Interrupting the Prison Pipeline through the D.C. Child Welfare System

By Katie Ishizuka

Last week, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released the fourth and final brief in a series addressing ways in which youth outcomes in the District can be improved to decrease justice system involvement and increase public safety. The brief, entitled Fostering Change: How Investing in D.C.’s Child Welfare System Can Keep Kids Out of the Prison Pipeline, focuses on youth involved in the District’s child welfare system. 

District youth may become involved with the child welfare system for a number of reasons, with the top two being neglect and physical abuse. The third highest reason for youth entering foster care is now parental incarceration: a collateral consequence of D.C. possessing one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.

The majority of these youth are in poverty and residing in Wards (7 and 8) facing economic, social and political exclusion and disinvestment. Ninety-nine percent are African American or Latino. They are 30% more likely to commit violent crime, 59% more likely to be arrested as juveniles and 28% more likely to be arrested as adults if they have experienced maltreatment. One in six has an incarcerated parent and almost half will not graduate high school of those in foster care. Most have experienced multiple forms of trauma and for those currently or previously involved in the child welfare system, the leading cause of death is violent homicide by gunshot.

Put another way, this is an extremely vulnerable group of youth facing individual, family, neighborhood and systemic barriers. While the District’s public child welfare agency, Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA), is tasked with ensuring the safety and well-being of these youth, no single agency or system can do this alone. Improving youth outcomes is reliant upon the strengths and collaboration of all youth-serving systems, including the education, employment and mental health systems. Recommendations on how these systems can be supported can be found in JPI’s first three briefs: Mindful of the Consequences:How Improving the Mental Health of D.C. Youth Benefits the District; Workingfor a Better Future: How expanding employment opportunities for D.C’s youthcreates public safety benefits for all residents; and The Education of D.C.:How Washington D.C.’s investments in education can help increase public safety.

In addition, optimizing youth outcomes is reliant upon neighborhood and community investments in the areas of D.C. with the highest rates of poverty and unemployment, including Wards 5, 7 and 8. The Wards in which people have the ability to get work and provide for their families are the Wards with the lowest child welfare system involvement and lowest justice system involvement.

More information on solutions with the capacity to promote the short and long-term safety, well-being and permanency of the District’s vulnerable youth; save on foster care, criminal justice and human costs; enhance social justice and increase public safety can be found in Fostering Change. 

Katie Ishizuka is a JPI research intern and co-author of Fostering Change: How Investing in D.C.'s Child Welfare System Can Keep Kids Out of the Prison Pipeline. 

Do you remember the Central Park Five?

By Adwoa Masozi
 

In 1989 I was six; too young to know that in New York City, a half hour from my New Jersey home, a political lynching of five African-American boys was taking place in full view of the American public by the justice system and national media. These young men-- Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam—have come to be known as the Central Park Five. Each of these young boys were falsely accused and wrongly convicted for the 1989 rape and brutalization of a white woman jogger in Central Park. 

I asked my dad, who now is 60 years old, what he remembers about that case when it first hit the news. He recounts the story well. 

“Well, at first I believed what they said. Five young black kids attacked a white woman in the park. Donald Trump was out there making statements about it. No one knew who the woman was—it was kept quiet, but they were parading the kids around on the TV.” 

Before I could get my next question in he added,

“They were being interviewed without the parents being there, which was illegal. You can easily scare young children into saying what you want.”

Q: How do you think the media helped to influence public opinion on the case?
“The media reported what the police said. At the time there was no solid evidence. The media was going to be biased because it was a white woman and they always want to promote stories of when black males rape a white female. It’s a quintessential case of stereotyping.”

Q: When did you stop believing they were guilty?
“The prosecutors and the detectives kept denying the guilt of the confessor. The guy who did it admitted he did it and the prosecutors and the detectives insisted he was lying.”

Q: What was the role of the white woman?
“She wasn’t interviewed too much; if I remember right her memory was messed up.  You never heard her story, they kept it quiet. I believe she had memory loss.”

Thanks daddy.
His name is Keith J. Burnam Sr.

The film produced by documentarian Ken Burns based on this case, and named after it, The Central Park Five, will debut this evening at 9 PM on PBS. And I look forward to watching it. I want to know all their stories, because there were six victims--not just one--in this case. Was the outcome of their trials because of a biased jury or did it also have something to do with the quality of their representation—who represented them? Was it the cops involved or the media? Why didn’t it matter that they were children? Where were their parents? How does the nation make amends to the wrongfully convicted?

Perhaps, the greater tragedy here is that this case is not isolated—far from it. This story has played out again and again in the cases of the Scottsboro Boys, Susan Smith, Emmett Till, and a host of others that don’t always get national recognition. 

