The resistance may create a paradoxical situation by treating data –probably the single most important tool driving successful reform — as a profane and abusive contrivance used by reformers to mislead people to get their way. What is essential to explain the need for reform becomes instead something that can’t be trusted.

Someone recently told me, in a conversation about our work on the Reform Council, “I don’t pay attention to data because anyone can skew it.” Other complaints include “The numbers are not correct” or “I don’t trust the data,” or “I don’t need data — I can see for myself.”

I have some background in social science statistics from graduate school. Despite my support of data analysis, I sympathize to some degree with these complaints. Data has become a dirty word because most states, including right here in Georgia, do not have a unified juvenile justice collection system that uniformly collects data under the auspices of a neutral entity. A unified system yields integrity and diminishes most complaints — well, the legitimate ones I mean.

No matter how much we unify a statewide data collection system with unyielding integrity, there will be those few who simply cannot accept it.

Data collection varies from state to state depending on which authority oversees the youth. Those states with intake and probation provided by state authorities are more inclined to have comprehensive and consistent data of youth. Other states give control to local courts that retain the data and make statewide analysis of juvenile justice practices difficult. Georgia has a blended system that includes dependent courts, independent courts, and some with a combination of both.

I will use Georgia as an example to illustrate this data dilemma, but the problem is a national occurrence.

Independent courts in Georgia employ their own intake and probation whereas dependent courts depend on the state to provide those services.

If the state wants data from an independent court, that court isn’t obliged to provide it. Not providing it is typically is caused by what I describe as the Data Fear Syndrome — “I just don’t trust what they will do with my data.”

Assuming everyone is cooperative and wants to share data, sometimes they simply can’t. The state operates one system and the independent courts operate their own — the systems speak different languages.

While president of the Georgia Council of Juvenile Court Judges, I made the development of a central juvenile data registry part of my executive plan. After experiencing one failed venture, I reached out to our state advisory group — the Governor’s Office for Children and Families — for assistance.

GOCF jumped on it. Our juvenile justice specialist, Joe Vignati — who also serves at GOCF as the juvenile justice programs director — moved forward with deliberate speed creating a Juvenile Data Integrity Stakeholders Work Group.

The collaborative effort of the Council of Juvenile Court Judges, Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Juvenile Justice among others coupled with the technical assistance of the Carl Vinson Institute at the University of Georgia, GOCF was able to roll out the pilot in 2011. That was two years after I completed my term as president. It was a good feeling.

The capabilities of this new system are remarkable — including interactive map and pre-made Maps, each providing multiple ways of exploring the data from spreadsheets to pie charts as reported in a 2011 JJIE article.

Despite this capability, it remains insufficient until we have all the data to fuel it.

When the Gov. Nathan Deal commissioned the Georgia Criminal Justice Reform Council last year to study the juvenile justice system and make policy reform recommendations, he secured the help of the Pew Trust on the States to analyze the data so the council could determine the strengths and weaknesses of the system.

It was at this juncture that Pew confronted the data dilemma — some folks just don’t want to give up their data.

This was not Pew’s first rodeo in the art of “data dumping” and fortunately they secured all DJJ and some independent court data that provided a good picture of Georgia.

Ironically, the difficulty in obtaining data from some is what led in part to the policy recommendation to create a centralized data collection system. I supported this recommendation and further recommended we pursue the Work Group’s product sponsored by GOCF — and I still do. It removes most of the concerns that are around the “Data Fear Syndrome” by placing the data with a neutral entity.

Implementing this policy recommendation is essential to future improvements in our juvenile justice system. It is also essential to transforming the word “data” from an expletive to a professional term deemed necessary in the practice of effective juvenile justice.

Until that time arrives, we will have to endure the few who want their data and hide it too.

Pew Research Center

Rate of Firearm Homicide Deaths graph from the Pew Research Center's May 2013 report 'Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.'

Earlier this month, Pew Research Center released a report tracking the trajectory of firearm-related homicides over the last 20 years, finding that the overall rate of murders committed with guns has declined from a national rate of 7 deaths per 100,000 in 1993 to just 3.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2010. The drop-off constitutes a 49 percent decrease in gun-related crime deaths, with current gun homicide rates in the United States at their lowest levels since the early 1960s.

Not only has the gun homicide rate dwindled over the last two decades, but researchers say that the victimization rate for non-lethal firearm crimes, such as assaults and robberies, decreased by three-quarters from 1993 to 2011, while the general violent, non-homicide victimization rate — with or without firearms — decreased by 72 percent over the same timeframe.

Pew Research Center

Graph from Pew Research Center's May 2013 report 'Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.'

However, the report finds that most Americans do not know that firearm-related crimes are on the downturn. A study conducted in March revealed that 56 percent of those surveyed thought the number of gun crimes committed annually are higher now than two decades ago.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tallied up a little over 11,000 firearm-related homicides in 2010 — an almost 40 percent decrease in total gun murders compared to 1993 estimates.

According to Pew Researchers, four-out-of-five firearm murder victims in the United States are male; with individuals aged 18-to-40 making up nearly seven-out-of-10 gun homicide victims in the nation.

Although constituting just 10 percent of the total national populace, young adults were found to represent a disproportionate number of gun murder victims, with researchers finding that in 2010, individuals aged 18-to-24 represented nearly a third of all U.S. firearm homicide fatalities.

Additionally, a disproportionate number of gun murder victims are African-American, researchers say. Despite representing only 13 percent of the total U.S. population, blacks made up 55 percent of all firearm homicide fatalities in 2010.

Photo courtesy of Yang Jun.

The initial results from a study analyzing youth violence in a small Denver neighborhood finds that the roots of adolescent delinquency may be found in tumultuous, early home-life experiences.

In February, researchers at the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence released findings from the first year of a five-year analysis of Denver’s Montbello neighborhood. With data for more than 2,000 local students culled from surveys, in tandem with almost 700 Montbello resident interviews, researchers determined that two-out-of-five young people in the area had been involved in delinquent activity within a 12-month period, with 6 percent of the youth population saying they had tried drugs before becoming teenagers.

“We know a lot about the causes of youth violence, and we also know a lot about what works to prevent youth violence,” said Dr. Beverly Kingston, project director for the Steps to Success Project Team. “But what we necessarily don’t know a lot about, is how to put it together in one location, one geographic place, and really make a difference.”

An isolated community in the city’s northern recesses, Montbello is a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. African Americans represent slightly more than a quarter of the Montbello population, with whites making up less than 10 percent of the community. According to Kingston, Montbello has the highest percentage of vulnerable children of any neighborhood in Denver.

Montbello citizens were asked about the youth issues they felt most concerned about, as well as civic areas they believe the community could improve upon. These risk and protective factors were then ranked by researchers, in accordance to how important residents considered them.

“The community looked very closely [at] five primary risk factors,” Kingston said. “So they prioritized risk factors to work on that might not have been the highest level in terms of rates in their community, but they were strong predictors of violence based on previous studies.”

Montbello citizens listed the following as the five greatest risk factors facing their neighborhood; early and persistent problem behavior, family management problems, associations with delinquent peers, exposure to violence and lack of commitment to education.

According to respondents, young children — between the ages of 6 and 11 — engaging in delinquent behavior posed one of the biggest threats to the community. “If young people are using drugs and alcohol or engaging in major problem behavior when they are that age, that can lead to future violence,” Kingston said. While children of the like did not represent a very large percentage of the community, she said that it was still an issue that Montbello residents nonetheless wanted to address and remedy.

Approximately 23 percent of the community’s 10- and 11- year olds were found to have engaged in delinquency or violence — a percentage that, despite being relatively low, Kingston considered “troubling” due to the children’s extremely young ages.

Montbello residents also felt that poor family management and domestic conflicts were pressing local concerns. “The community really wanted to address that family context and what they want to see is less conflict in families,” Kingston said. “Yelling, physical violence, [they] want to see that reduced.”

Members of the community, she added, saw inconsistent discipline, as a major catalyst for youth misbehavior. “One day, they are disciplined for coming later than their bedtime for their curfew, and another time, they’re not,” Kingston explained. “Or maybe, the mom in the family says ‘you can do this,’ but the dad says ‘you can’t do that.’”

Montbello residents consider negative peer influences to present challenges to the community, with many stating they would like to see a reduction in the number of local youth with weak social ties.

A lack of pro-social acquaintances during adolescence, Kingston said, is often a pathway to future violence. “They are not connected in school, they don’t have peers their age and those kids are especially susceptible to a delinquent peer group,” she added.

Regarding possible deterrents to youth delinquency, Montbello residents stressed two factors: religiosity and recognition of positive social behaviors by family, school and community members.

For most of the protective factor categories, Kingston said respondents scored more than 80 percent — meaning that the community members thought that such elements as family attachment and school-centered pro-social opportunities already had strong presences in the neighborhood.

Due to fairly low youth community numbers, Montbello residents prioritized “religiosity” as the utmost civic area they wanted to promote within the neighborhood.

“The religiosity scale was pretty low,” Kingston said. “Forty-seven percent of the youth surveyed in the community agreed that those religiosity measures were important to them.”

Citing a 2003 study, she said that there is some evidence that regular religious service attendance could lower the likelihood of young people engaging in problem behaviors.

“If you increase religiosity among a sample of already delinquent kids,” Kingston stated,  “they will be less likely to be delinquent when they get older.”

With the community risk and protective factors taken into consideration, the Steps to Success Project will now begin working on a Community Action Plan. Once implemented, the project seeks to reduce the total youth violence levels in the community by 10 percent over the next three years.

“Just relax,” she said.

Culler, her face impassive, never broke eye contact with her daughter, who sat across the room at the witness table.

The 15-year-old, who was accused of assaulting a shop owner, mumbled each answer. Twice the judge told her to speak up. Her demeanor alternated between anxiety and annoyance at the repeated questions, a quick smile sometimes flashing across her face until the next question called her to attention.

When the defendant’s attorney announced that the next witness wasn’t in the courthouse, the judge postponed the proceedings and called for another hearing date. Two court officers took Culler’s daughter through a side door of the courtroom. She would spend two more weeks in custody, waiting for her next day in court.

It’s a cliché that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but in spending a day at family court in Brooklyn, it can seem as though the wheels aren’t turning at all.  Judges hold hearings that often last just minutes and advance the case only by degrees before adjourning. Delays are frequent.

The process moves slowly as children linger in jail and their parents take off work to be there for them. Except when they don’t. It’s a system that operates by its own logic, and parents say it can be frustrating when they’re suddenly thrust into it.

After her daughter’s hearing, Culler, cursing under her breath, filed out of the courtroom with the attorneys. Minutes later the prosecuting attorney tried to talk to her in the waiting area.

“You’re trying to put my daughter in jail,” Culler yelled at her. “I don’t want to talk to you.” Culler asked that security take the attorney away.

“My daughter’s sitting in jail, and they keep adjourning it,” Culler said as the prosecutor retreated down the hallway. She said the prosecuting attorney only cared about putting her daughter in jail because she could.

Lisa Grumet, chief of policy and planning at the New York City Law Department, the government body that prosecutes juvenile delinquency cases, would not comment on specific cases.

Speaking generally, she wrote via email, “Placement is a last resort, but may be appropriate in some cases based on the nature of the youth’s conduct, the youth’s needs and best interests, and the safety of the community.”

“Placement” means prison and other facilities in which convicted juveniles can end up.

Tamara Steckler, the attorney in charge of the juvenile rights practice for The Legal Aid Society, a non-profit organization that offers free legal services to the poor, sees it as her job to keep juveniles out of jail.

“It’s not different than representing an adult for us,” Steckler said. “Our role remains exactly the same, which is to provide criminal defense services to that client.”

More than 12,300 people under the age of 16 were arrested in New York City in 2011, the last year for which data is available. Most of those arrested, unless they’ve committed or are accused of committing a crime serious enough to be tried as an adult, end up in juvenile delinquency proceedings in family court.

Like the other two judges who hear juvenile delinquency cases in Brooklyn’s family court, Judge Michael Ambrosio hears anywhere from 40 to 60 cases a week, including hearings, conferences and trials.

Each case is allotted time in roughly 30-minute blocks, but the schedule may be broken for any number of reasons. Defendants don’t turn up. Translators are unavailable. Attorneys haven’t been assigned.

Over the course of the afternoon session, a parade of young people, each flanked by two court officers, passed before the judge. As the juveniles stood with shoulders slumped, the judge checked in each case on the status of a parent in the courtroom.

Some cases were delayed when a parent wasn’t present. Parents aren’t required to show up, but Steckler said that officers of the court like to see signs that parents are supportive of their child.

For one 15-year-old accused of trespass, his mother had been present for the morning session. By early afternoon, when her son stood before the judge, the mother had left to go to work.

One mother did make it to the courtroom, but her daughter didn’t. The girl, 16, had run away from home while waiting for her court date. Judge Ambrosio issued a warrant for the girl’s arrest and told the mother to alert the court if the girl turned up. The mother said she would.

The expectations between the court and parents can be complicated.

Jacqueline Rosado brought her daughter to court to satisfy a warrant calling for the appearance of the 14-year-old. The warrant was issued after her daughter didn’t show up to school. Rosado confronted her daughter, and she said the two then got into a fistfight.

When Rosado showed up to court that morning, she said she expected someone in the system would help by offering counseling services. Instead, as her daughter waited in custody, Rosado said she spent five hours at the courthouse, but only five minutes in the courtroom.

Rosado felt the system cared more about moving through cases than helping parents like her struggling through a labyrinthine system they have no idea how to navigate. She said court officers asked her only whether she wanted to bring her daughter home or whether her daughter should be put in foster care.

“So where’s the help?” Rosado asked.

Other parents in the courtroom shared Rosado’s frustration.

At the end of the day, the court released Rosado’s daughter back into her custody. Standing with her attorney, Rosado waited for her daughter’s release in the hallway outside the holding area.

