Unlocking Knowledge of Those Impacted by Juvenile Justice System

“The real crime lies in how society views us.” 

This indictment by a young individual cited in a report by the Shelby County Youth Council in Memphis stings because it is true.

Activists of all ages in Shelby County have no illusions about dislodging deep systemic racism but they demonstrate increasing impatience about how minors are treated in the largest county in Tennessee.

Salina Shamsuddin with the Youth Justice Action Council did not mince words with me when talking about how grownups need to behave.

“It’s oppressive to call us children and kids because it has a negative connotation that is
not empowering to us so we’d like to be referred to as youth … Catching them [adults] and
standing up for ourselves is one of the biggest things that works and people really
understand they cannot treat us like this anymore.”

The Youth Justice Action Council (YJAC) centers its work on those directly impacted by the juvenile justice system in Memphis and developed 10 legal demands in its “Break the Chains” written petition and rap version . YJAC used these specific demands in its campaign to defeat the District Attorney and Juvenile Court Judge who tried many Black and Brown youth as adults.

Following this victory, the Youth Justice Action Council hosted a forum for the newly elected Judge, DA and County government officials. In small groups, two YJAC members shared their firsthand stories about the juvenile justice system and one of the other Council members facilitated. Adults were toldnot to interrupt or interrogate. Another one of the facilitators, Milana Kumar emphasized

“. . . the need to center on the experiences of systems impacted youth as opposed to just
recommendations. It’s harder to invalidate when they [DA and others] are faced with the trauma they have caused and cannot distance themselves.”

One Youth Justice Action Council representative serves on the five-member Shelby Countywide
Juvenile Justice Consortium, all appointed by the Mayor. This is not a token position. In fact, this repand the YJAC have credibility and clout plus strong rapport with the adult members.

“I don’t think we’ve ever made a decision that has not had a youth voice…They are our checks and balances. We are really led by them.”
– Rebecca Davis, Chair, Countywide Juvenile Justice Consortium

The Youth Justice Action Council (YJAC) is a youth-led organization that advocates for juvenile
system reform. It is sponsored by Stand for Children Tennessee, which advocates for improving
public education and for racial justice.The 100-year-old organization in Memphis, appropriately called Bridges USA that recently prioritized youth-adult equity and racial justice, provides the crucial structural support for this intergenerational symbiosis.

There’s a bit of disbelief that systemic change can actually happen. Even with the horrific murder by police of Tyre Nichols, the recent election fuels the determination of Salina, Milana and justice-impacted advocates to erase the superpredator view that sociologist Mike Males debunks in The Terrifying Plunge of Youth Crime .

The terrifying plunge in youth crime

By Mike Males | February 2023

Source: California Department of Justice

Why aren’t mammoth revolutions in youth behavior that make today’s teenagers a uniquely low-crime population that reduced gun deaths dramatically headlined in the news and studied excitedly in institutional forums?

Crime, gun killings, and arrest rates by youths have fallen faster in California than in any other state over the last three to five decades, a trend that apparently horrifies authorities and the news media across the political spectrum.

As California’s youth population age 10-17 grew and became more racially diverse (73% now are of Color), rates of criminal arrest plunged by 92% since 1995, and 96% since 1975. Teenagers under age 20 are now much less likely to be arrested than Californians ages 50-59, a stunning development that overturns decades of assumptions about crime and depresses major interests so much they won’t even talk about it. (One exception: the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent “Vanishing Violence” series.)

Around 8% of the youthful arrest decline is attributable to the decriminalization of marijuana in 2010, which reduced arrests for all ages. The COVID pandemic’s shutdown policies may have reduced crime in 2020, but youth arrests continued falling during the return to normalcy in 2021.

But the vast bulk of the decline is due to young people themselves. Violent crime rates among youth are down 75% over the last three decades, homicide arrests have fallen by 85%, and gun killings among youth have fallen by 72% — despite 1990s predictions of coming “hordes” of dark-skinned “adolescent super-predators” and scary recent headlines of a nonexistent youth crime “surge.” The crime plunge has saved the state over $10 billion in juvenile incarceration costs alone since 1995, with eight of 11 juvenile facilities closed already and the Division of Juvenile Justice slated to close altogether in July 2023.