While racism is less conspicuous these days, it remains an effective agent suffuse throughout all systems servicing or penalizing the American public. Whether we’re talking education, healthcare, employment, housing or justice—disparities in who has the most and least access cuts clear across the board.

Sarah Burns, author of The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding, puts it best, “These young men were convicted long before the trial, by a city blinded by fear and, equally, freighted by race. They were convicted because it was all too easy for people to see them as violent criminals simply because of the color of their skin."


Adwoa Masozi is the Communications Associate at JPI.

CCA: In Need of New Direction

By Tosin Oyekoya

Last month, Corrections Corporation of America promoted Kim White, an African-American woman, as their Vice President, Correctional Programs Division. She formerly served as Managing Director, Inmate Programs and served more than 25 years with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

After seeing posts about the manner in which CCA decided to celebrate Black History Month in February, I’m hoping her presence will slow down CCA’s efforts on doing such a thing again.

Image featured on ACLU's Feb. 8 blog.

If you weren’t made privy to the campaign I'm speaking of, let me update you. CCA celebrated Black History Month with blog posts remembering Rosa Parks and posted Facebook trivia contests about the contributions of African-American musicians. Evidently, CCA must have forgotten that they are the largest private corrections company in the United States and manage more than 60 facilities with a designed capacity of 90,000 beds.

How ironic is it that this company, celebrating Black History Month, is making $1.7 billion annually off of the incarceration of people of color?

The concept of privately-owned companies making profit from incarcerating human beings is absurd to begin with. It incarcerates more African Americans than any other private prison company. It spends millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to ensure their facilities stay full.

Overall according to NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated populations nationwide- federal, state, and private. African Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons. Also one in six black men has been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. In some states, like Illinois, African Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated for a petty drug offense than white people, even though African Americans and white people consume and distribute drugs at similar rates, according to the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study Commission.

Fulfilling Gideon's Promise

By Spike Bradford

Image courtesy Blue Mass Group / Project Legal

We have all heard the mandated Miranda warning in numerous television shows and films. Officers are required to tell accused people,“if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you,” and we assume it to be true; that indigent defense is one of the glorious benefits of our system that so highly values equal treatment under the law. However, the reality of indigent defense is often as different as real life is from most of those shows and movies.

This week, the Brennan Center for Justice released Gideon at 50: Three Reforms to Revive the Right to Counsel, a report describing a justice system that continues to provide poor defendants with substandard or non-existent counsel at trial and recommending several solutions to bring our courts in line with the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in the Gideon v. Wainwright case. That ruling found that accused people who are deemed unable to afford legal representation have a right to have that representation provided for them by the state, the same promise given by the Miranda warning.

Gideon at 50 asserts that the ruling basically produced an unfunded mandate that many jurisdictions have been unable or unwilling to meet. Many poor defendants—as many as 90 percent qualify for public defense, according to the American Bar Association—choose to accept unfair plea agreements or to face the court with inadequate representation. Public defenders are notoriously overworked and underpaid, often through statutes that cap their pay – we make note of this in our 2011 report, System Overload: The Costs of Under-Resourcing Public Defense. The situation has helped to feed our current historically high prison population and costs counties, states and communities dearly.

Mainstream Film Highlights Mandatory Minimum Sentencing and Snitching

By Tosin Oyekoya

“Snitch,” a film released late last month, tells the story of a John Matthews, a father who goes undercover for the DEA in order to free his son who was imprisoned after a drug deal setup. Matthews, played by superstar Dwayne Johnson, was willing to go over and beyond to prevent his teenage son, Jason Collins, played by Rafi Gavron, from serving 10 years in prison under mandatory-sentencing laws for having made one unintelligent mistake. He ill-advisedly accepted delivery of a box full of ecstasy as a favor for a friend. The film displayed him as a good kid who lived in a suburban area. His parents were both hard workers; his father owned a shipping company.

This movie – based on a true story – addresses two issues within the criminal justice system. The first issue is mandatory minimum sentencing. Mandatory sentences are predetermined sentences for certain categories of offenses, mainly drug-related and gun-related crimes. Under this sentencing policy, people must serve a minimum number of years in prison. These laws are enacted by state legislators that require judges to give fixed prison terms to those convicted of specific crimes. These laws prevent judges from considering other relevant factors, such as the defendant’s role in the offense or likelihood of committing a future offense.

A first-time drug offender will get a 10-year mandatory minimum without chance of parole in the federal system which is what Jason in the movie faced. Mandatory minimum sentencing forces plea bargains out of the accused. The threat of a mandatory prison term means that some people arrested for relatively low-level drug offenses feel compelled to plead down and serve a prison sentence, even though the root cause of the offense may be low-level drug sales to sustain a habit, while treatment may be a more appropriate course. Another criticism of mandatory minimum sentencing is that it is too harsh. The crime committed is not worth the amount of years taken from the offender and further causes prison overcrowding, yet another issue.

