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PRISM 2004 6 BY LAURA COULTER WITH ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ZACHARIAH DOREY-STEIN PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ

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WITH ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ZACHARIAH DOREY-STEIN BY LAURA COULTER PRISM 2004 6 The Hi s torical Legacy of Juvenile Ju s t i c e This 15-year-old boy has engraved various symbols and letters into his own flesh.Originally declared “high-risk,” he was determined to be non-suicidal and placed in a lower security unit.Last year 15,000 children with psychiatric disorders were improperly incarcerated,simply because no mental health care was available. PRISM 2004 7

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B Y L A U R A C O U L T E R

W I T H A D D I T I O N A L R E P O R T I N G B Y Z A C H A R I A H D O R E Y - S T E I N

P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y J O S E P H R O D R I G U E Z

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If he is tried in family court, he will soon be on his wayto a juvenile detention facility.While incarcerated there hewill be able to complete high school, but the conditions inwhich he’ll be living won’t be conducive to study. His cellwill likely be overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe. His sen-sory stimulation will be severely limited, and he’ll be underlockdown conditions for as many as 20 hours each day. If hesuffers from mental illness or chemical dependency, as thevast majority of incarcerated teens do, he can expect toreceive no treatment and no medication. And this is theprettiest picture we can paint.

If the boy is not so lucky, the district prosecutor will decideto have him tried as an adult in criminal court. Once con-victed, he will be sentenced under the same guidelines usedfor adult sentencing, with little or no thought given to hisrehabilitation or the age considerations that might make his case unique.

After sentencing, his court-appointed lawyer might requestan appeal, but it is more likely that she will simply look withweary but resigned eyes at the next item on the overloadedcourt docket.The prisoner will be cuffed and loaded onto abus with other prisoners to make the grim sojourn to thestate penitentiary.As the new arrivals dismount at the prison,they’ll be carefully watched and assessed by the veteran inmates.This one should be avoided; that one can be threatened formoney or contraband.All the watchers will notice our youngman, taking in his age, the nervous flick of his eyes.

Details of the ordeals he will suffer during his imprisonmentbeggar description, but the cold, hard facts are indisputable.Children placed with adults are twice as likely to report being“beaten up” by staff; close to one in 10 juveniles report beingassaulted by staff.These young people are eight times morelikely to commit suicide than youths held at juvenile facilities,and the reasons aren’t difficult to understand:As Youth LawCenter President Mark Soler explains, “A child who is putinto an adult prison is an invitation to rape.” Despite this, theCoalition on Juvenile Justice reports that of the 120,000youth now incarcerated, nearly 10 percent are being held inadult facilities.

While that tithe of children suffer the most, there’s nodoubt that the entire juvenile justice and detention processis in desperate need of an overhaul.

The Historical Legacy of Juvenile JusticeUntil the latter part of the 1800s, children and adults weretried in the same criminal courts and incarcerated in thesame penitentiaries. Children were seen as miniature adults,with all the same capacities and responsibilities for moralbehavior. This represented the broadly held philosophy ofnearly all justice systems throughout history, regardless ofcultural distinctions.

In the United States, that mentality underwent a slowtransformation.As early as 1825, the Society for the Preventionof Juvenile Delinquency and other reform organizations wereadvocating that youth be dealt with under separate auspices,but the first juvenile court system wasn’t established until1899, in Cook County, Illinois. By 1925, the rest of the stateshad followed suit.

Proponents of the separate justice system believed that thestate should act as parent to young offenders, and the goalwas to provide protection and rehabilitation to the children,as opposed to confinement and retribution.The focus of thecourt was on the particular situation and needs of the youthin question, rather than on the offense.Because its mission wasdistinctly different from that of adult criminal courts, juvenilecourt could be more flexible, and judges were able to selectfrom a wide range of options when it came to sentencing.This flexibility placed young people entirely at the mercy ofjudicial discretion, in which two different judges might sen-

This 15-year-old boy has engraved various symbols andletters into his own flesh. Originally declared “high-risk,”

he was determined to be non-suicidal and placed in a lower security unit. Last year 15,000 children with

psychiatric disorders were improperly incarcerated, simplybecause no mental health care was available.

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tence a young person to vocational training or hard time, foran identical crime.Children whom judges perceived as recal-citrant were placed in youth correctional institutions thatwere often brutal, dangerous places which utterly failed tohave any impact in terms of reducing crime.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Supreme Court handeddown a number of decisions (Kent v.United States, In re Gault,and Newlson v. Heyne) that made juvenile courts more likeadult criminal courts. Juveniles were given the same rights toanswer the charges against them and have access to an attorney,and the standard of evidence was changed from “preponder-ance of evidence” to “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

On a federal level, concern about the state of the juvenilejustice system was emerging.The belief prevailed that pooradministration of these systems on the state level was respon-sible for the system’s problems. In 1974, President Gerald R.Ford signed into law the Juvenile Justice and DelinquencyPrevention Act.This was the first effort to grant national atten-tion to the issue of juvenile crime, and reformers hailed it asa major victory.What the new Office of Juvenile Justice andDelinquency Prevention couldn’t remedy was that manyAmericans were beginning to believe that the youth courtsystem was too lenient, and were concerned that lack of aneffective deterrent was encouraging juveniles to engage incriminal activity.This perception was pushing state govern-ments into passing new, harsher laws to deal with youthoffenders.

In the 1980s, Florida became the first state to pass a lawallowing children to be tried as adults; most of the otherstates quickly followed suit.Today, all 50 states allow childrento be tried as adults, and 42 states have recently considered,or are now considering, laws to increase punitive measuresagainst young people who are convicted of crimes. Ninestates have no minimum age at which children can be incar-cerated with adults.

W ho�s Behind Bars?The Coalition on Juvenile Justice reports that fewer thanone-third of youth in the juvenile court system have beenapprehended for a violent offense.According to The State ofAmerica’s Children 2004, released by the Children’s DefenseFund, two-thirds of youths in the juvenile justice systemhave one or more diagnosable mental disorders. In fact, in2003 alone, 15,000 children with psychiatric disorders

were improperly incarcerated, simply because no mentalhealth care was available.

A study dealing with mental health and delinquency,compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Committeeon Government Reform and released in July, is the first ofits kind. One judge that the study surveyed, Ernestine S.Gray of the New Orleans Juvenile Court, testified that 70 to80 percent of the children who appeared before her had men-tal health or drug problems.“All too often,” Judge Gray said,“children charged with delinquent behavior are identifiedearly on as needing mental health services. But because theservices are not available, the children are sent back homeuntil there is another violation.After several brushes with thelaw, the children are incarcerated, so they might have a chanceat getting mental health services.”

Even when mental health services are available, they areoften inadequate, sometimes exacerbating the very problemsthey’re called upon to help relieve. One tragic case was thatof Rodney Hewlen, a 16-year-old who threw a bottle ofgasoline at a snow-covered fence on a vacant lot.His Molotovcocktail caused only $500 worth of damage, and no one wasinjured. Despite these facts and his age, he was tried in Texasas an adult and convicted of arson, a conviction whichearned him an eight-year sentence in an adult penitentiary.Prior to his trial, Rodney had been diagnosed with depres-sion and was taking Paxil.The prison psychologist decidedthat the young man didn’t need his medication and shouldjust “buck up.” Rodney lasted fewer than three months inprison: He was found hanging in his cell, and died of theresults of asphyxiation in the prison infirmary a few daysafter the guards cut him down.

Race is another dynamic that plays a part in the makeupof incarcerated juveniles.The National Council on Crime

A youth paces in his maximum-security cell.Evidence shows that youthful offenders are more likely to commit a crime after

release than they were before imprisonment.

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and Delinquency reports that among youths who have neverserved time, blacks are more than six times more likely thanwhites to be sentenced to prison by juvenile courts. For thosecharged with drug offenses, blacks are 48 times more likelythan whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.As for thosecharged with violent offenses, whites are incarcerated for anaverage of 193 days after trial, while blacks are incarcerated

an average of 254 days and Hispanics are incarcerated anaverage of 305 days.

Children from low-income families, who depend oncourt-appointed lawyers to defend them, are also at a cleardisadvantage. In states like Virginia, where public defendersearn less than $120 to represent a client in juvenile court—regardless of the client’s crime or the amount of time they

From loosely organized networks like the Family Court min-istry in Birmingham,Ala., to the organizationally sophisticatedYouth Enrichment Services in Pittsburgh, Penn., widely dif-fering models of outreach to juveniles in the justice systemare enjoying success. Sometimes that success involves bright-ening an otherwise grim day for one inmate; sometimes itmeans becoming a familiar and consistent face to childrenwhose lives are in chaos; sometimes it involves shepherdingkids with legal problems all the way through the process.

