Structural Racism
From the executive summary: “This report offers recommendations for researchers, policymakers, diversion programs, and community organizations focused on diverting Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people from criminal punishment systems. Our recommendations are based on an assessment of diversion programs through a Black feminist lens, which starts from the standpoint of the women and…
This report challenges the notion that Georgia’s youth legal system is built to rehabilitate and suggests measures that protect the health and humanity of all the state’s children. First, this report will explore the myth of the “superpredator” and its impact on perceived Black youth criminality. Second, it will detail the state’s school-to-prison pipeline and…
This report details the results of the first-ever state-wide Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) survey administered to people currently incarcerated for crimes they committed as children (under eighteen). The trauma measured from ACEs surveys include physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; physical and emotional neglect; separation from parents; mental illness or substance abuse in the home; parent…
Florida routinely pushes Black children out of schools and into a legal system with well-documented harms. In recent years, the state has made significant investments in school law enforcement and self-proclaimed “tough love” youth legal system policies, purportedly in the name of public safety. However, these investments have yielded a system that disparately disciplines, arrests,…
The answer, then, is not to simply reform the system of punishment, but to stop surveilling and punishing kids and instead invest in the things that set kids up for success, like education, family support, and access to healthcare. We need to start seeing children as children, not as criminals, and giving them the tools…
The focus of this paper is on the experience of Black adolescents who are growing up amidst evolving national beliefs about racism, ongoing political debate surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and a growing national awareness about the experience of being Black in America.
From the executive summary: “YEAH (Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout) is a community-based organization working to empower, advocate for, and meet the needs of young people ages 15 to 24 based in West and Southwest Philadelphia. Kendra Van de Water and James Aye co-founded YEAH in 2018 to address the stark lack of safe, culturally…
This article calls for the categorical exclusion of young children from juvenile court jurisdiction as a pathway toward the abolition of the juvenile legal system in its current form. This article highlights the landscape of age-based jurisdictional boundaries across the country: 24 states have no minimum age of arrest and prosecution, while 18 states have…
This document is updated regularly to include the latest case law from across the country discussing racial justice issues.
This article calls for the use of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish federal and state gang statutes. Highlighting the lineage of modern-day gang statutes from Black Codes to vagrancy laws from the Jim Crow era to gang injunctions, this article establishes how current gang statutes remain as “badges and incidents” of slavery. This article walks…
This infographic details statistics on the overrepresentation of Native and Indigenous communities in the criminal legal system, noting in particular that the incarceration rate of American Indian/Alaska Native communities increased 60 percent from 1990 to 2020. It cautions that current data collection practices on Native and Indigenous communities are often incomplete and inaccurate due to…
This Article is one of the first to explore the racialized impact of the two most controversial and ubiquitous forms of what we call “imputed liability murder.” An analysis of ten years of murder prosecutions in the state of Minnesota reveals that imputed liability murder is anything but a fringe subtype of homicide: an astounding…