After a day sitting around the courthouse, her frustration was evident.

“The way the system is run,” she said. “It’s like it’s being run by the kids.”

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5) is the first major update of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) clinical guidebook in almost 20 years. The DSM-5 expands and alters the diagnosis criteria for several disorders, and in some cases, introduces definitions of “new” psychiatric disorders.

The influence the DSM-5 has on children’s services could be extensive, because its diagnostic criteria are the nation’s most commonly used for identifying and treating mental disorders. Changes in diagnostic criteria, and especially mental disorder definitions, may alter the eligibility for some children to receive specialized education in school or limit certain treatments pediatricians may provide for younger patients.

The two most controversial changes to the DSM-5 have to do with the diagnostic criteria for autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Under the new guidelines, several individual disorders, such as Asperger’s syndrome, have been consolidated into a single autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Due to the new categorization, children with ASDs that are rooted mostly in communication difficulties or repetitive behavior may be reclassified as communication disorders, while some experts believe the single spectrum categorizations will leave systems unsure of whether a child meets “significant” clinical levels.

Dr. Michael J. Morrier, assistant director at the Emory Autism Center, said that since states have fluctuating definitions of autism eligibility, the new DSM-5 standards could result in some young people potentially losing their access to services.

“Some states right now, in order to qualify for that eligibility, you have to have a diagnosis of autistic disorder,” he said. “So since they’re getting rid of that, how are they going to do that?”

“One of the biggest changes is going to be having people really understand that autism spectrum disorders [fall within a] range, and it’s not these different subtypes anymore,” Morrier continued. “Someone with high IQ and a lack of social skills is going to have the same diagnosis as kids that have intellectual disabilities and those same social skills problems.”

Also under the new DSM-5 criteria, children can be given ADHD diagnoses if they demonstrate certain traits before turning 12. In the previous version of the DSM, the cut off for ADHD diagnoses was 7 years old.

“Changing the age, I think it’s just going to delay when kids get identified and served,” Morrier said.

The most publicized criticism of the DSM-5 changes came from Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, who in April said that the psychiatric “bible” shared more commonalities with a dictionary.

“The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability,’” he wrote in a blog post last month. “Each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity.”

File photo Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT

Originally published at The Center for Public Integrity

Amid a deepening debate over appropriate school discipline, board members of the nation’s second largest school district — Los Angeles Unified — took bold steps this week sure to be noticed nationally.

They voted to prohibit out-of-school suspensions of students based on “willful defiance,” a vague label, critics say, that’s become far too handy a vehicle for ejecting students rather than helping them settle down and improve academic performance. The board members also voted to implement a sweeping review and new standards for the district’s sizable police force, which has a history of aggressive ticketing of students.

The landmark provisions are contained in a “School Climate Bill of Rights”the school board adopted in a 5-2 vote on Tuesday.

Los Angeles Unified is the nation’s second largest school district, and with 300-plus police officers, it has the country’s largest school police force. It is the first school district in California to bar “willful defiance” suspensions. These suspensions — and school police citations for more serious criminal allegations — have fallen heavily on black and Latino students in neighborhoods struggling with high dropout rates.

A “willful defiance” suspension can stem from a student violating dress codes to lashing out with crude behavior or language, or refusing to be quiet or perform assigned work.

Separately, hundreds of L.A. Unified students, many of them middle-school students, have also been given school-police citations each month for engaging in physical fights or other “disturbing the peace” charges or for committing other infractions. In some cases, teachers or school administrators have requested that students receive tickets; in other cases, police officers have made the decision.

The new L.A. Unified policy aimed at curbing ticketing and arrests by school police stems from brewing controversy that the Center for Public Integrity has reported on over the last year.

The board’s new mandate strengthens existing requirements that L.A. Unified’s schools embrace other practices, including “positive behavior intervention” methods and “restorative justice” to improve student behavior and resolve disputes among students and teachers. The new order ensures that students can’t be sent home for defiance, but they can be removed from a class and kept at school.

Critics of student suspensions argue that children who act out in class are often are having trouble learning or are troubled by family crises. Kids only fall further behind and more detached from school when they languish at home for days or hit the streets unsupervised, they say.

Judith Perez, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, said her organization supports the new policy’s goals and supports keeping kids in school. But her members are worried about how they’re going carry out their orders without more adult supervisors inside L.A. Unified’s crowded, understaffed schools.

“The district needs to do more than enact a policy,” Perez said. “The first recommendation we are making is an increase in the number of assistant principals and counselors.”

A middle school, she said, can’t even get a second counselor unless it has more than 891 students. She also said that teachers’ contracts don’t allow them to supervise students pulled out of classrooms.

