criminal justice

Efforts to shield more teens from the adult criminal justice system are viewed as a progressive cause across the country. But an effort to expand California’s juvenile justice system to include older youth has drawn skepticism, partly due to its chief architect: the state’s probation lobby.

Probation and parole started out in the 1800s as rehabilitation efforts that tempered punishment with mercy. With the advent of the War on Drugs in the 1970s, rehabilitation and mercy became dirty words, and community supervision morphed into community corrections, emulating its big brother the prison as one more punitive response to poverty.

“Timing is everything,” CNN host and author Van Jones told a room full of law enforcement officials, gathered in San Francisco on Monday for the announcement of a new initiative that hopes to drastically shrink the number of Americans under the supervision of probation or parole.

   Today in San Francisco, more than 50 current and former probation and parole chiefs have signed on to a new initiative designed to reduce the number of adults who are under supervision in the country’s local probation and parole systems.

An appellate court in California has upheld the controversial 2018 law that prevents youth under the age of 16 from entering the adult criminal justice system. Since being signed into law in October 2018, district attorneys from a number of California counties have challenged Senate Bill 1391, arguing that it unconstitutionally amends Proposition 57, a 2016 ballot measure that gave judges the power to decide if a juvenile offender should be transferred to adult court.

The California legislature has passed a bill that prevents juveniles 15 or younger from being transferred into adult court for any crime, a dramatic turnaround in a state that used to give wide discretion to prosecutors in seeking adult time for youths.

The first-ever National Children of Incarcerated Parents Conference drew 285 attendees from around the globe and offered three full days of sessions on innovative programs, family-focused policy and lived experiences. Among the breakout session topics: immigration policy’s impact on families and children, alternatives to incarceration in Oregon and Washington, research on loss and children’s resiliency, the benefits of overnight contact between incarcerated mothers and their children, peer-parent support programs, and much more.

“In Kenya they have a greeting, and that greeting is, ‘How are the children?’’’ said Pastor Patricia Sealy during a panel on day one of the inaugural National Children of Incarcerated Parents conference in Phoenix.

A 500-page report presented at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday recommended sweeping changes to the county’s probation department, including a complete restructuring of the department to separately handle adult and juvenile cases.