David Chura's Blog
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Dec.22.2011
If anyone doubts that the young people locked up in our jails are children they should spend some time in one of those prisons around holiday time.
I did just that for the 10 years I taught high school students, some as young as fifteen, in an adult county jail, and every year it got tougher...
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Nov.10.2011
There’s been some good news in the media lately for anyone who cares about kids and justice. Federal statistics show that the number of juvenile offenders in jail has dropped by at least 25%. Along those same lines, the New York Times recently reported that New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman has...
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Oct.06.2011
She was pretty upfront about it: she didn’t want me there.
“It’s not you personally,” Marge explained. “It’s the book.”
Marge was the moderator, researcher, engine, really, of a local reading group. She was good at what she did, I was told, and I believed it. She was pretty thorough at listing all...
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Sep.20.2011
It was a busman’s holiday. 30 people in a room, all teachers in high school and GED programs in various prisons from across New York State, listening to me talk about teaching locked up kids. The conference was in Saratoga Springs with lots of other things to do. Yet there they were, nodding their...
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Sep.06.2011
In a six by eight foot jail cell there’s barely room for a bunk, a seatless toilet, and a postage-sized sink. The only other space you have in jail is in your head, and even that gets crowded with all the people you carry around in there who you resent for the things they did to you.
The world is...
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Feb.01.2010
By now I thought the shocked reactions to the Department of Justice’s report on sexual abuse of juveniles in detention centers would’ve disappeared. But articles and editorials from across the country continue to appear as states grapple with shocking numbers that won’t go away. Will all this worry...
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Jan.11.2010
The numbers are disturbing. During 2008 through 2009, 12 percent or 3,220 of the kids locked up in state or privately run juvenile detention centers reported that they had been sexually victimized by another kid or by facility staff.
Even more disturbing is that 10.3 percent stated they had had...
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Jan.05.2010
“Zero tolerance.” It sounds like a good idea: “Put your foot down.” “Get tough.” “We’re not taking it anymore.”
The American public, worried about the purported drug and gun wars being fought in our cities in the 1990s, grabbed onto this concept. In turn, a number of states and municipalities...
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Dec.22.2009
Some issues just aren’t debatable. Like cell phone use or text-messaging while driving. Yet states and municipalities continue to argue about what laws, if any, should govern these practices, despite the many stories we’ve all heard about car accidents, many fatal, that have happened because the...
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Dec.18.2009
"We are either going to spend the money now and provide the services that our children require or we are going to pay a big price at a later date when these children are part of the adult criminal justice system."
That's how Judge Edwina Richardson Mendelson, a New York family court...
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Dec.17.2009
I’ve worked with kids at-risk in and out of jail for over 25 years and they just don’t get it. They just don’t get that if you drop out of school, you can’t get a job; and if you hang out on the streets and drink forties the cops harass you 24/7. Get into a stolen car, let your man stash his drugs...
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Dec.11.2009
We Americans don’t know much about how our criminal justice system works. We have the basics down. “Commit the crime, do the time!” as the pop cliché has it.
If only it were that simple.
Most Americans know that if you get arrested and post bail you’re released from custody while your case...
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Dec.03.2009
In March 2007, the nonprofit Disability Law Center sued the state of Massachusetts over its treatment of hundreds of mentally ill inmates. Prisoners with emotional problems who are unruly in some way are kept in 23 hour solitary confinement, which, according to a November 10 Boston Globe article,...
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Nov.27.2009
There are 109 inmates serving life sentences without parole for non-homicide crimes they committed when they were 18 or younger. Some, put behind bars when they were 13 or 14, have been locked up for twenty or thirty years.
Those 109– minors then, adults now in their prime, or at least they should...
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Nov.27.2009
CNN Justice (11-13-2009) did an interesting and enlightening story on the United States aging prison population and the need for increased and more expensive health care.
Americans hold firm to their belief that the only way to deal with crime is to lock people up. It’...
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About David
Author of I Dont' Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lock-up (Beacon Press) http://www.beacon.org ), a narrative nonfiction collection of sketches of many of the locked up kids I worked with over a 10 year period while teaching...
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