Criminal Justice Reforms Must Include Youth Behind Bars

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Last week was unofficially criminal justice reform week. The president made an unprecedented statement on the need for criminal justice reforms at the NAACP’s national convening and made a first-ever visit by a president to a federal prison.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee led by Chairman Jason Chaffetz and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings held hearings where a bipartisan group of Senators, Representatives and Governors along with other witnesses testified on the need to overhaul the criminal justice system, including federal statutes and the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Most of the discussions last week centered on federal laws and federal corrections, and not on reforming state laws and state and local detention and corrections. And the juvenile justice system received scant attention. To be fair, the president did make a couple of remarks about youth, such as, “We’ve got to make sure our juvenile justice system remembers that kids are different,” and “What is normal is young people making mistakes.” And among the hearing witnesses thanks to Representative Elijah Cummings, I testified about the need for juvenile justice reforms and several members of Congress did ask questions about youth in the justice system at the hearings.

The president and congress should not leave out youth behind bars in efforts to reform criminal justice this year and their actions must focus on reforms at both the federal and state level.

Here’s why:

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Liz Ryan 7/20/2015

For troubled youths, veterans offer shoulders to lean on

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Two dozen boys wore cobalt polos and matching grins listening to the keynote speakers of their graduation ceremony. Absent from the event was a Little Village graduate who was recovering after being shot last week.

The boys in the blue polos had all suffered. Some had narrowly escaped gunfire. Some were shooting survivors, some had lost their friends and some had, at one point, found gang culture alluring.

But at La Villita Community Church on Saturday, after graduating from the YMCA of Metro Chicago’s Urban Warriors program, many of the boys had begun to heal. The 16-week peer support program teams youth who’ve endured extreme trauma with recent military veterans, who show the boys positive strategies for coping with loss and improving their mental health.

“Imagine a group of people standing on top of a cliff, holding hands. Imagine a crowd behind them, saying ‘No, don’t jump, you’re not gonna make it,'” said Xavier McElrath-Bey of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “It’s the same thing with gangs.

“We’ve seen people die. Get locked up. Get on death row. We’ve seen what happens to people who jump off that cliff, but for some reason, we all want to jump off the cliff.”

The program matched 10 veterans with 29 boys ages 12 to 18 who’ve grown up in the city’s Little Village or Humboldt Park neighborhoods.

“No one talks about their trauma and what these boys go through the way we talk about veteran trauma,” said Eddie Bocanegra, the program’s executive director. “It’s all PTSD, though. It’s all the same.”

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By Marwa Eltagouri 7/18/15

President Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis

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On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought.

Mr. Obama’s visit to El Reno, a medium-security prison in Oklahoma, capped off a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole.

Speaking to reporters after touring the cells, Mr. Obama reflected on the people he met there. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made. The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

This indisputable argument has been made by many others, most notably former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., who was the administration’s most powerful advocate for sweeping justice reforms. But it is more significant coming from the president, not just in his words but in his actions. On Monday Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 46 people, most serving 20 years or more, for nonviolent drug crimes. It was a tiny fraction of the more than 30,000 people seeking clemency, but the gesture recognized some of the injustices of America’s harsh justice system.

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By The Editorial Board 7/16/15

President Obama should call for ban on life without parole for kids

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We applaud President Obama for his demand this week for justice reform, acknowledgement that “kids are different,” and his visit to a prison today. The fact that he and Pope Francis – two of our most powerful world leaders – have made it a priority to visit those incarcerated in the United States and call for meaningful reform to the justice system reflects just how urgent it is.

We call on the President to follow the Pope’s lead in publicly condemning the practice of imposing criminal penalties on children, especially life without parole, the most extreme punishment available to children. The United States is the only country in the world known to sentence its children to die in prison. This step would be consistent with the President’s declaration that “justice and redemption go hand in hand” and would bring our nation closer to international standards for holding our children accountable.

This step also would align with a growing and diverse movement for reform among policy and opinion leaders, from President Carter to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and conservative commentator George Will. Fourteen states have abandoned the practice, and several others either don’t use the sentence or have severely limited its use.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in three decisions during the last decade, has ruled that children are “constitutionally different” from adults and should not be subject to our nation’s harshest punishments.

These significant advances in law have been informed by growing bodies of adolescent development research that have proven what every parent knows: children are not simply little adults. They are less capable than adults to control their impulses, think through the long-term impacts of their behaviors, and avoid pressure from peers and adults. Significantly, they also possess a unique capacity for change and rehabilitation.

