juvenile justice
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Chicago’s New GPS-Tracking Ankle Monitors Can Record Kids Without Their Consent
As cities and towns across America come to grips with the country’s mass incarceration problem, many jurisdictions are looking to digital surveillance, particularly ankle monitors, for solutions. But as a new report detailing Chicago’s use of electronic monitoring reveals, these technologies can be every bit as harmful to the people wearing them as putting them…
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Supreme Court to Hear Whether ‘DC Sniper’ Lee Boyd Malvo Deserves New Sentencing
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal of Lee Boyd Malvo, who participated in one of the most notorious, murderous shooting sprees in U.S. history, to determine if he should be re-sentenced because he was a minor at the time of his crimes. In September and October 2002, 17-year-old Malvo and…
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Minor Damage: The Criminal Injustice of Black Youth Tried As Adults
No one knew. When 25-year-old guard Keriana Alexcee found the body of Jaquin Thomas hanging in a New Orleans jail cell, she didn’t know that Thomas had been dead for more than 90 minutes. According to the Advocate, Alexcee had not been trained to check on Thomas every 15 minutes—as mandated by a federal consent…
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Black Teen Incarcerated for Days After Judge’s Release Order Despite No Probable Cause: Lawsuit
A San Francisco mother has filed a lawsuit alleging that the city kept her teenage son locked in a cell for days even though a judge determined that there was no reason that the boy should have been arrested in the first place and ordered his release. On June 29, 2017, Tureko Straughter’s 15-year-old son…
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Watch: To Understand How Harmful Juvenile Incarceration Is, Listen to This Poem
In a spoken-word poem, Dwayne Betts details the emotional impacts of juvenile incarceration. In partnership with WNYC Studios, we present Caught. #CaughtPodcast
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Rikers Doesn’t Put Teens in Solitary; Other New York Jails Do
This article was published in partnership with Caught, the new podcast on juvenile justice from WNYC Studios and the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal-justice system. Sign up for its newsletter or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter. When the police approached Imani and her friends outside a Syracuse,…
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Where’s My Village?
Editor’s note: This is the second of two essays The Root is publishing in partnership with Caught, a new podcast from WNYC Studios about the juvenile-justice system. We hope to generate a conversation about how we can support rather than merely punish young people who are in crisis, and we want to hear from you…
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How to Stop Locking Up Kids
Editor’s note: This is the first of two essays The Root is publishing in partnership with Caught, a new podcast from WNYC Studios about the juvenile-justice system. We hope to generate a conversation about how we can support rather than merely punish young people who are in crisis, and we want to hear from you…
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Watch: The Role of Teenage-Brain Science in Juvenile-Justice Reform
In 2005 the United States became the last country to end the death penalty for offenders under 18 years old. Adolescent neuroscience research played a huge part in changing this policy. However, there are still approximately 2,500 prison inmates in the United States serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed…