Structural Racism
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…
Examines the impact of race on age at the onset of school disciplinary actions and police contact, and the rate of receiving increasingly severe disciplinary actions.
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…
In this Article, we call for greater nuance and careful treatment of rap-related evidence in the courtroom, which includes recognizing rap’s history, conventions, and practices generally, and acknowledging rap’s complicated and complex intersection with gangs specifically. Greater nuance and more careful treatment will enable courtroom members, including judges and jurors, to make better informed evaluations…
This paper analyzes how race and reproductive healthcare are used as carceral tools of racial oppression that emanate from slavery. I argue that both mass incarceration and the denial of reproductive health services for Black women must be abolished as a way of abolishing vestiges of slavery. Part II contextualizes the historical control of Black…
A robust literature is developing around how the stress of discrimination is implicated in individual- and group-level sleep disturbances, and how these disturbances contribute to the development of population-level sleep disparities over time. Although discrimination can be based on many individual and intersecting biases, like gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and education, in this article, we…
This Article suggests that doing non-extractive research, what some have called liberation science,7 involves transformation starting from the earliest stages of the research process to upend implicit hierarchies of knowledge and power. Part I of this Article explains the concept of wicked problems and documents the embedded wicked problem of structural racism. Part II focuses…
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.
The work described herein articulates a way forward for the NIH to continue to improve youth mental health and to reduce YMHD through supporting rigorous, impactful research. However, the urgency of the youth mental health crisis and YMHD is so pressing that many NIH ICOs have already begun this important work, particularly through supporting research.…
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…
In re Personal Restraint of Asaria Miller, at the urging of merits counsel from the University of Washington’s Race and Justice Clinic, supported by amicus counsel from Seattle University School of Law’s Civil Rights Clinic, the Washington State Court of Appeals took an important step in accounting for the ways that youth of color likely…
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…
The paper proceeds as follows: Part I describes the changes in law in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in a marked increase in young people sentenced to life or life-like sentences, as well as the evolving understanding of psychosocial and neurological development that followed. Part II summarizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth…