A call by President Obama for an outright ban on life-without-parole sentences for children would encourage state leaders and members of Congress to replace these extreme sentences with laws to ensure that children are held accountable in age-appropriate, trauma-informed ways that focus on their ability to learn from their mistakes and better themselves, with the hope of one day returning to their communities.

Eliminating these inhumane death-in-prison sentences for children would move us closer to a country living up to the vision that President Obama articulated in his speech Tuesday to the NAACP. In his call for reform to our country’s deeply broken justice system he said, “I am going to shine a spotlight on this issue because while the people in our prisons have made some mistakes — and sometimes big mistakes — they are also Americans, and we have to make sure that as they do their time and pay back their debt to society that we are increasing the possibility that they can turn their lives around.”

We applaud this message and urge the President to help secure his legacy as an agent of transformative change in our criminal justice system by taking the common-sense and morally necessary step of calling for our country to join the rest of the world by ending the practice of sentencing our children to die in prison.

Jody Kent Lavy
Director & National Coordinator
Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth
July 16, 2015

President Obama at NAACP Convention: "Kids Are Different"

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“We’ve got to make sure our juvenile justice system remembers that kids are different. Don’t just tag them as future criminals. Reach out to them as future citizens.”

– President Obama, July 14, 2015

 

How parole boards keep prisoners in the dark and behind bars

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Reynaldo Rodriguez was 19 with a young son, a good job and no criminal record when he shot and killed a man. As part of an ongoing family feud, someone — Rodriguez believed it was a man named Robert Cuellar — had shot at Rodriguez’s mother and brother. Then Cuellar slapped Rodriguez’s sister.

“I just blew a fuse,” Rodriguez says now of killing Cuellar.

In 1977 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and the judge gave him a choice: A sentence of 15 to 30 years would probably mean parole in 12. A life sentence would make him parole-eligible in 10 years.

Rodriguez chose life. At his sentencing, Saginaw County (Mich.) Judge Gary McDonald made it clear that this was “not the mandatory natural life imprisonment sentence” and said that if Rodriguez was a “model prisoner,” McDonald would recommend release in 10 years.

Thirty-seven years later, Rodriguez is still behind bars.

America’s prisons hold tens of thousands of people like Rodriguez — people primarily confined not by the verdicts of a judge or a jury but by the inaction of a parole board. Michigan is one of 26 states where parole boards are vested with almost unlimited power to decide who gets out of prison when, and why.

With more than 1.5 million people behind bars, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the financial costs are staggering. As politicians from both parties seek alternatives to mass imprisonment, the parole process has emerged as a major obstacle.

A months-long Marshall Project investigation reveals that, in many states, parole boards are so deeply cautious about releasing prisoners who could come back to haunt them that they release only a small fraction of those eligible — and almost none who have committed violent offenses, even those who pose little danger and whom a judge clearly intended to go free.

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By Beth Schwartzapfel 7/11/15

Harsh prison sentences swell ranks of lifers and raise questions about fairness, study finds

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Stricter state sentencing laws in Washington have swelled the ranks of inmates serving life sentences to nearly one in five.

And some lifers who opted to go to trial are serving much longer sentences than others who committed the same crimes and plea-bargained — raising questions about equitable treatment of prisoners.

Those are among the findings in a new analysis by undergraduate honors students in the University of Washington’s Law, Societies & Justice program, who sought to determine the number of lifers in Washington prisons, the legal processes that lead to life sentences and the cost of housing those inmates, many of whom will die behind bars.

Washington largely eliminated its parole system after the state’s Sentencing Reform Act was enacted in 1984. The SRA was intended to increase consistency in sentencing and shift the goal of sentencing from rehabilitation, which research at the time indicated did not reduce crime, to punishment.

“At the time, the conventional wisdom was that rehabilitation didn’t work, and that parole boards were making arbitrary decisions,” said Katherine Beckett, a professor in the Law, Societies & Justice program and the Department of Sociology, who oversaw the students’ research.

The upshot of the SRA was that except for a few categories of inmates — juveniles, certain sex offenders sentenced to life and prisoners sentenced before the law was enacted — most prisoners would never go before a review board, have their sentences reconsidered or have a chance at early release. Ever.

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By Deborah Bach 7/7/2015

"Dying in a Concrete Garden of Life"

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By Azeem
Inmate serving life without parole for an alleged crime as a child

Why kill the rose before it gets the chance to grow? The rose didn’t choose to be cultivated in a hostile and non-hospitable environment…where proper nourishing was almost an impossible feat to accomplish. The rose began growing wildly, with thorns, and rough edges because it adapted to and adopted the characteristics and qualities of the blighted soil and dilapidated environmental circumstances around him.

