ATLANTA — Georgia legislators split the difference when they toughened juvenile justice laws in 1994. They stiffened sentences for the most violent crimes, sending some teens to adult prisons. But lawmakers also gave courts discretion to keep some of the serious offenders in the state’s juvenile facilities.

Two decades later, though, a new data analysis shows Georgia's juvenile system has turned out just as high a percentage of repeat offenders as its adult prisons. Whether teens spent time in youth detention centers or adult lock-ups for targeted violent crimes, the analysis found, their felony recidivism rates have been virtually identical.

The findings come as Georgia policy-makers debate proposed reforms intended to rehabilitate non-violent juveniles in their communities rather than in state detention. The move would free up costly bed space so that violent teens could remain behind bars — prisoners, some say, of a system that remains ill-equipped to help them straighten out their lives.

Some Georgia law-enforcement leaders believe violent juveniles should be locked up and off the streets, at least for a while. “The best way I can tell you to protect the public is to take [violent youths] out of society,” says Douglas County District Attorney David McDade.

McDade, a key member of a state panel studying juvenile justice reform in Georgia, says he doesn’t oppose rehabilitation programs for violent offenders. But scarce public resources must be spent first, he said, on other young offenders who are more likely to mend their ways.

Other observers contend Georgia cannot continue to lock up violent youths in the hope that they’ll turn over a new leaf upon release.

"Do we believe that we can change people when they're younger so they don't commit further crimes?” said Tom Rawlings, the state’s child advocate under ex-Gov. Sonny Perdue. “If that is the belief, then we have to start acting like it.”

A Mississippi school district under scrutiny for excessive punishment of black students has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to enact new disciplinary policies, train school police officers in “bias-free” policing and stop involving officers in minor campus behavioral disputes.

“We commend the Meridian Public School District for taking this huge stop toward ensuring that its schools are safe and welcoming to all students – and that education is a road to success instead of a pipeline to prison,” said Jocelyn Samuels, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Right Division.

At a Friday briefing with reporters, Samuels said the division hopes that school districts nationwide will look to the Meridian agreement as a model for addressing complaints of overly harsh and sometimes racially disproportionate discipline.  As the Center for Public Integrity reported previously, Meridian, Miss., police told federal investigators that they were functioning as a “taxi service” to ferry students to jail for allegations of defiance and disrespect.

Separately, the civil rights division still is pursuing a lawsuit it filed last October against the city of Meridian, Lauderdale County and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services. The suit alleges that criminal-justice and law-enforcement officials were jailing students for days without probable cause hearings and without sufficient access to counsel to explain their rights.

American families that have been split up for 10 years or more — or forced into exile — by immigration laws took their fight to Capitol Hill Thursday. Representatives testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee that is a crucial forum for public debate over possible immigration reforms.

“It is often said that our immigration laws are broken, but not why. It’s simple: Our laws contradict our values,” Randall Emery, president of American Families United, told members of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, which is under the Judiciary Committee. 

American Families United represents American citizens and U.S. legal permanent residents whose families have been separated for a decade or more by punitive immigration mandates.

As the Center for Public Integrity and KQED public radio reported recently, the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents are forced, under a 1996 law, to serve a 10-year exile or more outside the United States before they can finish their applications to become legal residents.

Some undocumented spouses can obtain waivers to cut short these so-called bars, but many thousands are not eligible. Thousands of people are too afraid to even try to sponsor their undocumented spouses out of fear of being separated or forced to move abroad to remain together.

The Center’s story recounts the hardship families with children are facing after applying to legalize undocumented spouses — only to have U.S. officials ultimately order those spouses to stay out of the United States for 10 years, 20 years, even for life.

An unprecedented surge in deportations in recent years has affected tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American children. The traumatic experience of losing a parent for an entire childhood — or being forced to move abroad to remain with that parent — is certain to have a profound impact on the mental health of these U.S. citizen children, according to researchers who have begun a study of this population.

This week, researchers based in Texas, California and Mexico released a joint announcement about a project they began last year to survey deportees’ American-citizen kids. Lead researcher Luis Zayas, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, said he wanted to draw attention to his team’s work now because Congress has begun serious negotiations on immigration reform proposals. Zayas hopes legislators take into account the welfare of children whose parents face deportation.

“It’s disturbing because these children are citizens,” Zayas said. “Our country is not accustomed to turning people into exiles.”

The University of California at Davis’ Center for Reducing Health Disparities is also collaborating on the project, along with Mexico’s National Institute of Psychiatry.

The study, expected to be done by next year, is funded with a $182,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers are interviewing a total of about 80 children in the Austin, Texas, and Sacramento, Calif., areas, as well as children who’ve moved to Mexico to be with parents.

In post-Newtown America, those with power say they must act to prevent another massacre of innocents.

The Obama administration wants stiffer gun control, and $150 million to help schools hire up to 1,000 more on-campus police or counselors, or purchase security technology. State legislators are considering shifting millions of dollars around to help schools hire more police. Some locals aren’t waiting: The 5,500-resident town of Jordan, Minn., has moved its entire eight-officer police force into schools. 

