General

Illinois received more evidence last week that incarcerating young people doesn’t rehabilitate them. Independent experts told a federal court that Illinois’ juvenile prison system operates an education program far below minimally accepted standards, does not meet the basic mental health needs of incarcerated youth and uses solitary confinement too often and for too long, with potentially damaging effects on youth who return to our communities.

Governor Pat Quinn today made key appointments to the Truancy in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Task Force which has been charged with identifying different strategies and approaches to help educators and CPS administration address the truancy problems in the City of Chicago. Today’s action is part of Governor Quinn’s agenda to prepare every child for success in college, career and beyond.

A new report from the prison watchdog John Howard Association says mental health treatment in Illinois youth prisons is so bad that judges need to stop sending kids with mental health needs to them. The scathing report was released on Thursday. It is the latest in a series of studies that are highly critical of the care and education within the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice.

After hearing about the Chicago shooting last week in which 13 were injured in Cornell Square Park, including a three-year-old, I and writer Mikki Kendall, both Chicago residents, had very different reactions. It’s "not just the park incident," Kendall told me by email. "20 people were shot this weekend. People are being shot almost daily. And I have a 14 year-old son who can't go to the McDonald's in Hyde Park at lunch because the school has noticed an uptick in crime at that location." I was depressed and horrified, too — but depressed and horrified in the way that you are when you hear about gun violence anywhere. Unlike Kendall, I wasn't directly concerned about the safety of my family.

The United States imprisons more people than any other country — and a staggering number are juveniles. In fact, about half a million juveniles a year enter detention centers, not including those tried as adults, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports alternatives to incarceration. Sadly, our school system is contributing to the problem. Too many children are denied their right to a quality education and instead set on a path toward failure and incarceration.

The two brothers should have been choosing the colleges they would attend, but instead they were behind bars, unsure whether they would graduate from high school at all. After getting arrested three years ago for breaking into businesses in the northwest suburbs to steal booze, the teens remained in jail for a few months as they waited their turn to attend a four-month boot camp as their sentences. At 17, they had been charged as adults with felony burglary. Had circumstances unfolded a few years later, everything might have been different.

There are synonymous meanings to the phrase “perfect storm,” but the one that describes the current state of the war on zero tolerance school policies is “a phenomenon that happens to occur in such confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude.” The war started many years ago when researchers began studying the effects of school suspensions and arrests, revealing the risk of kids dropping out of school, committing crimes, and inevitably landing in prison.

During the intervening years we have witnessed a phenomenal occurrence of independent initiatives attacking zero tolerance from varying approaches. This phenomena of occurrences got a boost from an unexpected source — medical science.

Illinois has become one of only a handful of states to adopt standards requiring law enforcement to track Hispanic/Latino arrest data.

It’s been six months since Celia Peoples last saw her 14-year-old son. He is only five hours away from her home in the small downstate town of Harrisburg, Ill., but Peoples, who is unemployed and barely making ends meet, can’t afford to take a car or a bus to visit him. Peoples’ son is incarcerated in the Illinois Youth Center Kewanee. “I just don’t have the money to go see him,” she said.