California’s 35 Democratic-voting counties show larger declines in crime by youth, but both are down more than 90% since the early 1990s. Since the early 1990s, youth arrest trends have fallen by 90% in San Francisco, 90% in Siskiyou, 91% in Orange County, 92% in Los Angeles, 92% in Sacramento, 94% in San Diego, 94% in Santa Clara County (San Jose), 94% in Alameda County (Oakland), 95% in Fresno, 96% in Sierra County, and 99% in remote Mono County. California’s large urban counties had declines of 80% to 90% in violent crime rates among youth. In the early 1990s, California’s major counties suffered 500-600 firearms homicides among teenagers per year; in 2020-21, in a youth population 600,000 larger, around 150 per year – a rate decline of 80% to the lowest rate in at least 50 years.

The silence indicates a bad faith in institutional America, not only in protecting the profits of youth-crime industries from law enforcement to juvenile justice, treatment facilities, and prisons to sensationalist media, but an ego-flattering psychology that insists that adolescents are reckless and adults wise and mature. It’s time to abandon the 19th century myths that have governed crime discussion and move into the amazing opportunities the 21st century youth revolution offers.

Response to CDC’s “Teen Girls ‘Engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma” Report

MaryAnn Harlan | February 2023

I see we are at the stage in the media narrative where we are once again worried about our girls. On Feb 13th the headline at the Washington Post declared “Teen Girls ‘engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma, the CDC finds”. I don’t mean to make light of the CDC data on Youth Risk Behaviors because there is concerning data. But as someone who investigated media narratives about girlhood I couldn’t help but heave a heavy sigh. Are we really back here? It seems we are.

What was interesting is that after the first few paragraphs about an uptick in experiencing sexual violence the article focused on the mental health findings; significant increases over ten years in behaviors that could be considered symptoms of depression and suicidal thoughts and actions. It was left to the reader to correlate the uptick with the increase in suicidal ideation and depressive behavior. And that isn’t the correlation the article went on to make.

I was particularly frustrated by the gendered analysis. Girls, according to the WaPO expert, are more attuned to their feelings and therefore more likely to self-report depressive symptoms. Boys are more likely to “mask” symptoms and be aggressive. Not to mention, according to the
same quote, girls are more likely to be vulnerable to social media. Except the report didn’t actually ask about social media. So, we don’t really know if this is why girls are reporting higher rates of attempted suicide based on CDC’s data or that boys aren’t.

It is convenient to focus on girls’ emotions and so-called capacity to name their depression. But it ignores larger issues that CDC’s survey doesn’t address. Others will address some of these issues related to the actual questions, the stats, and what is missing from CDC’s report and problematic data, but I worry about the narratives the media creates.

Narratives about girls at risk quite frequently ignore race, class, age, geography, gender identification (beyond the binary), sexual orientation, disability, etc. As we saw the last time the girls at risk media narrative dominated the headlines, the imagined girl is generally white and middle class, not to mention able-bodied and cis. Monies, policies, programs flow into “fixing the imagined girl’s problem and left behind are girls who don’t fit this narrative.

Furthermore, it doesn’t take into account girls, or frankly all youth’s, own capacity to state what they need, to articulate what their actual problem is and act on it. The narrative becomes embedded in popular narratives, news articles heavily reliant on anecdote, after school special type plot lines on television and in books, popular nonfiction, and parenting advice. It is nothing short of disinformation using imagined girls as props. And I guess I am left asking who benefits from this narrative? Because that is in my estimation the real danger to youth.

What Gangs Can Teach Us

By Anthony Bernier | February 2023 

Back in them bad ol’ 1990s, when we were being taught to fear anyone who “looked like” a “gangster,” I worked at an “inner city” library. We were learning the language of “zero-tolerance,”gang injunctions and enhancements, immediate suspensions, and criminalizing something we used to call “ditching school” but now were taught to refer to it as “criminal truancy.”