Despite Juvenile Justice Reform Progress, Still Racial Disparity Work to Do

This blog post was originally posted on Reclaiming Futures' blog March 13, 2013 entitled "Two New Reports Show Juvenile Confinement Reform in Five States"


By Spike Bradford
In almost every state, youth of color are held in secure facilities at rates as high as four and a half times their percentage of the population. For example, in 2010, African-American youth made up 16.6 percent of the under 18 population. That same year they comprised 40.9 percent of incarcerated youth in the U.S, a disproportionality ratio of 2.46 to 1.
Just to be clear, this figure means that African-American youth are 2.46 times more likely to be incarcerated than we would expect if we used their percentage in the general population as a guide. And that’s just the national average. In 14 states in 2010, African-American youth were disproportionately represented in juvenile confinement by more than a factor of three. The issue has traditionally affected African-American youth but Latinos and other youth of color have begun to experience more juvenile justice system disproportionately in recent years.

JPI’s recent report released Feb. 27, Common Ground: Lessons learned from five states that reduced juvenile confinement by more than half, found that, despite falling youth confinement rates nationally, disproportionate incarceration remains a problem in most states. In fact, even amongst states that have lowered youth confinement by more than half, the disproportionality of incarcerated youth of color has gotten worse.
The problem isn't new or a surprise to politicians practitioners or advocates. It certainly isn’t news to confined youth of color whose cellmates are overwhelmingly various shades of brown. Disproportionality was mentioned in federal guidelines as early as 1988 in revisions to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (PDF).

So why haven't decades of well-intended efforts solved or at least lessened the problem? Most likely because the decision to confine or not confine a young person of color 1) cannot legally or ethically be based on their color, and 2) that decision is too late in the chain of decisions that led to the youth's justice system involvement.

In our American legal system there is no place for racially influenced decision-making (not to say it doesn’t exist). So the possibility of a mandate to incarcerate fewer youth of color upon adjudication is an impossible one. Even if tried, it would lead to cries of reverse discrimination. A judge must base their decision on other factors. Sadly, these other factors are ones for which youth of color are at a disadvantage. They come from communities and schools that are more likely to have a police presence, making prior citations or arrests more likely. Youth of color are more likely to be stopped for suspicion and less likely to be counseled and released than white youth. Youth of color who lack financial resources can’t afford legal representation, making pre-trial detention more likely which leads to a higher likelihood of adjudication (a guilty finding in the juvenile system) and incarceration. And it doesn’t stop there. Justice system involvement for youth increases the likelihood of adult justice involvement. Any level of involvement hurts families, communities, impacts educational attainment and burdens society.

• Executive summary of Juvenile Justice Reform in Connecticut: How Collaboration and Commitment Have Improved Public Safety and Outcomes for Youth
• Full report of Juvenile Justice Reform in Connecticut: How Collaboration and Commitment Have Improved Public Safety and Outcomes for Youth
• Full report Common Ground: Common Ground: Lessons Learned from Five States that Reduced Juvenile Confinement by More than Half

Spike Bradford is senior research associate for JPI.

International Women’s Day

By Tosin Oyekoya

International Women’s Day is a global day of celebration of women as well as a day of resistance to all forms of gendered violence, exploitation and oppression. Women living behind prison walls are denied many of the basic “rights and freedoms” that will be celebrated by women all over the world on this day. As if that is not enough, they are also forced to endure the violence that is throughout the prison system. For these women, International Women's Day should be a day to promote better treatment of women in prison worldwide and keep us ever mindful and vigilant in eliminating the injustices, violence and harm inflicted on women who pass through criminal justice systems.

Yesterday in Dallas, TX, groups representing criminal justice, civil liberties, policy, and faith organizations such as Texas Inmate Families Association and Human Rights and Grassroots Leadership, among others, gathered across the street from Dawson State Jail for a candlelight vigil to honor the women who have died while incarcerated at the jail.

“We were pleased with the turnout. It is not about how many people showed up,” said Kymberlie Charles, the national organizer of Grassroots Leadership.
Three women were honored at the vigil whose deaths could have been prevented had the correction officers at Dawson State Jail not ignored their pleas for help. Also honored at the vigil was a premature infant who lived only four days after being born in a toilet inside Dawson.  The baby’s mother requested a pregnancy test just three weeks before giving birth but was denied by prison staff.  The women, who died, along with the baby’s mother, were serving short-term sentences for non-violent offenses. When asked if this is going to be an annual event, Charles said “We hope not! Our point of this vigil is to get this place shut down.” Hopefully by next year this time, it will be closed.