The practice of indiscriminate shackling of children in juvenile court — the use of wrist, belly or ankle restraints, often with limited consideration of the case’s circumstances — is fraught with peril from a developmentally or trauma-informed perspective.
Most children appearing for a delinquency matter in juvenile court are adolescents. Adolescence is a developmental stage marked in part by a brain undergoing substantial maturation, efforts to craft an identity separate from one’s parents and refinement of one’s worldview (i.e., how the world works in terms of justice, fairness, etc.).
In other words, adolescence is a time of incredible growth — and although teenagers are highly adaptive, it also is a period of vulnerability and malleability. The use of shackles in juvenile court as a matter of routine practice interferes with healthy development in a number of ways, and actually can cause unintended harm.
[For more of this story, written by Shawn C. Marsh, go to http://jjie.org/op-ed-indiscri...t-should-end/108219/]
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