The library was an example of the city’s separate-but-equal “inner-city” civic infrastructure – code for low-income immigrant and minority neighborhoods. The dilapidated building sat precariously at end of a cul-de-sac, butted-up to the side of a freeway embankment, at the dark end of a freeway underpass. It was so hidden that the police couldn’t find it! On Friday nights, the “Big Top” gang discovered that the parking lot was a great party spot. It was. Secluded from the street, the freeway screaming just feet away, they could play their music loud and not bother anyone. I wish we had a place like that when I was young…

The partying was one thing. But staff would arrive on Saturday mornings to busted beer
bottles everywhere and the side of the building, pathetic as it was, covered in graffiti.

The library’s administrative impulse here, almost by policy, and certainly reaction, was to call the police – even if they couldn’t find the building.

Then would come the lights and sirens, helicopters, and kids getting busted (if not
worse).

I honestly don’t know where it came from, but a different idea dawned on me. It just
seemed like a reasonable thing to at try.
I got this big piece of scrap cardboard, and wrote this [verbatim]…

Come on, you guys.
The little kids come in on Saturday. Do you want
them to think of Echo Park like this?

I taped the sign to the front door.
The next morning, staff came back into my office and says, “you gotta see this.” We
walk out to the front of the building and saw new tagging.
But rather than the usual stuff, this one simply said, in huge letters, “Big Top, sorry.”
And they never tagged the library again.

The point of the story is obvious.
Objectifying young people, like objectifying anyone, rarely brings about positive
outcomes. This is the lesson we never read or hear about in popular media.
Administrations treat kids like someone who sees every problem as a nail because all
they have is a hammer.
All we did here was ask.

American journalists, politicians, and interest groups left to right agree: It’s okay to lie about teens.

Mike Males | February 2023

Ninety-nine percent of the tens of thousands of news stories and commentaries on teenagers, suicide, and drug overdose lie. The willfully create a false impression.

UCLA Health is cruder than most, posting the flat lie that “suicide rates (are) highest among teens and young adults.” Other commentators are more subtle, dodging the disappointing truth about “rates” and instead reciting the scary-sounding but grossly misleading: “suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens.”

That’s meaningless. Of course an external cause like suicide, along with accidents and homicide, would be leading death categories for teens, since teens rarely die from major natural causes like heart disease or cancer.

It’s understandable that press reporters and the late comedian George Carlin might confuse “high rate” with “leading cause.” But it is astonishing that UCLA’s famed Child and Adolescent Psychiatry unit would be so ignorant and indifferent regarding basic suicide facts that such a mistake could remain posted.

In the 1980s, authorities caught psychiatric hospitals grossly sensationalizing suicide to scare parents into filling overbuilt hospitals with teenage patients. Of course, UCLA Health took down my complaint within hours – but left their false posting up. That’s typical of American attitudes. Lying about teens is ok; correcting lies is forbidden.

Look for yourself. Every article on “teen suicide” and most on drug abuse (especially fentanyl) contain the meaningless “leading cause” claim but universally omit the much more relevant, contextual fact that teenage rates of suicide and overdose are much lower than adults’ rates.

Table 1 details the important and most recent statistics no one else will present. It combines high-schoolers with higher-risk 18-19 year-olds and includes only immediate, not chronic, deaths.

Even with these conservatisms, adults of ages to be parents to teenagers are twice as likely as teenagers to commit suicide, 7.5 times more likely to fatally overdose on drugs, including 6 times more likely for fentanyl, and 15 times more likely to fatally binge-drink. Teens comprise 13.4% of the teen-adult population but account for only 5.6% of suicides, 1.5% of drug overdoses, 1.8% of fentanyl deaths, and 1.1% of binge-drinking deaths.

Not only do commentators omit these crucial realities omitted from discussion, they peddle exactly the opposite impression that teens are riskier than adults. This blatant misrepresentation contains more cruelty than concern. Teenagers who suffer at-risk parents are afforded no attention, sympathy or official help. No one advises teens on administering Narcan to parents who overdose on fentanyl – a family crisis eight times more likely than a high-schooler overdosing.

