About 2,000 people sentenced to life without parole for crimes they committed as children may not have to spend the rest of their lives in prison, thanks to a decision on Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2012, the high court banned mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles. Monday's decision made that retroactive, which means those people now are eligible for re-sentencing or parole hearings.
Nate Balis, director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's juvenile-justice strategy group, applauded the ruling.
"The adolescent brain doesn't fully develop until the mid-20s," he said. "Young people ought to be treated as youth who are still changing and who are capable of changing, which means it should be about their development and not about punishment."
About 300 people are in California prisons in this situation. However, they're already eligible for re-sentencing after 15 or 20 years, the result of a state law passed in the wake of the 2012 Supreme Court ruling.
"The rest of the world, through the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Children, has said sentencing children for an act committed at 15, 16, or 17, to serve the rest of their life in prison - it's an inhumane sentence," said Daniel Macallair, director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco. "Civilized countries don't do it, and we shouldn't do it."
Macallair said California judges always have had discretion on sentencing, because the state never had mandatory life without parole for juveniles, even for the most serious crimes.
Meanwhile on Monday, President Obama announced a series of criminal-justice reforms he plans to take through executive action, including a ban on the use of solitary confinement for juveniles in federal facilities.
The ruling is online at supremecourt.gov.
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A Grand Island-based organization is offering a diversion program cited in a new report as one of the most effective with at-risk youths.
The intervention program is Multi-Systemic Therapy, or MST, which the Mid-Plains Center has offered for more than 20 years. In The Sentencing Project's report, MST is identified as having contributed to the 75% decline in youth incarceration between 2000 and 2022.
Chase Francl, president and CEO of MidPlains, explained the approach is to involve all of the "systems" contributing to or affected by a youth's dysfunction.
"You can work with the child, great, but if he still has the same peers that are driving this, you need to be working with the family and help them," Francl asserted. "How do you set limits on this? Your child's sneaking out at night; let's look at what that does. Let's look at how it's impacting school performance. Let's be talking with the teachers."
Mid-Plains therapists work in Kearney, Grand Island, Hastings, York and Lincoln. Francl noted youths are typically involved with therapy for 12 weeks, and the program has decreased long-term rearrests by more than 70%.
Josh Rovner, director of youth justice for The Sentencing Project, said it is not surprising incarceration has some of the worst outcomes for young people who get into trouble.
"Among the things that matter most for young people to achieve is to have a positive peer group and to have the support of their parents and other caring adults in their lives," Rovner outlined. "Sending kids away from home into locked facilities provides neither of those things."
Francl added keeping the youth at home is a major goal for the majority of the young people and families they serve.
"Typically, where we get called is, 'This situation's on fire; this is our last chance at putting it out. Would you guys come in and see if you can salvage the situation?'" Francl observed. "If we can't be successful with this, this youth is getting placed out of the home, whether that's a group home, whether that's detention."
The Mid-Plains MST program has had more than 90% of youths remain at home while enrolled, and more than 97% have had no new arrests. Francl stressed although the majority of referrals come from the court system, court involvement is not a requirement. He added he has been told there would be enough youths to fill the program if they doubled their staff tomorrow.
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West Virginia state agencies have failed to collect data on incarcerated youth, according to a new lawsuit filed by the West Virginia NAACP in the Circuit Court of Kanawha County.
Every year, thousands of children appear before a judge and many become entangled in the state's juvenile justice system.
Aleshadye Getachew, senior counsel for Democracy Forward, explained the state passed a law in 2015, mandating agencies to collect data about juvenile justice outcomes to aid policymakers, but she said agencies haven't delivered.
"This data really should have been collected in 2015 when this law was first passed, but it hasn't," Getachew pointed out. "We sent out FOIA requests on behalf of the West Virginia NAACP and what we received was pretty limited."
She added the lack of data is leaving advocates in the dark on whether the state has made progress addressing a crisis of incarcerated youth, particularly those involved in truancy diversion programs and school-related incidents.
According to the state Department of Education, more than 169,000 incidents on school property occurred during the 2022 academic year, with more than 51,000 students referred for discipline.
Loretta Young, president of the West Virginia NAACP, said data is critical for examining racial disparities among students facing harsh penalties, such as suspensions or expulsions, or being referred to law enforcement for minor incidents.
"Because the data collection will lead us to what the problem is, how we possibly can develop community resources along with the school resources, so that children are not going from the school to the pipeline of prison," Young urged.
According to federal data, law enforcement accounted for 82% of all delinquency cases referred to juvenile court in 2019.
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Efforts to reform juvenile sentencing in the U.S. have made significant strides but a new report showed Alabama is lagging behind.
A study by The Sentencing Project said two in five people sentenced to life without parole were 25 or younger at the time of their crime.
Ashley Nellis, co-director of research for The Sentencing Project, and co-author of the report, said brain science supports the idea people are most prone to criminal behavior in their late teens to mid-20s, a period of heightened risk-taking and impulsivity. She believes young offenders deserve a second chance as they mature.
"There hasn't been a fair response to those who are sitting there 10, 20, 30 years into their sentence and not having any sort of relief, even though many agree now that the adolescent brain is a critical component to consider as sentencing," Nellis explained.
Currently, 55 people in Alabama are serving life without parole or a virtual life sentence for crimes they committed before turning 18.
The report also uncovered racial disparities, with more than 80% of those serving juvenile life without parole in Alabama being Black. Nationally, the figure is 53%.
Nellis argued it is important to extend reforms across the country, as landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases since 2010 have recognized minors should not be held to the same standards of culpability as adults. The rulings acknowledged youth are more susceptible to risk-taking and impulsive behavior, especially in emotionally charged situations.
"The U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on life without parole for juveniles and severely limited the allowable use of life without parole for young people," Nellis noted. "But they stopped short of telling the states how to implement."
The report urged policymakers to craft reforms reflecting current brain science and apply to all forms of life imprisonment and extreme sentencing. While 28 states have banned life without parole for minors, and five have eliminated it entirely, Alabama has yet to follow suit.
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