September 12, 2014

Twenty years ago this week, in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed a crime bill. It was, in effect, a long-term experiment in various ways to fight crime.

The measure paid to put more cops on the beat, trained police and lawyers to investigate domestic violence, imposed tougher prison sentences and provided money for extra prisons.

Clinton described his motivation to pass the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act in stark terms.

“Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools,” he said. “Every day, we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder.”

And if Clinton and Congress reflected the punitive mindset of the American people, what they didn’t know was that soaring murder rates and violent crime had already begun what would become a long downward turn, according to criminologists and policymakers.

Nicholas Turner is president of the Vera Institute, a nonprofit that researches crime policy. Turner took a minute this week to consider the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the 1990s.

“Criminal justice policy was very much driven by public sentiment and a political instinct to appeal to the more negative punitive elements of public sentiment rather than to be driven by the facts,” he said.

And that public sentiment called for filling up the nation’s prisons, a key part of the 1994 crime bill.

These days, Jeremy Travis is president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But 20 years ago, he attended the signing ceremony for the crime bill — and joined the Clinton Justice Department.

“Here’s the federal government coming in and saying we’ll give you money if you punish people more severely, and 28 states and the District of Columbia followed the money and enacted stricter sentencing laws for violent offenses,” Travis says.

But as Travis now knows all too well, there’s a problem with that idea. Researchers including a National Academy of Sciences panel he led have since found only a modest relationship between incarceration and lower crime rates.

“We now know with the fullness of time that we made some terrible mistakes,” Travis said. “And those mistakes were to ramp up the use of prison. And that big mistake is the one that we now, 20 years later, come to grips with. We have to look in the mirror and say, ‘look what we have done.'”

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By Jonathan M. Katz and Erik Eckholm

September 2, 2014

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time.

The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential harm from false, coerced confessions and of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

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