Airing on French broadcast network TFI and posted to their website on November 23, this solid news report draws on interviews with Jacob Ind and Trevor Jones. Ind was sentenced to juvenile life without parole when he was convicted in the deaths of his abusive mother and step father in 1993. Jones, whose first degree [...]
Scott Walsh is founder of the Restorative Justice Foundation C/o University of York Law School York England His email comments about the differences between US and UK justice have been edited down for this post. First: Politics This is one more area where the UK and the US are miles apart. In the United States [...]
There are many problems with having juvenile offenders in adult jails, but possibly the most pressing one is keeping children protected. Because juvenile offenders are likely to experience physical and sexual violence, corrections institutions often subject children to 23 hours per day of solitary confinement. Protecting underage offenders with isolation is extremely problematic and according [...]
Despite the fact that brains reach their full size around the age of six, scientists have recently learned that brain development is not complete until the mid-twenties. Car rental agencies seem to get this (in most states, you cannot rent a car until you are 25), but the government has no hard stance on the [...]
The lack of programs in adult prisons is shameful enough — but in many facilities, the neglect of inmates goes even deeper. Take, for example, a petition by inmates of California’s Corcoran State Prison, who are staging a hunger strike to protest conditions in the prison’s Administrative Segregation Unit. According to San Francisco-based BayView newspaper, inmates [...]
Dear constituents, I am writing today to ask for your help in making sense out of what often seems to be senseless violence. We all know that children are the biggest threat to the safety and security that we enjoy every day in our community. As your District Attorney and public safety savior, I have [...]
by PolitiVisor A striking and heart breaking example of the Catch 22 which abused or neglected children face every day, Robert Richardson III has been charged as an adult with First and Second Degree Murder in the shooting death of his father at their home in Hartford County, Maryland. As in most parricide cases, there [...]
by PolitiVisor 5280 Magazine’s recent article simply titled “Presumed Guilty” is more than an homage to the tireless investigative work of fourth estate journalists like Miles Moffeit and Susan Greene; it’s an objective indictment of a failed criminal justice system in Colorado. Through layered profiles of the men and women who made up the system, [...]
Prosecutors in Hamilton, Ohio want us to believe that a 17-year old who killed a fellow inmate in a group home for abused kids launched a vicious and unprovoked attack on the victim. The problem is that the known facts contradict their assertions. And while prosecutors are perfectly willing to make public statements, they aren’t [...]
While the eighth amendment states the United States government will not engage in “cruel and unusual punishment,” the United States Supreme Court has dismissed arguments asserting that the death penalty can be defined as cruel and unusual. Instead, power has been left to the lower courts to decide on an individual basis. In the meantime, [...]