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said after a young man shot his way into his former grammar school on Dec. 14 in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 first-graders and six educators.

With the new year, the NRA has been flexing its political muscle, lobbying states not just to hire more school police — under the group’s National School Shield project — but also to pass laws allowing teachers or other staff to bring licensed guns to school to defend their students and themselves.  

Beyond the headlines, though, the push for more cops or other armed security personnel in schools is running headlong into another movement that’s been quietly growing in states as diverse as Mississippi, New York, Utah, Texas and California.

The United States still leads the industrialized world in incarcerating young people, and ethnic-minority kids are still locked up more than whites.

But there is good news: Since 1995, the rate at which states confine young people has been steadily dropping for all ethnic groups, reaching the lowest rate in 35 years in 2010, according to a report released Wednesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

In 1975, the child welfare and research group found, the number of youth aged 20 or younger placed in lockup began climbing, reaching a peak in 1995 of 381 kids locked up for every 100,000 nationwide. That same year, though, the rate began declining, dropping by an impressive 41 percent between 1995 and 2010 to 225 per 100,000.

The report by the Baltimore-based foundation also notes that the reduction in incarceration rates has not been accompanied by any increases in crime. “On the contrary,” the report says, “crime has fallen sharply even as juvenile justice systems have locked up fewer delinquent youth.” 

Laura Speer, associate director of policy reform and data at Casey, said in an interview that the report’s “main take away is that this is positive trend.” 

However, Speer said, some states still show relatively higher propensities for locking up youths – South Dakota is one – and across the country, black youth are nearly five times more likely to be confined than whites. Latino and American Indian youth are between two and three times more likely than whites to be locked up.

“There is still a way to go, across the country, to get equities in the way kids are treated throughout the juvenile-justice system,” Speer said. 

She cited several factors for contributing to the overall decline in youth incarceration.  

Americans whose spouses have been exiled for years as a result of strict immigration penalties took their plight to Congress Thursday, begging legislators to help them as lawmakers discuss overhauling immigration laws.

Some of the affected families met with a key figure in the immigration fight, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who told them that he believes there is a new bipartisan spirit in Congress, and a readiness to eliminate at least some of the mandatory penalties Congress approved in 1996. Members who approved the punitive laws in 1996 said they wanted to try to deter illegal immigration by punishing offenders more harshly. The penalties have split up families for years at a time.

The punishments, mandatory terms of exile known as “bars,” must be imposed on an undocumented spouse when he or she tries to go through the process of becoming a legal resident. Americans have a right to sponsor foreign spouses for legal residency, but their citizenship does not trump the penalties Congress currently requires be handed down.  

Thousands of Americans’ spouses — many of them parents of children who are U.S. citizens — have received these bars since they started kicking in, after delays, around 2002. A basic bar ousts spouses for 10 years. But some spouses have been barred for 20 years, even for life with no possibility of return. 

On Thursday, affected Americans with small children told Gutierrez of relocating to Mexico to reunite with spouses. They complained of multiple hardships, including health problems and threats of kidnapping and extortion.

Children involved in commercial sex trafficking are often recruited first by classmates at school who are doing the bidding of pimps, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other officials warned Wednesday at an event at the U.S. Department of Education.

Officials also warned that educators could unwittingly leave students vulnerable to victimization if they suspend or expel troubled students from school — leaving them unsupervised — or place them in alternative school settings where they are also exposed to potential recruiters.

“In my school district we are looking at our disciplinary practices,” said Jenee Littrell, director of guidance and wellness at the Grossmont Union High School District in San Diego County. She was invited to the U.S. Department of Education describe her efforts to identify and help school-aged youth exploited by pimps. The Obama Administration is attempting to disseminate more information to schools on this problem.

Littrell talked about two girls who, unknown to school staff, had become involved in child prostitution. The girls’ behavior had become especially aggressive with staff, and one girl was suspended from school, Littrell said. She was discovered at a track, an hour later, Littrell said.

Littrell said that, in her experience, girls who are lured into prostitution have been poor and affluent and from all ethnic backgrounds. But recruiters, both boys and girls working for pimps, Littrell said, zero in on kids in foster care and students with troubled home lives or special-education needs.

The state of Massachusetts is going to trial this week, fighting accusations that it is systematically failing to protect children in foster care from allegedly unfit foster homes,  physical abuse, medical and educational neglect, questionable psychotropic drug doses and other harm. 

Children’s Rights, a New York-based children’s national advocacy group, filed suit against Massachusetts Gov. Deval  Patrick and two health and human services officials in April 2010. The trial that opened in federal court in Boston Tuesday could last for weeks.

Massachusetts has a good reputation as a state concerned with child welfare, Children’s Rights’ executive director Marcia Robinson Lowry said. But after two years of research, her group was surprised to conclude that the state’s child-welfare system is “one of the most dangerous in the country on a number of significant measures.” 

The Children’s Rights’ suit is a class-action lawsuit with six young plaintiffs whose alleged neglect is specifically described, along with findings based on data measuring various aspects of children’s care. Massachusetts tried, unsuccessfully to get a court to block Children’s Rights’ pursuit of a class-action lawsuit representing all the state’s foster children, who currently number about 7,500.