Diplomas Not Detention: The Better Options for Kids Act

By Hope DeLap and Jasper Burroughs

JPI Interns

Judge Teske on Capitol Hill in June.

Across the nation, young students who commit minor misdeeds (truancy, running away, alcohol possession and others) are suspended, expelled, and put in prison at an alarming rate.
On June 25th we attended a briefing that marked Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) introduction of the Better Options for Kids Act of 2014. The bill seeks to rupture the school to prison pipeline by supporting states with policies that “improve educational continuity and limit juvenile court involvement and incarceration for youth.” 

The Better Options for Kids Act will encourage “five state policies that help drive down juvenile incarceration and crime, saving millions of dollars,” which include:

• Limiting court referrals;

• Limiting police officers in schools;

• Providing training or funds without expulsion;

• Promoting community-based alternatives;

• Providing re-entry help for young people returning to the community from custody.

The legislation echoes the recommendations included in JPI’s 2011 report, “Education Under Arrest,” which calls on jurisdictions to use strategies like those listed in the Better Options for Kids Act, including investing in education, prevention and intervention strategies that work to keep schools safe. The legislation also reflects the findings of the JPI report, Juvenile Justice Reform in Connecticut, which showed that there are better ways to improve community safely than needlessly refer youth from schools to the justice system.

Judge Steve Teske, Chief Judge of the Juvenile Court of Clayton County, Georgia, spoke about his experiences advancing nationally recognized practices in balanced and restorative justice in a jurisdiction that serves almost 80,000 kids. He said that addressing the issue of the mass incarceration of students is “not just a legal obligation, [it] is a moral obligation. These are our children.”

Jim St. Germain also spoke. The 24 year old Brooklyn-native began dealing drugs at age 11 and was arrested at 14 on a felony drug charge. He agreed with Judge Teske: “[this is] not just a juvenile problem, this is America’s problem.”

If he had been two years older, St. Germain would probably have served time into his twenties in an adult prison. Instead, he spent three years in a group home with five other boys, emerged with newfound purpose, and got a Bachelors Degree. He is now preparing to enter NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He also tirelessly advocates for juvenile justice reform and is a current member of the Vera Institute of Justice Juvenile Justice Board and NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s Reengineering team. He counts himself lucky, acknowledging that “it’s a blessing that I got caught at an early stage. I wouldn’t have stopped unless my whole neighborhood changed overnight.”

Land of the Free

By Hope DeLap

Independence Day is the celebration of the birth of a nation liberated from the oppressive rule of Britain, free of the shackles of its past and empowered to thrive moving forward. But are we still this nation? Can we truly celebrate freedom when our justice system has never been so unjust?

Photo taken from http://www.thedailysheeple.com/

It is hard to celebrate America’s liberty knowing how truly un-free so many Americans are. A recent study showed that 65 million Americans have a criminal record. If you don’t have a calculator handy, 65 million is equivalent to one in four adults in the United States. Furthermore, another study found that about one third of adults in America have been arrested for adult or juvenile offenses, not including minor traffic offenses. Despite so many Americans having previous convictions on their record, a criminal history is seen as extremely problematic, not as normal. There is a severe social stigma attached to a condition 65 million adults share. Additionally, the past can never be left behind. These people are not free to move forward with their lives. Background checks and collateral consequences become the new chains that constrain their liberty.

The collateral consequences of conviction prevent so many people from moving on and creating new lives for themselves. These collateral consequences include additional civil and state penalties which continue to punish people long after they have paid their debt to society. JPI reports in Billion Dollar Divide that in 2010, 451,471 people in Virginia alone were disenfranchised. These penalties, mandated by statute, extend beyond voting rights and affect all areas of individuals’ lives:

• Employment and business licensing
• Housing
• Education
• Public benefits (unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)
• Credits and loans
• Immigration status
• Parental rights
• Interstate travel

Eleven Years Too Late: It’s Time to Implement PREA

By Natrina Gandana

For the last two years, I have been studying and working on criminal justice reform. I’ve worked inside and outside prisons, advocating for reform in California. Now, I intern with the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. which has enabled me to immerse myself into the political and legislative parts of the justice system. 

(l-r) Amy Fettig, Liz Ryan, Elissa Rumsey, Joshua Delaney, Rudy Qazilbash  

So after attending the seven-hour long teach-in session on the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), Brenda V. Smith, a professor of law and director of the Project on Addressing Prison Rape asked the attendees two big questions – what have we learned and what are we going to do?

I had learned so much, facts and statistics ran through my head, while the names of individuals and stories weighed heavily. So when Professor Smith asked those questions, I knew what I was going to say. I walked up to the microphone, thanked all the speakers, and told everyone that they inspired me to fight for criminal justice reform. Before I could continue, Talila Lewis, founder of Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf (HEARD), yelled from the crowd, “You already ARE fighting!” Taken aback, I heard “woohs!” and claps from the audience, and I smiled.  

However, I wasn’t smiling during the event. This inspiring, but hard-to-swallow teach-in centered on the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). PREA passed unanimously in both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Bush in 2003. It is a comprehensive initiative that establishes a zero tolerance policy for sexual assault in custody and requires the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce standards that detect, prevent, reduce and punish sexual assault in custody. The Justice Policy Institute, in collaboration with the conservative Hudson Institute, helped to make the legislation a reality. Despite JPI’s creation of a broad coalition in support of the law and its necessity, PREA’s potential was never fully realized.

