A shove on a playground. A pair of shears meant for an art project. Pepper spray carried for a dangerous walk to school and left in a backpack during first period.
While seemingly minor, these infractions, and others like them, have helped fuel a school-to-prison pipeline, with 60,000 youths in U.S. juvenile detention centers on any given day.
Three programs across the country are among those aiming to block that pipeline by preventing arrests for minor crimes, diverting kids who have been sentenced into community programs rather than detention centers and helping youths who have been detained envision a future after incarceration.
“We know that removing students from school, putting them in handcuffs, putting them in the back of a police car, bringing them to a police station, where they can be held there for up to six hours, is a traumatizing, horrifying experience,” said Naomi Goldstein, Ph.D., psychology professor at Drexel University and director of the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab.
[For more of this story, written by Molly McCluskey, go to http://jjie.org/2017/02/20/for...ceration-offer-hope/]
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