It was a particularly warm June day, and we were sitting at a kitchen table talking with a mother distraught about the recent arrest of her teenage son, who was being held pretrial at the adult jail in Philadelphia.
After a few hours of conversation about the challenges that she, her son and other children had experienced, along with their shared traits of resilience and determination, she asked if we had just a few more minutes to take a look at something she had received in the mail.
While we recognized the document as a court summons, we were unfamiliar with the story it told: It was issued by Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services, summoning her to a hearing where her ability to pay for the cost of her child’s incarceration in a juvenile justice placement would be determined (her son had recently returned from juvenile placement prior to this pretrial incarceration in the adult system). She handed us the document to say, “What is this?”
[For more of this story, written by Joanna Visser Adjoian and Lauren Fine, go to http://jjie.org/2017/05/01/how...-table-to-city-hall/]
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