ACLU-AZ: tasers, prisoner abuse, and juvenile diversion.

This is really exciting folks. Go to all if you can if for no other reason than to show them how many people out here care....

From: ACLU of Arizona [mailto:grassroots@acluaz.org]
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 2:53 PM
Subject: Location update: You bring your lunch. We'll bring the experts.

---

All lectures will be held at 3707 N. 7th Street, Suite 100, Phoenix, AZ 85014

You are invited to the ACLU of Arizona's Summer 2011 Brown Bag Lecture Series!

Who says there is nothing to do during the summer in the Valley of the Sun?

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

In Their Own Words: Enduring Abuse in Arizona Immigration Detention Centers

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Protecting What Works: Juvenile Diversion in Maricopa County

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

A Force to Be Reckoned With: Taser Use in Arizona Police Departments

All brown bag lectures will be from noon to 1 p.m.

Free and open to the public. Drinks and desserts served.

Seating is limited, so please make reservations by calling Mary Hope Lee at 602-650-1854 ext. 100 or by emailing info@acluaz.org.

Truth-in-Sentencing, Arizona: one in ten youth will be sexually abused the first year in juvenile prison.

This is profoundly tragic. This kid was in state prison for shoplifting and drug use - that's a real problem, given who the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections touts as their main customers: "the worst of the worst young criminals in the state." I have yet to see any of the real bad guys get abused in prison, but we shrug off reports like this one as if they're freak accidents and only the criminals we love to hate get hurt badly. Thank god the judge let the kid go home after all this.

Judges should be ordered to read aloud at sentencing the risks they expose each child to if they plan to lock them up - beginning with the one in every ten kids who will be sexually abused the first year they're in the system. Then when a child is raped or suicides in custody, the judge should be held civilly liable for the risk they knowingly, explicitly subjected them to as part of their punishment.

The judiciary can't possibly think that juvenile detention centers are really therapeutic rehabilitation facilites to send children to - which is why the AzDJC calls places like Adobe Mountain "Safe Schools", instead of what they are: child prisons. It makes the prospect of committing a child there more palatable to the well-intended. They're really prison prep schools, though, and come complete with gangs, drugs, and sexual abuse - as well as child-size prison uniforms, stark cells, handcuffs and shackles.

We just pack a bunch of naive, emotionally impaired kids in with a few real disturbed thugs to justify keeping those places open at all, then indoctrinate them into a culture that leaves them few options for roles and self-image to choose from outside of the criminal justice paradigm populated by distinctly-defined "criminals", "victims", and cops.

Most children who have been criminalized and institutionalized are also survivors of abuse already, and grow up with unresolved trauma issues that lead to self-medicating with drugs - and then prison again. It is not uncommon for their involvement with the juvenile justice system to be the greater source of trauma than their adolescent participation in crime was, though.

This kid, for one, was hardly safe - and the truth is that when this kind of thing happens it hardly ever hits the press, so the public is lulled into thinking that violence in the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections is not the rule. Prisons RUN on violence and the threat of it to coerce compliance, though, people. They are authoritarian police institutions - do not send children there and expect them to come out healthy. If they do, they are the exception to the rule, not the other way around.

Sentencing practices should be closely monitored for all critical outcomes - not only recidivism, but suicide, homicide, further victimization, sexual exploitation: once we start treating kids like criminals, we seem to stop caring about all other aspects of their lives but whether or not they remain criminals...nurturing little but prison culture, stigmatization, and a negative self-image in the process.

Don't believe them for a minute when they tell you they have to be like that because of the serious pathology of their youth - the worst are still out getting away with it. The kids the AzDJC really have the most of are the ones who got caught and were too poor to swing their own attorneys - a good many of whom were low-level, non-violent drug offenders who just kept relapsing on probation, and everyone knows that a bunch of the kids we throw into juvie should have gone through mental health treatment, not the criminal justice system - and would have but for the lack of funds for public mental health services in this state. Those kids couldn't get into a residential treatment program unless they were first criminalized (that must be a violation of the Olmstead Act) - and then they ended up in prison instead.

So, this article is for those who still believe that "criminals deserve what they get in prison." Folks who really believe that do these kids the greatest harm through their deliberate indifference to their suffering - as do the bureaucrats who do damage control by distorting the gravity of their plight behind the best of bars. When the AzDJC faced the threat of privatization last year, they and the officers' unions chose to appeal not to our collective sense of responsibility to help these kids, but to our fear of them instead, arguing that private companies can't safely handle the highly dangerous young criminals they have in their care. Public safety would be compromised, they argued - never mind how it would affect the welfare of our criminalized youth. I even heard one guy refer to the escape at Kingman (as if the lack of state oversight had no bearing on the outcome) - suggesting that young state prisoners would be busting out and killing everyone if they could.