California, as a state, could follow Los Angeles’ lead in ending suspensions for defiance and setting limits on police involvement in discipline matters.

L.A. Unified’s policy mirrors a bill in California’s legislature that would sharply limit the ability of schools statewide to issue out-of-schools suspensions simply for defiance. During the 2011-2012 school year, state data shows, nearly half of more than 700,000 student suspensions in the state were for defiance.

Golden State legislators are considering another bill that would require all schools to set standards for the role of school police and strive to keep police out of routine disciplinary matters. Both bills have already passed through critical first committees.

“I’m a social worker by profession, and we at the Los Angeles Unified School District support the school police. But we cannot have a system that is just punitive and focuses on ‘the gotcha,’ “ L.A. Unified district board president Monica Garcia told the Center.

Garcia sponsored the “bill of rights” because she thought suspensions and aggressive use of school police in some schools was backfiring and failing to improve student behavior and achievement rates.

“What I expect to happen now is more graduation in Los Angeles,” Garcia said. She said L.A. Unified has an opportunity to show national leadership in efforts to stop a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

The board’s new policy declares that: “Studies indicate that suspension does not often result in positive behavior conditioning and furthermore can instead intensify misbehavior by increasing shame, alienation, and rejection amongst students.”

The text of the policy also says: “A study from Texas found that students are five times more likely to drop out, six times more likely to repeat a grade, and three times more likely to have contact with the juvenile-justice system if suspended.”

Garcia said that juvenile-court judges in Los Angeles also appealed to her in recent years to change practices that were leading to increasing numbers of court citations of students.

The judges said that too many students were being sent into the criminal justice system for minor offenses they felt should be handled at school, immediately, rather than with court appearances weeks or even months later.

Last year, the Center analyzed L.A. Unified’s school-police citations and produced reports in collaboration with KPCC radio in Southern California and KQED The California Report.

The analysis found that between 2009 and the end of 2011, L.A. Unified school police were issuing, at times, more than 1,000 court citations a month to students for a range of violations, including tardiness, graffiti, pot or cigarette possession and, especially, for allegations of “disturbing the peace.” The disturbing-the-peace charges stemmed from accusations of a student getting into fisticuffs, threatening to fight or using challenging language.

More than 40 percent of all tickets issued by police during this period were going to students younger than 15. And the numbers of citations issued in Los Angeles far exceeded the tickets that school police were handing out in New York City, a bigger district, the Center found.

A more recent analysis by the Center showed that tickets issued in L.A. Unified have fallen dramatically, the result of pressure from community activists, juvenile-court judges and news reports disclosing how the volume of tickets had ballooned.

But tickets that L.A. Unified school police still hand out to students for disturbing the peace, especially, remain highly concentrated in certain middle schools.

Students at Markham Middle School received more tickets during this time — 47 — than any other school in the district. Forty-one tickets were for fighting, or disturbing the peace. Students at the Watts Learning Center Charter Middle School got the next highest batch of tickets, with 13 out of 33 for fighting. Banning High School was third, with 32 tickets.

The Center’s latest analysis found that between last November and March of this year, about half of all the 1,590 tickets issued went to children 14 and younger.

More 13-year-olds — almost all of them black or Latino — received tickets than 16 or 17-year-olds. Black students, 10 percent of district enrollment, received more than 37 percent of disturbing-the-peace tickets. And 56 percent of black students cited for that infraction were between 11 and 14 years of age.

Manuel Criollo, a community organizer with the Labor-Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, has spent several years working with students, parents, district officials and school police to embrace alternatives to police citations. Starting last summer, school police began referring ticketed students to Los Angeles County Probation Department officials, who say they’re trying to keep kids out of court and instead send as many as they can first to community-based counseling services.

But Criollo’s group has been pushing for explicit, written district policies designed to roll back ticketing even more and set strict limits on police involvement in disciplinary matters and minor offenses.

The group has long complained about “racial patterns” and unfair ticketing practices, and asserted that some police officers’ attitudes have spoiled students’ relations with law enforcement and teachers. The Labor-Community Strategy Center drew attention to and helped end early-morning sweeps that officers were doing around schools in low-income neighborhoods in recent years; officers would nab students, search them and issue tickets with hefty dollar fines to kids` who were even minutes late.

Criollo said the board’s new policy is a “strong mandate” for district officials to sit down and hammer out new police policies they promised they would do last year. “It’s the culmination of a lot of what community groups have been fighting for,” Criollo said of the policy.

The “bill of rights” adopted this week orders the district to “review and evaluate” all current school policies, practices and training “relating to the equitable treatment of students.”

It also orders the district to “review the data on the use of school-based citations and arrests and identify and remedy frequent use at individual school sites.”