Major interests evade high adult rates of suicide and overdose, especially among White middle-aged men, because mental disturbances and addiction are deeply stigmatized in American culture, especially by medical and psychological authorities. The American prejudice is to pretend suicide and drugs afflict only powerless groups, like youth.

These unreasoning bigotries hamper reasoned solutions to America’s social crises, evident in staggering suicide and overdose tolls. We should learn why supposedly “impulsive” teens have such low rates of suicide, not inventing bogus measures to scapegoat them.

Table 1. Deaths from suicides and suicide-suspected deaths, drug and fentanyl overdose, and alcohol overdose, average annual rates per 100,000 population by age group, 2020-2022 (provisional).

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023.

Why do libraries continue to strike out with young people?

Anthony Bernier | January 2023

The answer to the question why libraries strike out with young people is simple: libraries envision young people merely as information consumers, and many still believe that libraries are about books.

And we wonder why young people make libraries the butt of jokes.

When libraries privilege only certain materials and experiences over young peoples’ own ways of being, we must recognize that institutional behaviors, institutional priorities, and institutional agendas keep these institutions in severely compromised positions.

In acknowledging library visions of youth only as information consumers, for instance, youth allies should ask the whereabouts of school newspaper collections. Where the playbills and programs of annual school plays, sporting events, or extra-mural competitions? Where the archival collections of youth-created, podcasts, murals, or zines? Where the manuscripts of valedictorian speeches or debate champions… or youth poets, filmmakers, journalists, and authors?

Increasingly, and to unprecedented degrees, young people enact their own literacy practices through producing what I call “fugitive literacies.” Youth bend and shape new and ever-cheaper communications affordances and skills into literary vocal cords of their own.

Yet, despite all the ethical huffing and puffing librarianship does about commitments to “intellectual freedom” and “information access” libraries institutionally ignore youth-produced literacy enactments.

Youth produce these cultural contributions not through national publishing houses, but locally in small lots, often in one-time offerings, non-sequential, or non-serial, and often fleeting productions. The library world’s dismissive term for this cultural production is “ephemera,” a synonym for not-very-valuable; a synonym for “we don’t care about this stuff.”

Implicitly, it means that we don’t care about those who produce it, either.

I refer to the manifestations of these new literary vocal cords as “subversive materials that engage fugitive literacies.” I invoke such normally pejorative terms as “subversive” and “fugitive” to reflect how our institutions marginalize them.

One highly unusual example of a cultural institution taking youth culture seriously appears at Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive. Although focused on Hiphop itself, rather than on its creators, the collection inherently acknowledges the young voices who, since the 1970s, created an artform rivaling jazz as an American contribution to global culture.

“Mission: The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute’s mission is to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”

Fugitive literacies, by nature, capture the ephemeral and fleeting. Yet they document not only the lives of young people as they live them in the present, but offer contributions as well to the larger culture – if only libraries would take them seriously…

For further thinking on the neglected status of youth-produced writing and cultural production, read Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti’s book: Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation.¹

Part of our job, as youth allies, should be to reverse the depths of this neglect and deploy the formidable skills and resources at our disposal to elevate the many ways in which young people document their world and ours.

¹ Douglas, K., & Poletti, A. (2016). Life Narratives and Youth Culture. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schools Squander Imperative

By Adam Fletcher | January 2023

Schools are struggling, to say the least. By their own report, the US Department of Education paints a damning picture of the inability of educators and school leaders to recapture and re-institute the “good ol’ days” before the pandemic. Stories I have heard directly from teachers on the ground confirm this reality.

However, all of these researchers and educators painting this bleak picture are the problem itself. Instead of taking responsibility for their own failures, educators are repeatedly pointing their fingers at students. According to one post-pandemic summary from July 2022, student misconduct, rowdiness outside of the classroom, acts of disrespect towards teachers and staff, and prohibited use of electronic devices are all indicators of negative student behavior that define student engagement and student success in schools.

Viewing students—as the problem, not as the solution—is demeaning, deceiving, and ultimately irresponsible. It dismisses the imperative presented to educators after the pandemic, which plainly demanded that schools wholly re-envision learning, teaching and leadership throughout education.