Andrea Moore works for Youth Enrichment Services, Inc.(YES), based in Pittsburgh.Under the executive directorshipof Dennis Floyd Jones,YES provides mentoring and monitor-ing for young people coming into contact with the juvenilejustice system for the first time.Most of the children they dealwith are between the ages of 10 and 14, and are detained eitherfor a first offense or a repeat, nonviolent offense.YES is adiversion program, an alternative to detention for kids await-ing their court date. During their stay (average stay is about90 days), kids in YES will receive one-on-one mentoringwhich will continue until adjudication and, in some cases,after sentencing.

“These children lack stability and consistency,” Mooretold PRISM.“They get into a lot of trouble being in thewrong place at the wrong time.What we have to realize isthat children are children, no matter where they are. Thedifference between the kids who go into the juvenile systemand those who don’t is that the ones in juvenile detention gotcaught.There are preachers’ children who have done exactlythe same things as these kids, but they’ve gotten away withit.There but for the grace of God go all of us."

As Moore points out, the Christian organizations that aremaking a difference don’t focus on the juvenile offender inisolation; instead, they deal with the whole child, along with

the child’s family.The Gilead Center, an outreach for singlemothers which assists them in making the transition to sobrietyor to life after prison,offers a valuable ministry in Pennsylvania,a ministry goal that is mirrored by Agape, a faith-basedorganization that serves the Southeast from its headquartersin Mobile,Ala.The emphasis in both of these organizationsis to help families become whole by aiding parents to takeresponsibility for their children and by providing a caringsupport network.

“You’ve got to get to the kids earlier,” Moore says.“Get tothem when they’re 8, 9, 10.This is the job of the church.Christians need to come out of our four walls of the churchand begin to outreach to every child.We need to be alert andmore sensitive to children.We need to be more stable so thatwhen they hit a hard place they have someone to go to.Consistency makes a lot of difference to children—if we’reconsistent and alert, we can impact their lives. Children aretired of people being fake, tired of broken promises, tired ofbeing disappointed.”

Ultimately, the church needs to be there every step of theway: reaching out to children, from birth onward, in a waythat deals with the particular problems in their lives; educat-ing, loving, and seeing them for who they are; refusing toignore realities of poverty, abuse, or neglect that dog the stepsof too many kids; letting them know they’ll always have aplace to come home to, no matter how far they stray.

A lot is at stake—not just the lives of the children in thejuvenile justice system, and not just the reputation or strengthof the Christian church. As humanitarian Margaret Meadonce said,“The solution of adult problems tomorrow dependsin large measure upon the way our children grow up today.There is no greater insight into the future than recognizingthat, when we save children, we save ourselves.”

“I was in prison, and you visited me…”PROGRAMS THAT WORK

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spend with their client—many attorneys are not sufficientlymotivated to keep their client’s best interests in mind.

Of course, not all—or even most—of the young prisonersincarcerated are innocent victims of a malevolent systemcommitted to robbing them of liberty. Each year, the lives ofthousands of people are disrupted and shattered by crimescommitted by juveniles, both violent and nonviolent.Thequestion is not of guilt but how we can deal—in a healthy,compassionate, and effective way—with juveniles who com-mit crimes.Many dynamics are at play in the lives of childrenwho end up in the justice system. Common factors includechronic poverty, unstable or broken families, inadequatepublic schools, and lack of any support network, whether athome or in the community.

No Place Like Home:Living Conditions in Juvenile Facilities

Today, more than six out of 10 youth admitted to juveniledetention are placed in overcrowded institutions. Between1985 and 1995, the average daily population in the nation’spublicly operated juvenile detention centers increased byroughly 72 percent, resulting in a 642 percent increase in thenumber of overcrowded detention centers (statistics from theAnne E. Casey Foundation).

These detention centers are often infested with roachesand lice and offer little to nothing in terms of rehabilitativeopportunities. Guards are afforded a disproportionate amountof authority, sometimes using pepper spray as a disciplinarypractice.The Youth Law Center reported that while touringone particular detention facility, they observed cells so crowd-ed with floor mattresses that the prisoners could barely movearound, cells in which the walls were smeared with fecalmatter.The children were kept in these cells for as many as20 hours a day with no external stimulation. In these con-ditions, assaults, rape, and intimidation are common.