L.A. Unified School Police Department Chief Steve Zipperman did not oppose the policy, and Garcia consulted with him when it was drafted. L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy publicly supported the new policy, and said it was aimed at stopping “early criminalization” of students for “frivolous” matters.

There is a purity in theory, a beauty reminiscent of the idealism of Plato and Pythagoras, that is fun to engage. Working in this realm is a kind of game, fun, yet ultimately empty without the willingness to get out in the world and get dirty. In a training environment we seek to balance this tension in a way that honors both aspects of reality. We want to transmit the underlying principles while also showing how things “really” work.

The thinker and developer of restorative approaches who I most respect is Dominic Barter. His understanding of the underlying dynamics of conflict, the part that I see as based on theory or principle, is as keen as anyone I have met or studied. At the same time he has done the work of engaging his community in the co-creation of restorative systems throughout Rio de Janeiro and the rest of Brazil, as well as working around the world to help others do the same.

Dominic stresses the importance of systems in restorative work, and of consciously engaging the ways in which communities respond to conflict, which are often hidden. The first step in this process is to “engage identified sources of power within the community. Reach agreement within the community on the use of restorative practice as a way of handling conflict.” As a theory this seems pretty straightforward, but how do we make it real?

A lot of the work done here in Athens, Ga., was accomplished by my friend and former boss, Gwen O’Looney. Gwen was the mayor of Athens for eight years, and is energetically involved in all sorts of projects in the city. She knows everyone in town it seems, and she was able to connect with important people in the judiciary, the prosecutor’s office, the public defender’s office, the police, related nonprofits and many other stakeholder groups.

Most importantly, she is engaged with the community most impacted by our work, the folks whose kids come into frequent contact with law enforcement and the courts.These neighborhoods are impacted by high unemployment, poverty, crime, trouble with schools and a host of other “social ills” that are too common. Most of the residents are black.

Gwen was perhaps uniquely qualified to bridge these two groups. She could talk about policy, budgets, sociology, evidence based practices, and other issues of concern to those with the elected or appointed responsibility for community safety and public policy. She could also talk with leaders in the neighborhoods, people without official power, but who nonetheless were vital in making the work real. Without their participation and buy-in, without owning the process, the program will ultimately fail.

These two groups seem distinct, and when we look through certain lenses they are indeed far apart.Yet the reality is that they, and everyone else in this town, are interconnected in a myriad of ways. What happens to a poor kid charged with a crime has an impact on all of us, though it may not be immediately obvious.

The heart of social change lies in the communities most affected. A top-down approach to solving problems that create crime and other societal ills will never ultimately work. The top-down, power-over structure has served to create these conditions. Only when we as a society can admit this to ourselves can we begin to collaboratively engage in deciding what to do next.

It is time to stop doing things to people and for people, and begin to work with people. That is the only route to sustainable change.

National Inmate Survey, 2011–12 / U.S Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics

From the BJS New Report: Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011–12

The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released data from the 2011-2012 National Inmate Survey (NIS) on Thursday, revealing new findings about rates of sexual victimization in the nation’s prisons.

Some advocates claim that the new figures, however, may underreport the amount of juvenile inmate sexual victimizations that goes on in the nation’s jails and prisons.

“Previous studies and the experiences of young people in the adult criminal justice system document that youth are at greatest risk of sexual victimization in adult jails and prisons,” said Campaign for Youth Justice CEO and President Liz Ryan. “This study tells us that youth face sexual victimization in adult institutions, but due to underreporting by youth in challenging adult facility conditions, we need more research to know more about this problem.”

The findings include the first-ever nationalized estimates for the sexual victimization of juveniles incarcerated in adult facilities — with the BJS stating that roughly 1.8 percent of 16- and -17 year-olds held in U.S. adult facilities report being sexually assaulted by other inmates.

The data includes a sample size of nearly 100,000 adult inmates and approximately 7,000 juvenile inmates in state- and federally- operated prisons as well as locally-ran jails. Per the new BJS findings, the percentage of juveniles reporting sexual victimization by other inmates is marginally higher than the percentage of adult prisoners reporting such victimization in U.S. local jails (1.6 percent) and lower than the percentage of adults in U.S. state and federal prisons that report being sexually attacked (2 percent.)

“These data do not support the conclusion that juveniles held in adult prisons and jails are more likely to be sexually victimized in other age groups,” the report reads.

The national findings run contrary to previous BJS research, which suggested as much as 21 percent of all substantiated victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse in U.S. jails in 2005 were juveniles.

Brenda Smith, Director of The Project on Addressing Prison Rape at American University’s Washington College of Law, believes that the new numbers underestimate the rate of juvenile inmate sexual victimization in U.S. jails and prisons.