But the murderers and sociopaths they have in custody aren't the ones getting screwed - it's the kids like this one below and Presley Austin who represent the incoming tide...AzDJC Director Mike Branham should be the one out in front on this telling the public how bad these places are for such youth, that there's no way to make the prison system "work" for most of them, and that we should be directing our resources into other kinds of services for them before they hit the child prisons.

The problem with committing our children so readily to the care of the state, is that it tends to place its own survival over the best interests of the people its machinery was constructed to serve in the first place. Mike could have embraced an abolitionist vision and steered the entire agency towards dissolution, redirecting resources back to their prisoners' home communities to decide how best to teach their youth the nuances of justice, and to cultivate a better sense of social responsibility than our current reliance on these archaic institutions has done thus far.

Thank you, Judge Aragón, for exercising compassion and taking responsibility for correcting your orders. Someone should fire that prosecutor - especially if he's the one who coaxed the judge to send that kid up river in the first place. He was some kind of dangerous, alright...

Why can't these places keep their prisoners safe?

---------------------------------

Release is ordered for boy, 16, after attacks in custody
Kim Smith / Arizona Daily Star
March 5, 2011


A Pima County Juvenile Court judge who sent a 16-year-old boy to the Catalina Mountain School last December ordered his release Friday after learning the boy may have been repeatedly stabbed with a pen one week last month and sodomized the next.

Judge Gus Aragón ordered the boy placed on probation until his 18th birthday in March 2012, said Assistant Pima County Public Defender Terri Pones.

"I am ecstatic," Pones said following the hearing.

According to court documents filed by Pones, Aragón sent the boy to the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections in December after the drug-addicted boy repeatedly violated probation.

The boy had been adjudicated delinquent for stealing candy and soft drinks from a Marana park concession stand, Pones said. He also has drug convictions.

On Feb. 3, a teacher overheard the teenager's roommate tell another roommate the teenager had been stabbed in the throat, arm and rib cage with a pen two days prior, according to the documents. The teenager told his mother and corrections officials he was afraid of retaliation and he'd overheard other teens talking about assaulting him again.

The boy and his mother were assured he would be housed by himself, staff would supervise him on a more individual basis and someone would always be "shadowing him," Pones said in the court documents.

On Feb. 15, the teenager was taken to Northwest Medical Center after being sodomized by a roommate and forced to perform a sexual act, Pones said.

After being discharged from the hospital, the teenager was sent to Adobe Mountain in Phoenix for his safety, making it difficult for his family to visit him, Pones said.

Because of the assault, Pones said the boy's "treatment needs have now far exceeded" those he had in December and he ought to be released so he can receive treatment in the community.

David Berkman, Pima County's chief criminal deputy attorney, said prosecutors asked Aragón to schedule a hearing on the allegations once the corrections department completed its investigation, but he declined to do so.

"It appears he accepted what they said," Berkman said.

Prosecutors objected to the boy's release, Berkman said, and may ask for another hearing on the matter, depending upon the results of the investigation.

Laura E. Dillingham, director of communications for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, said the investigation is ongoing.

Contact reporter Kim Smith at 573-4241 or kimsmith@azstarnet.com

Black girls and the Prison Industrial Complex.

School-to-prison-pipeline links:

• ACLU Racial Justice Program page on Challenging the School-to-Prison Pipeline at http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/school-prison-pipeline

• NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. page on School to Prison Pipeline at http://www.naacpldf.org/issues.aspx?issue=3

• Charles Hamilton Houston Institute page on Redirecting the School to Prison Pipeline at http://www.charleshamiltonhouston.org/Projects/Project.aspx?id=100005

• Juvenile Law Center at http://www.jlc.org/

• Southern Poverty Law Center page on School-to-Prison Pipeline at http://www.splcenter.org/legal/schoolhouse.jsp

• Dignity in Schools Campaign site with links to research as well as tools specifically for parents, students, community organizers, and educators, at http://www.dignityinschools.org/

• Advancement Project site specifically for grassroots advocates challenging the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track at http://www.stopschoolstojails.org/

----------------

In post-racial America, prisons feast on black girls.