During remote learning, many students became authentically empowered for the first time in school. Suddenly, they were able to decide for themselves whether they wanted to turn their cameras on, if they wanted to show their interest by answering questions, and what their own best modalities for learning were, in-person or online. Without the lingering physical dominance of teachers standing above them, many students chose to disengage at will, leaving the frame of their cameras to remain unseen or simply not showing up at all.

Some would argue that this was a false choice at best, but I disagree. In pre-pandemic schools, it was a luxury to leave school and believe you’ll succeed without a great deal of privilege and money. During the pandemic students had a lot of leeway despite their socio-economic standing. Schools are striving to re-assert their authority after the pandemic to the detriment of students of color, low-income students, and neurodivergent learners everywhere.

The “negative student behavior” described by research I mentioned shows what happens when you take a person who has tasted freedom and confine them again. They become disruptive, they don’t act according to rules, they lose respect for people who don’t respect them, and they use the devices that liberated them from the confines of small thinking, finite learning, and insufferable testing. In other words, they act in ways educators don’t approve of.

Instead of forcing conformity and demanding compliance, schools could seize this moment by embracing authentic student engagement, which happens when students have agency in learning. That can mean students determining the things they want to learn, utilizing the learning methods that work for them, identifying how well they learn given subjects, making cross-curricular connections according to their own interests, and following their passions.

The pandemic got schools en masse closer to that reality than ever before. Unfortunately, we are squandering the imperative demanded by students by trying to force them back into the boxes they emerged from during that time. Hopefully this won’t require another pandemic to change.

You can read “More than 80 Percent of U.S. Public Schools Report Pandemic Has Negatively Impacted Student Behavior and Socio-Emotional Development” from the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education here.

Michelle Obama Blames Her Relationship Challenges On Her Young Daughters

By Milo Santamaria | January 2023

I was a child in the early 2000s, which means I grew up during the Obama administration. I was
eight, almost nine, years old when former president Obama was inaugurated for his first term.
And I’m old enough now to understand how his administration has negatively impacted many
marginalized communities, but as a child, my friends and I were taught to look up to him. Which
is why I think the First Lady’s comments made such an impact on me.

“There were 10 years when I couldn’t stand my husband, and guess when it happened, when
those kids were little…,” The First Lady tells her interviewers. “Little kids, they’re terrorists. They
have demands, they don’t talk, they’re poor communicators, they cry all the time, they’re
irrational, they’re selfish, they’re needy…You can’t blame them, they’re cute…so you turn that
ire on each other.”

Now in some ways, I understand where she’s coming from. Parenting is a huge responsibility
that often falls on mothers. Black mothers in particular also face much more scrutiny than white or non-black mothers for their parenting.

Feminists such as Silvia Federici have coined the term social reproductive labor, which is the
work needed to sustain capitalism outside of the workplace. This includes domestic labor,
raising children, and caring for working spouses. This gendered division of labor works to
expand capitalism outside of the workplace and into the home.

However, it is never okay to make such sweeping generalizations about an entire group of
people, especially with the kind of platform Michelle Obama has as a former First Lady. And if a
Harvard-educated woman living in a mansion paid for by the government is struggling to raise her kids, what does that say about the rest of us?

Many complain that Millenials are not having children or buying homes when this is a sign that
most Americans are financially struggling and can barely afford to sustain themselves, let alone
a family.

Under capitalism, anyone who cannot work or earn money is often seen as a financial burden,
which often lessens people’s empathy and care for children and vulnerable communities.
Many blame working-class and marginalized parents for having children, but that same criticism
is never turned toward the systems and politicians that create poverty and labor exploitation;
The conditions that lead to childhood poverty, neglect, and trauma.

I believe that children are just as important to anti-capitalist movements as any marginalized
group. For example, the recent UC graduate worker strike where student workers were fighting
for affordable childcare and housing. I was living on campus at UCSC when the student workers
marched with their strollers and young children.

Parents are overworked both in the workplace and at home, and this impacts the relationships
they have with their partners and children. If more of our needs were met by our communities,
and social safety nets, parents would have more time to focus on their children and their
relationships with partners or friends, reducing stress and resentment in families.