“During my tenure as a commissioner on the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, we found that youth are at particular risk of abuse in custodial settings – both juvenile and adult facilities,” she said. “While I appreciate BJS taking a closer look at victimization of youth in adult facilities, these findings call for a closer look at the data, and conflict with existing research — their own and others — and from the previous accounts given by youth to the people that they trust.”

According to BJS findings, two-thirds of juvenile inmates that reported being sexually attacked by other inmates were victimized more than once, while three-quarters of juvenile inmates that reported experiencing staff sexual misconduct said they were victimized repeatedly.

Additionally, less than one-sixth of juveniles reporting inmate sexual abuse said they informed others of incidents, while less than a tenth of juveniles experiencing staff sexual misconduct said they informed family members, friends or facility personnel of such incidents.

DTKindler Photo / Flikr

Robert L. Listenbee, Jr., Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

“I don’t need to tell you that alcohol use by young people is dangerous,” said Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) Administrator Robert Listenbee at a webinar held this week by the Interagency Coordination Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD.)

In a recorded message, Listenbee said alcohol is the most commonly used and abused drug in the United States, stating that it played prominently in the nation’s youth homicide, suicide and violent crime rates. He also said that underage drinking has deleterious effects on education, leads many chronic users to unemployment and underemployment and may result in individuals graduating to more potent — and perhaps illegal — substances.

“It takes a whole community to reinforce this agenda,” he said. To be effective in combating underage drinking, Listenbee said that officials from both law enforcement agencies and the justice system had to form partnerships with local community groups.

He also encouraged agencies like the OJJDP’S Underage Drinking Enforcement and Training Center (UDTEC) to promote “proven, science-based strategies” to reduce youth access to alcohol.

With many agencies experiencing budget cuts, Listenbee said that programs targeting underage drinking may have to find new and creative ways “to do more with less.”

“We can do this, but it’s going to take strategic thinking,” Listenbee said.

At the OJJDP-hosted event, “Enforcing the Underage Drinking Laws: Accountability and the Role of Justice System,” Sherie Cantelon, Grant Management Specialist for OJJDP’s Youth Development, Prevention and Safety Division, served as moderator. Also speaking at the event were Shawn Walker, Director of Enforcement for the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC); Purdue Professor and retired judge Linda Chezen; and Diane Riibe, former executive director for Nebraska’s Project Extra Mile.

Courtesy of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control

Shawn Walker, Director of Enforcement.

“Law Enforcement really should be focused on contributing to an enhanced quality of life in the community,” Walker said. He believes it is important for law enforcement officials to reject the notion that underage drinking isn’t a major problem for communities, stating that deterring youth alcohol use also reduces secondary offenses, like vandalism and larceny, that typically stem from underage drinking.

Simply approaching underage drinking as a law enforcement issue, Walker said, is ineffective in remedying the problem. He said agencies, especially those with limited resources, could create “force multipliers” by building partnerships with other agencies, and also encouraged law enforcement officials to work with media, which in turn, could create advocacy for the issue.

He also suggested that law enforcement agencies talk to business leaders and school officials, and stressed partnering with specialized departments to formulate action plans. Gang units, school resource officers and community service boards are especially skillful at managing limited resources, Walker said.

During her presentation, Chezen stressed the importance of providing resources for judges, and especially judicial educators, who are tasked with organizing the continuing legal education (CLE) of state and local judges.

While judicial education standards vary from state to state, Chezen said that across the nation, most judges are required to obtain CLE hours to remain on the bench. Access to emerging science regarding underage drinking, she said, is crucial for judges to continue making adequate decisions in U.S. courtrooms.

Judicial Educators should know about screening tools and advocate for adequate resources for the education of judges and judicial staff, Chezen continued. She said that National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) was an excellent starting place for those seeking peer-reviewed, evidence-based information on underage drinking.

As a judge, she said she considered her opportunities to learn about new sciences to be precious and well-spent.

“Justice for kids,” she concluded, “depends on the adults.”

Courtesy of CDC.gov

Diane Riibe, former Executive Director for Nebraska's Project Extra Mile.

Ribbe advocated for the establishment of .08 blood alcohol concentration measurements as federal intoxicated driving standards, and was present when Bill Clinton signed the Federal Transportation Appropriations bill into law in October 2000.

During the webinar, she encouraged a multi-issue focus on legislative initiatives, education, youth leadership and media advocacy to amplify peer support influence on policies.

In order to mirror the successes of the tobacco control movement, she said advocates needed to have a sharp focus on science-based strategies, emphasizing the most effective, evidence-driven approaches. For advocates and activists, she cited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s The Community Guide as a recommended resource — calling it “a very easy framework to identify strategies.”

She said that media advocacy could be used as a “strategic” means of building policy initiative support, which she believes could lead to long term, sustained changes regarding national alcohol policies.