Nonviolent offenders enjoy no separation from moreviolent convicts, so that a runaway can be housed in the samecell as a rapist or killer. But whether they are held in juve-nile detention centers or adult prisons, the evidence showsthat when youthful offenders are released, they are more like-ly to commit a crime than they were before imprisonment.Not only is the juvenile justice system failing to educate youthsin moral and civic matters, but it is actually providing itsinmates with an intensive course in crime.As convicted drugdealer George Jung, immortalized by Johnny Depp in the movieBlow, said of his first prison experience: “I went in with adegree in marijuana and came out with a Ph.D. in cocaine.”

Sadly, stories of abuse are not uncommon. Following afour-month probe into allegations of corruption among cor-rectional officers at Glades Correctional Institution in Florida,

the Florida Department of Law found 45 officers and civilianprison employees at one prison violating numerous standards,including one sergeant who smoked marijuana on duty,gambled with and stole from prisoners; another sergeant whoextorted drugs and money from prisoners; and an officerwho used cocaine as well as sold it to prisoners. In responseto this report, a corrections spokeswoman told reportersthat the officers would face no discipline.“No one is beingprosecuted,” said D.O.C. spokeswoman Laura Levings, “sothere was no corruption.”

Denial on the part of authorities and silence on the partof prisoners are the rule rather than the exception.As ArthurCandell of the Institute for Public Affairs wrote, “Prisonactivists claim that only about 1 percent of the abuse inflictedby prison and jail guards on inmates ever reaches the atten-tion of the public. Numerous laws and regulations effectivelydeny prisoners access to the courts to challenge any kind ofabuse. Fear of retribution among inmates if they reportexcessive use of force on themselves or others, and theintimidation of guards by their peers and superiors, keepthese episodes within the walls.”

Perceptions and MisperceptionsThe juvenile arrest rate for murder decreased an astounding74 percent from 1993 to 2000, and between 1994 and 2000,the juvenile Property Crime Index (dealing with burglary,larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson) dropped nearly37 percent to its lowest level since the 1960s (statistics fromthe Child Welfare League of America, 2002).

Despite these encouraging numbers, American fear ofjuvenile crime has continued to snowball. Mark Soler of theYouth Law Center says that our concern over juvenile crimeis due more to what we see on television than to actual crimestatistics.“The vast majority of juvenile crime,”he says,“is non-violent crime. Only about 6 percent of the kids that arearrested each year are charged with a violent crime” (quotedin If I Get Out Alive,1999; see resources for more information).

However, politicians find it politically expedient to be“tough on crime.” It is a popular position to advocate thatyoung people be held to the same bar of behavior as theiradult counterparts. If they’re old enough to do adult crimes,the reasoning goes, then they’re old enough to do adult time.

This in spite of evidence that adolescents operate signif-icantly differently than adults. Some studies have suggestedthat between the ages of 12 and 21, humans experience asmuch brain and chemical change as between birth and the ageof 5.The capacity for making sound judgments is impairedduring the teenage years, and adolescents are generally notequipped for realistic long-range thinking.To a teenager, theproblems of today seem permanent and overwhelming: It is

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difficult to imagine a time when one’s adolescent peers won’tbe the deciding factor in terms of fashion, musical tastes, andsocial acceptability. Concerns about not fitting in can’t beassuaged by assurances that in five years, nobody will care ifyou don’t wear Sean John apparel.

Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a distinguished professor of psy-chology at Temple University, says that we have forgotten thatkids who commit crime are kids.“They’re not little criminals,”he says,“and a lot of the things that make them kids, that makethem different from adults, are things that we should be thinkingabout as we develop policies and practices involving how wetreat juveniles who have gotten into trouble. So the properway to treat juvenile offenders is to make sure that the com-munity is safe, to make sure that they’re held accountable forwhat they’ve done,but also to make sure that we return themto the community in a better mental and psychological statethan they went in [with]” (quoted in If I Get Out Alive).

But instead of looking at adolescents and seeing childrenwho have not yet grown into what they’re going to be,whosethought processes may not yet lead to sensible decisions, wesee people who talk like adults and claim to think and feellike adults.This allows us to make harsh judgments withoutfactoring in the complexities of age and development.

Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama andformer chairman of the Juvenile Crime Subcommittee ofthe Senate Judiciary Committee, voices the attitude of manyAmericans when he says,“What do you do for a young toughwho beats somebody up in school or writes graffiti that coststhousands of dollars on the school house? What if it’s theirfifth time? Their tenth time? Unfortunately, many of theseyoungsters have never developed. They are almost withoutconscience, they’ve been abused perhaps,maybe they’ve beenon drugs,maybe their mother was a cocaine addict and they’recrack babies, or whatever the cause is, some of them aredangerous. Some of them will kill you, will kill your family,and his (sic) classmates at school.”

This perspective classifies children who commit crimesas without moral compass, without soul, and without possi-bility of rehabilitation.To engage in this pseudo-logic stripsthese children of their humanity and allows us to divest our-selves of responsibility. If we believe they are subhuman, thenwe are not required to treat them like human beings.

W hat�s God Got to Do with It? The Bible tells us who these juvenile offenders really are, andtells us unequivocally:They are precious children, created inGod’s image and invested with God’s love. Jesus made clear hisspecific relationship to the imprisoned and oppressed when heinformed his followers that all who visited those who were sickand imprisoned were actually visiting him (Matthew 25).

The twin themes of valuing God’s most vulnerable chil-dren and seeking justice run like veins of silver ore throughoutboth Testaments. As they inherited the promised land, Godnot only instructed the children of Israel to take care of thewidows, fatherless, and aliens, but also established a sophisti-cated court system that set up standards of evidence andallowed for mercy and refuge in punishment. Isaiah, warningthe unrighteous children of Israel of God’s impending judg-ment, held up their injustice to prisoners and the fatherlessas evidence against them. He declares, “Woe to those whomake unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, todeprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from theoppressed of my people” (Isa.10:1-2). Clearly, God likewiseexpects us today to address the ills in our justice system andadvocate for those vulnerable children who are caught up in it.

Admittedly, there is very little any one person can do tochange a system that is bloated with injustice and riddledwith political self-interest and corruption.This is not to saythat the magnitude of the problem should paralyze us butrather that while we push aggressively for the long process ofsystemic overhaul, we must deal with juvenile offenders inthe same way that God created them—one at a time.

Many ministries have sprung up across the country toformulate relationships with young convicts, and some have

This17-year-old boy is being held in a maximum-securityunit for violent and high-risk youth offenders. He threw a

rock at a car and struck a man in the head, seriouslyinjuring him. Because the injured man may die, the boy's

sentence is uncertain at this point. He feels sorry for hisfamily, since both of his brothers are also in jail.

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experienced remarkable success (see “Programs that Work”sidebar on page 9). Some innovative halfway houses have beendeveloped as a sentencing alternative to help teens finish highschool and plan for a crime-free future.But ministry with trou-bled teenagers is difficult, and most attempts by evangelicalsto reach out to these kids falter and die in a short period oftime. Mac Daupin, an elder at Cahaba Valley Church inBirmingham,Ala., which has offered a Family Court ministryfor the last two decades, says that failure occurs because well-

intentioned Christians “go a couple of times, have no conver-sions, then get discouraged and don’t want to come back.”John Taylor, another participant in the same ministry, adds that“discouragement is a big factor. It’s like you’re throwing apebble in the ocean, trying to fill up the ocean.”

Fear is another factor—fear of entering a juvenile detentionfacility or fear of failing to make a connection with the kidsinvolved. But whatever the reason, the first step to reactingto the juvenile justice crisis in a Christlike way was offered

Ultimately, the most effective solutions for rectifying the injus-tices in the juvenile justice system will have to come throughstate and federal legislatures. As Patricia Puritz, director ofthe American Bar Association’s Juvenile Justice Center, notedin Criminal Justice magazine in Spring of 2000, legislativeconfusion, incoherence, and ignorance are to blame for thecurrent crisis. Some legislative remedies that have been pro-posed by Puritz and others across the nation include:• Altering the process for transferring children into adult

courts.Transfer Law SB 440, currently under discussion inGeorgia’s state legislature,would mandate a hearing in juve-nile court regarding jurisdiction and require that the FamilyCourt judge, as opposed to the district attorney, make thedetermination on whether the child should be tried as an adult.Short of banning such designations altogether, this measureshows some promise and is supported by MothersAdvocatingJuvenile Justice, an organization based out of Atlanta, Ga.

