Word: systemic
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...egregious as the case is, experts say it is all too indicative of a juvenile-justice system racked with abuses yet subject to far less scrutiny than the adult system it increasingly mirrors. The entire Texas juvenile-justice system had to be overhauled two years ago after it was discovered that kids were arbitrarily held years beyond their original sentence and that many were sexually abused. Recent studies have shown high recidivism rates from graduates of the private boot camps that were in vogue under then President Bill Clinton after he endorsed the experience as Governor of Arkansas. (Read "Boot...
...Nationwide, the system, which sends kids to a mix of large public "kiddie" prisons and smaller (but far more numerous) privately owned ones, handles more than 1.6 million juvenile cases a year; detentions have increased 44% from 1985 to 2002, the most recent year for which data are available. And that doesn't include the number of young offenders who bypass the juvenile system altogether. Every year, some 200,000 youths are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults, and on the first instance of trouble, often for relatively minor crimes, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice; those kids...
...offenses. And officials at both the state and federal levels seem to be getting the message. Last summer, after reviewing a large swath of research literature, the Department of Justice concluded that "to best achieve reduction in recidivism, the overall number of juvenile offenders transferred to the criminal-justice system should be minimized." That came three years after the U.S. stopped executing minors, following a Supreme Court decision, Roper v. Simmons, that was largely based on new brain research showing that the full development of the frontal lobe, where rational judgments are made, does not occur until the early...
...sentiments are echoed by advocates who are working to clean up the system. "We are closing Guantánamo, [but] we need an equal amount of attention to the abuses of restraints and excessive use of isolation in the facilities where our nation's children are being held," says Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, who has spent 30 years litigating against such abuses. Soler argues that only the most violent juvenile offenders really need to be detained - roughly 5% of the more than 90,000 who are currently institutionalized in juvenile correctional...
...responsive and responsible system also requires oversight throughout the justice system, something that appears to have been sorely lacking in Pennsylvania. No one has accused prosecutors of being part of the scheme, but many observers argue that they were in a position where they should have known of the problem but chose not to speak out. Instead, it took the work of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center to uncover the abuses. After discovering that more than 50% of kids in Luzerne County Juvenile Court had been without legal counsel, the organization in April 2008 petitioned the Pennsylvania supreme court...