New American Media Ethnoblog

By Rachel Pfeffer, Mar 15, 2011


African American girls and young women have become the fastest growing population of incarcerated young people in the country. Efforts to stop mass incarceration focused on black girls are almost nonexistent in government policy, the media, foundations and academia.

Recently, the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Law School took the bold and necessary step of organizing a day-and-a-half free event titled, “African American Girls and Young Women and Juvenile Justice System: A Call to Action.”

The beauty of this conference was the focus on black girls and the passionate energy to create a path for action among the participants.

Academics and activists, among them formerly incarcerated African American girls and young women, gathered together from across the divides of class, age, race and place to talk about what we know about these young people, their interaction with the criminal justice system--and what we are going to do about it.

Sociologist Nikki Jones of UC Santa Barbara, and Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii opened up the conference with a look at the statistics.

“No”, said Jones, “Black girls are not committing more crimes, even though they are being incarcerated in record numbers.”

“I’ve been studying this for decades,” said Chesney-Lind. She added, “We have never seen these kind of numbers before. National policies like zero tolerance are responsible for the school to prison pipeline. And a dual justice system that treats white girls differently from black girls is disproportionately impacting African American girls.”

She continued, “In 2008, we knew the arrest rate in California was 49 out of every 1,000 for black girls, 8.9 per 1,000 for white girls and 14.9 per 1,000 for Latinas.”

The cause of the over criminalization of African American young women is best understood by looking back through the lens of American history and the ideological construction of black criminality.

“The shackles of slavery endured into other eras, including convict leasing systems and chain gangs,” said Prisicilla Ocen, a professor at UCLA’s Critical Race Studies.

“In order to sustain these systems, de-humanizing stereotypes of black women were created to maintain the difference between white and African American women,” she said. “Black girls are still dealing with racial and gendered stereotypes that were used to justify punishment.”

Ocen continued, “These historical stereotypes laid the groundwork for the creation of a dual criminal justice system – one where African American women and girls are treated differently for the same behaviors.”

Many participants saw the treatment of African American girls in the justice system as criminal with little accountability. “Adults are committing crimes too; this is part of the story that needs to be told,” said Barry Krisberg, Research and Policy Director at UC Berkeley’s Earl Warren Institute on Law.

Krisberg went on, “Once in the criminal justice system, African American girls are treated with brutality, so much emotional and sexual abuse. We are violating African American girls’ human rights everyday in all 58 counties of California. Where are the lawsuits? Where is the accountability?”

The breadth of the problem seems overwhelming, yet no one at the conference seemed daunted. The resolve in the room at Boalt Law School was palpable and the ideas for action began to flow. Formerly incarcerated participants, who work at the Center for Young Women’s Development (CYWD), and other formerly incarcerated African American girls will lead these efforts. They are the experts.

For the past 17 years, young women at CYWD have been leaving jail, the street economies and gangs to work for self healing, social justice, policy change and a meaningful place in their communities.

“The call to action is the task before us—there are a number of things we can do,” said Lateefah Simon, activist and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights San Francisco.

“The Henderson Center can provide institutional support for African American Leaders, who are engaging in the criminal justice system. We can convene all the judges, we can organize ourselves locally and nationally to focus on African American girl,” said Simon. “Yes, let’s do that--we want our girls to be free.”

There is room for everyone to have a meaningful part in efforts to stop the over incarceration of African American girls or young women. For more information about how to get involved in this effort please contact: african.american.girls.a.call.to.action@lists.berkeley.edu

Rachel Pfeffer is the founder of the Center for Young Women’s Development and currently on the Advisory Board. For more information www.cywd.org.

EXILE: Incarcerated LGBT Youth.

Another decent post from the folks at Solitary Watch - the embedded articles/reports are worth reading, too.

---------------------------

LGBT Kids in Prison Face Rape, Beatings, and Isolation
Solitary Watch / July 13, 2010
by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

CHILDREN IN LOCKDOWN

“Across the United States, the brutal and dysfunctional juvenile justice system sends queer youth to prison in disproportionate numbers, fails to protect them from violence and discrimination while they’re inside and to this day condones attempts to turn them straight,” writes Daniel Redman in a powerful article on LGBT youth behind bars, which appeared last month in The Nation.