• Allocation of funds for training and equipping defenseattorneys appointed to represent indigent juveniledefendants. According to a 1996 study published as A Callfor Justice:An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality ofRepresentation in Delinquency Proceedings, in many cases the firsttime children meet their court-appointed attorneys is at theirdetention hearing.Due to crushing caseloads and insufficientresources, these attorneys are unable to file even rudimentarypre-trial or appeals motions.These cases are often passed offto the least experienced attorneys, who receive no prelim-inary or ongoing training. Funds need to be available toprovide sufficient paralegal and investigative support, and thestate should mandate training and evaluation for all attorneysinvolved in indigent juvenile defense.The Due Process Advo-cacy Project, a nonprofit organization dealing with lawyersassigned to these cases, has taken some of these steps on itsown in sponsoring training events for lawyers nationwide.

• Creation of coherent uniform standards with regard to

children’s competence to stand trial.Thomas Grisso,pro-fessor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts, drawsupon years of extensive research to contend that seriousdoubt exists as to whether most children would rise to thelegal standard of competency.The standard includes: first, theability to understand the nature and possible consequencesof charges, the trial process, the participants’ roles and theirown rights; second, the ability to participate with and mean-ingfully assist counsel in developing and presenting a defense;third,the ability to make decisions to exercise or waive impor-tant rights. Grisso argues that most children would fail tomeet one or more of these standards in an adult court, andthat law should require that these standards are uniformlyapplied to children when they face redress in an adult court.

• Mandating oversight of the functions of the juvenilejustice system. Ongoing data collection and evaluation ofthe status of each state’s juvenile justice system should beroutine.Legislatures should fund a perpetual effort to deter-mine exactly how children are being treated in the juvenilejustice system, the nature of the system’s weaknesses, andthe components that lend to success. Lack of oversightleads to shoddy,misinformed legislation and poor executionof existing systems.

• Alternatives to incarceration should be examined andfunded. Many states, such as Indiana, have effectively imple-mented alternatives to incarceration, including halfwayhouses where children can complete school and receivepsychological treatment. It’s a mistake to place nonviolentoffenders beside their more violent counterparts in an iden-tical incarceration situation.All children should be treatedas if they have the potential to reform and to live out pro-ductive lives as citizens.

For information on contacting your representatives in the Senateand Congress, go to www.senate.gov and www.house.gov.

What Can I Do?

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They put kids in jail,for a life they ain’t even get to start.That’s murder, too, and it’s breaking my heart.It’s breaking our nation apart…

— from the song “Joy” by Talib Kweli

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by Christ himself: Go visit. And then go visit again. Teen-agers who commit crimes are used to a world of adults whohave given up on them, who look at them and see a crimestatistic instead of a young person. Perhaps your face, yourtouch, your love, can be the one God uses to make a differ-ence in one child’s life. ■

Laura Coulter’s dual passion for justice and research makes her aninvaluable regular contributor to PRISM magazine.

Joseph Rodriguez,whose images taken at the San Jose Junvenile Hallillustrate this article, is a graduate of the U.S. juvenile justice systemand a photographer who documents the stories of young people strug-gling to survive both inside the system and outside. Go to www.pixelpress.org/juvenilejustice to get a glimpse into these kids’ lives.

ResourcesThe Children’s Defense Fund, www.childrensdefense.org The Child Welfare League of America, www.cwla.org The Youth Law Center, www.ylc.org Center of Juvenile and Criminal Justice, www.cjcj.org

True Notebooks (Knopf, 2003) describes author Mark Salzman’slife-changing experience of teaching writing to some of LosAngeles’most violent teenage offenders.His students describethe life of a juvenile hall inmate, in their own unforgettablewords. Go to www.insideoutwriters.org to learn moreabout writing programs for juvenile offenders, and to readtheir work.

The Beat Within (www.thebeatwithin.org), a program of thenonprofit Pacific News Service, is a weekly publication fea-turing the art and writing of incarcerated juveniles.

If I Get Out Alive is an award-winning public radio documen-tary that exposes the systematic abuse and brutality faced byjuveniles in the adult prison system. It features firsthandaccounts from children currently behind bars, rehabilitatedyouths who survived the system, parents of young peoplewho died in adult prisons, legal experts, policy makers, andcorrection officials.To order a tape or transcript, or to listento the broadcast, go to www.lcmedia.com/alive2.htm.