This was an encouraging week for those alarmed at the way the U.S. pumps children into the criminal justice system and what it does to them once they are there. On Capitol Hill, at the Department of Education, in a Texas courtroom and in California schools, and finally at the Supreme Court, there was a chorus of voices declaring in their own way that kids are different — and should be treated so by the nation’s prosecutors, judges, educators, and police.Sen. Charles Grassley, the conservative Republican from Iowa who next month will chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been a champion of stiff mandatory sentences for adults, but Thursday he signed off on a federal measure that would update and strengthen the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection Act. If enacted, it would help ensure that fewer children are incarcerated for “status offenses” — behavior such as truancy that wouldn’t be a crime if an adult did it — and to restrict the practice of jailing juveniles together with (or near) adults. This latter issue, one that affects thousands of detained children, came up again this past week in Massachusetts, where state officials — after at least 15 years of noncompliance with federal law — have decided to seek federal grant money to alter the layouts of 11 courthouses where juveniles are held too close to adult prisoners.
[For more of this story, written by Andrew Cohen, go to https://www.themarshallproject...2/kids-are-different]
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