The Annie E. Casey Foundation is throwing new weight into its campaign to close state juvenile correctional centers nationwide, saying they’ve effectively become “youth prisons” where teens are prone to being abused.
The Casey Foundation is calling for an end to “large, prison-like institutions” for teens who have been committed to custody by a judge. In a new TEDx talk, Casey Foundation President Patrick McCarthy says large, secure facilities have become “factories of failure” that wreck the lives of the kids they’re supposed to help.
"We need to admit that what we're doing doesn't work, and is making the problem worse while costing billions of dollars and ruining thousands of lives," McCarthy says.
It’s not a new stance for the foundation, one of the leading institutions studying juvenile justice and other youth issues. But it’s taking the argument beyond the field of practitioners and policy wonks, and it’s left more than a few people in the juvenile justice field questioning its practicality.
[For more of this story, written by Matt Smith, go to http://jjie.org/casey-time-to-...outh-prisons/116612/]
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