“Media efforts are quite literally the ramping up of community [advocacy],” Ribbe said.

Since many individuals are concerned about underage drinking, she believes there is already fertile ground for civic engagement in most U.S. communities.

“Our job as advocates is to take this collective community care and harness it,” she said.

Local politics, though, in this collection of small, working-class communities, about 50 miles north of New York City, is anything but routine, or civil. It is a vicious scrum that has come to reflect deep religious and racial divides.

Next Tuesday’s election for seats to the East Ramapo Central School District’s board isn’t about politics in the traditional sense, pitting Democrats against Republicans or red state ideology against blue; it’s about the divisions between the black and Latino residents who see the public school system as a civic stepladder to a better life, and the Hasidim, a mystical religious sect, that sees it as a threat to its way of life.

The central issue of this otherwise minor election is a rephrasing of the question that animates politics here: where is the line that separates the public from the private.

Robert Stolarik / JJIE

April 7, 2013, Spring Valley, NY, USA: In a village divided by race, religion, and culture, a demographic split has allowed public money to pour into private religious schools, resulting in huge cuts to the already decimated public school system. Community leaders fear a rash of violence and a wave of youth related crime as the public school budget has been gutted in the Spring Valley District. A shopping center in Spring valley sits in the crossroads of an invisible racial, and religious boundary.

In recent years, the school board here has been dominated by members of the Hasidic community. Since taking control, the board has gutted the public school system, leaving the mostly black and Latino students with fewer classes, no after school programs and no extra curricular activities or clubs.

The most recent budget has called for even deeper cuts in an already devastated system. The public school community has said the Hasidic board exploits laws to redirect public money into yeshivas, where their children go for religious and cultural reasons.

Leaders of the Hasidic community say that the allegations that the religious dominated board redirects the money from public school children to the yeshivas is false.

“The biggest misconception that we have here is that we’re sticking our hands into the pockets of the public school kids and putting it in our childrens’ pockets,” Yehuda Weissmandl, a Hasidic Jew who assumed leadership of the school board when his predecessor abruptly resigned last month, recently said. “That is not true and it is offensive. I give away a lot of time to these children, time I should be spending with my children because I’m very passionate about these children.”

The election also comes as many in the area fear that the deep cuts are leading to a public safety crisis, one where teens will end up in the criminal justice system instead of school.

Robert Stolarik / JJIE

Spring Valley, NY, USA.

Dr. Oscar Cohen, an advocate for public school children who has worked with the Spring Valley NAACP, said the same vitriol that has marked the feud between the public school advocates and the members of the Hasidic community has defined the campaign for the seats on the board.

“Anger,” he said. “That is the prevailing force here. It is effecting everything.”

This election is unusual because it is the first time in years that none of the candidates for the three contested seats are from the Ultra Orthodox community, but they are backed by it.

Arthur Schwartz, one of the lead attorneys on a class action lawsuit challenging the practices of the Orthodox-dominated school board, described what he called the ‘Charles slate’ as “cosmetic.” This slate includes: Bernard Charles, a black interim member of the board; Pierre Germain, a Haitian American, and MaraLuz Corado, a Latina pastor.

“I don’t know if this is going to fool a lot of black or Hispanic people,” he said. “There are people who are willing to sell out their brethren, so to speak, in return for power and positions.”

Robert Stolarik

April 9, 2013, Spring Valley, NY, USA: Students, parents, and activists protest at the school board meeting discussing the budget for the 2013-2014 school year.

Schwartz said that although there are more registered public school voters, the Hasidim have a bigger turnout because they are effective at mobilizing turnout.

Charles did not return phone calls for comment on this story. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press office did not respond to calls and emails.

Cohen agreed with Schwartz’s assessment, saying that the lack of a slate of Hasidic candidates is in appearance only.

The public school slate of candidates for the East Ramapo School Board — Robert Forrest, Margaret Tuck and Eustache Clerveaux — accepted the invitation from the local NAACP leadership to field questions at the meeting. But Charles’ opposing slate declined without an explanation.

Robert Stolarik / JJIE

April 9, 2013, Spring Valley, NY, USA: Students, parents, and activists protest at the school board meeting discussing the budget for the 2013-2014 school year.

The night of the forum, while they talked to an audience of some 125 black and Latino parents about how they would look out for the interests of the public school children, Charles was spotted at a local ballpark where members of the Hasidic community were hosting an event on the dangers of the Internet.

He was handing out campaign fliers in Yiddish.

Read the first article here: Public Kid vs. Private Kid Divide in One New York Community Turns Dangerous  

UPDATE: At 3:30PM on Wednesday, May 15, FBI agents descended on Ramapo Town Hall forcing employees from the building and seizing documents from a number of departments.