How Young People are Fairing on Adult Community Supervision, and the Need to Raise the Age in Michigan

By Jason Ziedenberg

As a former staffer of two corrections agencies responsible for community supervision of youth and young adults, the data in a new report published this week by the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency (MCCD) on the transfer laws – and how youth are fairing under adult supervision – underlines for me the critical need for this state to increase the age of juvenile court jurisdiction to age 18.


The report, Youth Behind Bars: Examining the impact of prosecuting and incarcerating kids in Michigan’s criminal justice system, profiles the fact that Michigan is one of 10 states that automatically sees 17 year olds tried in their adult system. A huge number of youth are affected by this, and not only those engaged in serious delinquency. Between 2003 and 2013, according to the report, 19,124 youth aged 17 were tried as adults, and entered either an adult jail, prison or ended up on probation. While there are a couple of pathways for youth to be transferred to adult court, because 17 year olds are automatically tried as adults, most youth affected by the law were convicted of a non-violent offense.

Different people will read Youth Behind Bars and see different reasons why there is a need for a change in the Michigan law. When I think about my time working with probation departments in Oregon, juvenile departments that supervise young adults in Washington, D.C., and work with community supervision leaders that want to advance best practices through the National Institute of Corrections, I see a classic example of how the state isn’t keeping up with best practices that we would like to see criminal justice policy.

Beyond the Fence: Maya Angelou’s Visit to Oak Hill

This was originally posted on June 5, 2014 by the Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings.


By David Domenici


I served as the school’s principal for four years, working with an incredibly dedicated team of teachers, many of whom are still there today. In the spring of 2009, with our organization’s annual fundraiser approaching, I decided to call Dr. Angelou and ask if she would be willing to come to Oak Hill, located about 20 miles outside of DC, to spend some time with our students.

Last weekend my best friend, James Forman, published a beautiful tribute to Dr. Maya Angelou. James recounts how the school we started for court-involved and at-risk teens from DC came to bear her name, how Dr. Angelou joined us for our annual fundraisers 17 years in a row, and how she embraced our students (in every sense of the word) at those events.

I know one of the reasons James wrote that piece was to make sure that Dr. Angelou’s commitment to our students would be recognized as part of her legacy. In that spirit, I feel compelled to add a few paragraphs to supplement James’ account.  

‘True North’ Youth Justice Reform: Lessons from Ontario

This post originally appeared on JJIE's ideas and opinions page May 21, 2014.

By Jason Ziedenberg

The two big trends to watch in American youth justice policy have focused on reducing youth incarceration, and moving young people from adult prisons and jails into a reformed youth justice system.
These are positive trends that the field needs to build on, but it’s too soon to pop the champagne. Too many states still have direct file laws on the books where youth automatically end up in the adult system by their charge, Raise-the-Age efforts in a couple of states are slow to take hold, and as budget-strained states close youth facilities, the field faces new challenges in building, funding and sustaining the continuum needed to meet young people’s needs.

These challenges should not be seen as roadblocks in places like New York, California, North Carolina, Texas, Florida and a dozen other states where large parts of the reform agenda have yet to be fulfilled. If these states are looking for yet one more example that our broader youth justice vision can be achieved, you need only to go “north.”

In 2003, the Canadian federal government replaced the antiquated Youth Offenders Act — Canada’s equivalent of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act — with a new law. Under the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), the 10 provinces and two territories sought to implement a youth justice vision that recognizes young people’s unique adolescent development needs, divert youth from the justice system and meet their needs through other youth serving systems, expand the options that could serve as alternatives to youth prisons and improve rehabilitation and re-entry services for those few youth in locked custody. The provinces received modest funding from the federal government to implement the new law, but the 10 provinces were largely left to align their work with the YCJA on their own dime.

Listen Up D.C.: Stop Putting Your Young People In Adult Jails

This post originally appeared on JJIE's ideas and opinions page May 22, 2014.

By Marc Schindler

Having helped lead the Washington, D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) – the city’s juvenile corrections agency — I know, first hand from my experience running that system and from my colleagues around the country that, Washington, D.C. can and should serve youth who are currently being transferred to the adult system in the juvenile justice system, rather than see them jailed and locked up in the adult system.

This issue has come into sharp relief for me this week, with the release of a new report: Capital City Correction: Reforming DC's Use of Adult Incarceration Against Youth. Released by DC Lawyers for Youth and the Campaign for Youth Justice, the report looks at how young people are prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system in Washington, D.C. through Direct File – a statute that enables federal prosecutors to send District youth accused of certain crimes to adult court without judicial review.

The report showed that 541 young people under the age of 18 were detained or incarcerated in adult facilities in D.C. between 2007 and 2012 and that youth spent 10,000 days – the equivalent of 27 years – in adult jail. The young people who end up on this path experience inadequate facilities, higher risk of being victimized while locked up, increased chances of solitary confinement, and often carry the long-term consequences of adult felony convictions when they leave the system. We also know from decades of research, including by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that transfer to adult court actually increases recidivism, with youth prosecuted as adults more likely to commit crimes upon release than similar youth handled in the juvenile system.