Being raised in such an environment makes young roses prone to prick others with their thorns…sometimes intentionally and at other times unintentionally…and oftentimes others are harmed by the thorns of such roses while they were intoxicated, by way of the un-natural and un-healthy nutrients of their disintegrated environments. It’s remarkable to see how anunderdeveloped rose can remember so vividly how it cried uncontrolled tears of confusion and sorrow, when it witnessed the results of thorn pricking that it can’t recollect. That rose wasn’t heartless!

Inarticulatable expressions is the fear, pain, loneliness and betrayal felt by thatunderdeveloped rose as vintage plants of various breeds uprooted him from his family and placed him in an unknown environment where experienced strangers of all sorts were the norm…planted in a concrete garden with pure dirt bags and steel furnishings…Sentenced to die a slow death in new life by Misery, hopelessness, and misguidance for harms caused as a child- convicted of being too young to learn from mistakes never committed previously. How can a youthful rose flourish in such an environment while suffering from adequate “oxygen” and sunlight deprivation?

It was said that he was irredeemable, and that he can’t be rehabilitated. The Divine Decree of Allāh transcended the creations grim expectations of that youthful rose. It’s remarkable to see a rose become so beautiful and fully redeemed in an environment in which it wasn’t allowed to experience, and benefit from the natural and normal process of photosynthesis. That’s rewarding enough in this concrete garden that’s filled with dirt bags, nightmares, and steel furnishings. I’ve seen many roses become dried out and wither away…hope abandoned for despair…in many cases hope was stolen and despair was its replacement.

I’ve witnessed many more roses grow upright in such a Bleakish environment…Black Roses, White roses, brown roses and yellow roses…JLWOP is not the solution…it’s an epidemic that’s suffocating society because society can’t benefit from the wholesome oxygen that the foliage of those roses exudes. JLWOP suffocates the future…It’s a Genocide of Progression.

Sometimes…cutting the thorns…punishing for the harms that one causes in moderation and placing the rose in an environment in which he could benefit, grow, and reach his full potential, is Most honorable and beneficial. Condemnation to Death in a Concrete Garden of Life is not a fitting Recompense for the acts of underdeveloped Roses…suffering in first person…Crying out in third person: Give him (and them) a second chance. END JLWOP!

History of Abuse Seen in Many Girls in Juvenile System

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As many as 80 percent of the girls in some states’ juvenile justice systems have a history of sexual or physical abuse, according to a report released Thursday. The report, a rare examination of their plight, recommends that girls who have been sexually trafficked no longer be arrested on prostitution charges.

The study, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” found that sexual abuse was among the primary predictors of girls’ involvement with juvenile justice systems, but that the systems were ill-equipped to identify or treat the problem.

“Our girls, and especially our girls at the margins, are suffering, and what the study shows is how violence is part of their lives and how the response is criminalization,” said Malika Saada Saar, the executive director of the Human Rights Project for Girls, a Washington-based organization that conducted the research with the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Ms. Foundation for Women.

The report’s authors say that girls involved in criminal behavior receive far less public attention than boys because there are far fewer girls in juvenile detention centers and because crimes committed by girls do not usually involve violence.

Laws in many states allow the police to arrest girls as young as 13 on prostitution charges, even when they are victims of sex trafficking. The report says the policy of incarcerating girls at young ages for prostitution, as well as on suspicion of truancy and running away, leads to profound mistrust of the criminal justice system and, often, more arrests.

“When law enforcement views girls as perpetrators, and when their cases are not dismissed or diverted but sent deeper into the justice system, the cost is twofold: Girls’ abusers are shielded from accountability, and the trauma that is the underlying cause of the behavior is not addressed,” the report says.

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By Timothy Williams July 9, 2015

Huffington Post reporter says MI, US prisons need more transparency

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Current State talks with Huffington Post reporter Dana Liebelson about her recent article about juvenile offenders in Michigan’s prison system and the challenges facing reporters covering the prison system.

In 2013, the Michigan Department of Corrections was sued by seven inmates who first entered the adult prison system before their 18th birthday. They say the state failed to protect them from sexual and physical abuse from both other inmates and prison staff while housed in those facilities. The state has denied those claims. This spring, two of the journalists reporting on the lawsuit had their notes and other materials subpoenaed by the Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s Office. Dana Liebelson from the Huffington Post was one of those reporters.

The subpoenas were later withdrawn, but Liebelson says it’s just one example of a frightening lack of transparency when it comes to the U.S. prison system. Her story on juvenile offenders housed in adult prisons was published last week along with an op-ed looking at the difficulties of reporting on prisons in the U.S.

Current State speaks with Dane Liebelson about the article and the challenges of reporting on prisons in the U.S.

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By April Van Buren July 6, 2015