LGBT youth reportedly make up 15 percent of the juvenile prison population, and report 12 times as many sexual assaults as straight youth do. In addition to being raped, beaten up, bullied, and shunned, these kids often end up in solitary confinement. Redman writes:

Sending LGBT victims of violence into isolation, instead of punishing their attackers, is common practice across the country, even though a federal court has held the practice to be unconstitutional and the American Psychological Association opposes it. And once the youth are put on lockdown—whether to punish or to protect—they miss out on crucial educational opportunities. In 2006, a bisexual youth in California petitioned the court to be removed from his facility because staff members had kept him in isolation for twenty-three hours a day. At 20 years old, he had missed so much schooling that he was only halfway to his high school diploma.

Besides using isolation to purportedly protect queer youth, guards also use lockdown as punishment. “We had one kid who wouldn’t go to school because he was afraid” of the other youth in the facility, says Wesley Ware [of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana]. And because he was on the mental health unit, a certain amount of social interaction was required as part of his rehabilitation program. For refusing to leave his cell, he was put on lockdown for noncompliance, and his chances for release diminished yet again.

Often, queer youth face as much hostility from prison guards as they do from peers. When a youth faces bullying or violence from another kid, staff can be reluctant to intervene. “The staff views it as [the kid] deserves it, or he’s asking for it—so they don’t intervene or they’ll egg it on,” Ware says. They view it as “good for the kid—gotta teach him and have it beat out of him. Then when the gay kid finally breaks, then he faces the disciplinary consequences.”

Guards are often bullies themselves. Krystal [a transgender teen in Louisiana] reports that staff called her “a disgrace to mankind,” a “punk” or “fucking faggot” on a daily basis and threatened her, saying, “I’ll beat your fucking ass.” When staff called Krystal “faggot” or other names, sometimes she talked back. “Sometimes I would even say, I’m proud to be that,” Krystal says. She would receive more tickets for talking back.

Redman talked to several teens in Louisiana, where the Juvenile Justice Project has just released a comprehensive–and disturbing–report, Locked Up and Out: Youth in Louisiana’s Juvenile Justice System. But as he clearly states, “Antigay policies aren’t just a problem in the Deep South or rural regions.” Nor do prison abuse, rape, and solitary confinement happen only to LGBT kids. As Matt Kelley pointed out yesterday in a post on the subject at Change.org, “The problem of abused LGBT youth in prison forces us to think not only about broader issues of sexual assault in prison, but also on alternatives to locking up juveniles.”

Meanwhile, as the Sentencing Project noted last week, ”Three major juvenile justice initiatives remained stalled in the Congress.” One of these is the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which “promotes the use of effective community-based alternatives to detention, keeps youth out of adult facilities, reduces the disproportionate involvement of youth of color in the system, and promotes other research-driven best practices in the juvenile justice system.” Sounds like a good thing, right? Too bad it’s currently three years overdue for reauthorization.

Help Wanted: Your two cents.

I've been composing this blog for three days now, with few breaks. I want it to be a library of sorts - a virtual infoshop - where folks can find pretty much every juvenile justice link they need in one place. Because of the diversity of issues among youth in both the juvenile and adult systems, that's nearly impossible. There's so much information I want to share that it's begun to bog me down; I just can't put it all up there, and I'm afraid to crowd the really good stuff out.

So, my friends, I will need your help, especially these next few weeks. If you peruse this page and see something missing that should be here, email me. If you hit a broken link or read an article that seems inappropriate, let me know. If you have suggestions for a published article, send me a link and I'll check it out. Same with general issues about the system or facilities that you want to learn more about - maybe I can find some things that are already published and post them, or make a few calls and write something up. You are also welcome to write your own opinion pieces and submit them - I don't have guidelines - just be decent, reasonable, and accurate. All emails of that sort should go to azjuvenileprisonwatch@gmail.com.

As for allegations of neglect, abuse, poor facilities, or particularly brutal twists in the juvenile justice system - let me have them and we'll discuss where to go. We may use the blog to expose issues that haven't seen much light yet; first-hand accounts can be very enlightening, and while I'd prefer to have everything on the record, I will respect requests for people to remain anonymous if they fear retaliation. We may also quietly contact the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and request a CRIPA investigation instead (as was done with the AzDJC about abuse at their programs a few years back). We may even turn what you have over to the Phoenix New Times if it seems to demand investigative journalism - they are much faster than the DOJ. Whatever we do, it will be our decision (yours and mine), not just mine.

Finally, if families and community members - even AzDJC employees - want to meet and organize around juvenile justice reforms, let me know and I'll help people connect with each other. In the meantime, if there are one or two people willing to help with this blog - doing research, fine tuning the margins, following up with feedback and concerns, writing editorials - please contact me: Peggy Plews, prisonabolitionist@gmail.com, or 480-580-6807.