The Center for Public Integrity

Shrewsbury teen Valerie N. Hall pushed her mother down a flight of stairs in 2000, smashed her head in with a hammer and left Kathleen Thompsen Hall to die while she went for a ride with her boyfriend. For her mother's murder, Hall, a depressed and suicidal 16-year-old at the time, served nine years in prison. 

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School student John Odgren, who suffers from depression and other mental ailments, fatally stabbed schoolmate James Alenson in the boy's bathroom in 2007 when he was 16, and after realizing what he had done, tried to get help. Odgren is serving life without the possibility of parole at Bridgewater State Hospital. 

Both crimes were ghastly. Both teens suffered from mental illness. Both were charged with first-degree murder. 

But their punishments could not have been more different. 

The dispositions of the Hall and Odgren cases illustrate the profound inequities that have grown up in the Massachusetts juvenile justice system since the passage of a tough sentencing law enacted 15 years ago and designed to punish the most depraved “super-predators” among teen killers. 

An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting reveals, for the first time, that that law is not being applied consistently to the most horrific juvenile murder cases, as it was intended. The findings come as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares this spring to tackle whether it is “cruel and unusual” punishment to sentence juveniles 14 and under to life without parole for murder. 

New data analysis by investigative reporters in Florida shows a huge jump in children’s poverty in a state hard hit by foreclosures and unemployment.  

According to our colleagues at the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, “homelessness among school-age children soared from 30,878 in the 2006-07 school year to 56,680 in 2010-11. Homelessness for children of all ages, including those too young for public school, was 83,957 in 2010-11, up from 49,886 in 2006-07.”

The math is pretty stark: Between 2007 and 2011, the number of homeless school-age kids in Florida leaped 84 percent. 

The Center's thoughtful story on the impact of the Great Recession charts the rise of children’s poverty, county by county in Florida. Ellen L. Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness, based in Massachusetts, is quoted making a disturbing observation.

“I think that we are growing a Third World in our own back yard,” Bassuk says. “We look at developing countries, but we don’t look at our own country."

It’s made national headlines, and now the sordid story of alleged lewd and bizarre conduct by a Los Angeles teacher includes another sensitive dimension: immigration status.

A number of parents of students at Miramonte Elementary School are apparently admitting they are undocumented immigrants and fear coming forward to talk with law enforcement about allegations against teacher Mark Berndt. Most students are Latino at the school where the suspect has taught for more than 30 years. And many parents are immigrants, some legal residents, some not.   

Los Angeles’ La Opinion, one of the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspapers, has a piece today quoting undocumented parents who say they have information to share about Berndt but are afraid they could be deported if they speak to investigators. 

One of the parents has a daughter who received a post card from the accused teacher, and words of encouragement from him about how smart she was. He wrote “college girl” on a photo he gave her that the family has kept, La Opinion reports.  The paper says eight families have retained a lawyer and have information about Berndt, who is accused of 23 counts of lewd behavior toward students.  He remains in jail and has not entered a plea in court.

LOS ANGELES — Fifteen-year-old Juan Carlos Amezcua was just five minutes late for school, and already at the corner by Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles when a school police cruiser’s siren went off last Nov. 16.

The consequences of what happened next — handcuffing, allegations of rough treatment and a $250 daytime curfew ticket — are still resonating here. In January, Amezcua and his cousin, who was also stopped by police en route to school, saw their tickets dismissed in juvenile court. Still upset at their encounter with police, though, the pair and their parents filed a complaint on Feb. 3 with the school district and police concerning officers’ behavior.

Meanwhile, the presiding judge of Los Angeles’ juvenile court and Los Angeles city leaders are also moving to curtail law-enforcement involvement in policing student attendance.

The dispute is indicative of a broader, complex and, at times, racially charged debate over how best to deal with tardy or truant students in jurisdictions across the country. Since the 1990s, cities large and small have adopted daytime curfews with monetary fines to force kids to get to school. Now the City of Angels is at ground zero as the impact of such ordinances is reconsidered.

Next Monday, the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee starts a review of proposed amendments to that city’s nine-year-old daytime curfew law. Among the proposals: setting limits on enforcement by police, who routinely search youths and sometimes handcuff them. The proposed amendments would also effectively end $250 fines in favor of negotiated agreements that tardy students submit to counseling.

Players in the fight to shut down — or keep open — the last of California’s state-run youth prisons are meeting this week where the action is: Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Finance, where the nitty-gritty of state budgeting gets done.

Struggling with the costs of incarceration generally, California could become the first state to wipe out is state juvenile jail division and the last of three prisons in a highly discredited system. 

Sources said “stakeholders” on both sides of the proposal were invited to a meeting today, Thursday, to discuss Brown’s proposal to phase out three prisons housing about 1,100 wards at more than $200,000 a year each.

On one side, pushing for closure, are many, but not all, juvenile-justice reform advocates who have long attacked the state system as a scandal-prone failure.  

On the other side: influential groups such as the Chief Probation Officers of California and the California District Attorneys Association. They argue that not all California counties are ready to take these higher-level offenders despite prior funding shifted to counties — and offers of more — to increase their ability to do that.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the prison guards’ union, is also against total closure. It represents one of the nation’s largest law-enforcement employee groups. Last year, legislators in California voted to require that counties pay the state $125,000 per ward, starting now, if revenues to the state didn’t improve. They didn’t, but collection is on hold — for now.

Led by a top juvenile court judge, a special task force in Los Angeles County is releasing a report attacking excessive student suspensions and cautioning against law enforcement solutions to truancy.

The Center for Public Integrity has a near-final draft of the report, which has some illuminating lessons about the types of attendance-improvement efforts that succeed — and fail — in certain parts of the populous Southern California region and other areas of the country.

The School Attendance Task Force has a broad range of members who began meeting in late 2010 to discuss how to keep kids more engaged in school in the metropolis, which is afflicted by low graduation rates.

The chairman is Judge Michael Nash, who presides over one of America’s biggest juvenile courts, which is in Los Angeles County. Others include an anti-truancy leader in the county’s District Attorney’s office, the chief of school police in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles city police representative, a public defender and several civil rights groups and city and various school district leaders.

One fundamental recommendation from the task force: “Have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.” In other words, restrict suspensions of students for lower-tier offenses, such as “defiance,” and ensure that students get adequate counseling in school before removing them. The report also calls for using the justice system for “solutions and supports” rather than financial penalties for truancy.

A Michigan teenager is at home on suspension for hair that's too long.

Meanwhile, the state of Maryland may actually restrict suspensions to offenses that are violent or truly harmful to others.

Two wildly different takes on when to remove a student from classrooms, a hot debate now among educators, parents and others concerned about kids' welfare.

In Maryland this month, state education leaders are expected to deliberate new proposals that could dramatically scale back reasons for suspending and expelling students in that state.

If adopted by the Maryland Board of Education, the new rules would narrow the broad spectrum of offenses for which students can now be suspended, according to Washington Post coverage. James H. DeGraffenreidt  Jr., president of the education board, said he’s concerned that half the at-home suspensions in the state are for nonviolent offenses, such as insubordination, failure to follow rules and cellphone infractions.

The Baltimore Sun also reports that the new rules would prohibit expelling students for most offenses except for firearms possession. That would contrast sharply with the scene in California, where the Center for Public Integrity reported that the Golden State's Kern County goes far behind national and state averages for expelling students for defiance, disruption and obscenity.    

As police presence and student suspensions have grown in schools, so has the volume of a debate over what rights parents have to be aware their children are being questioned or participate in the disciplinary process.  

Grieving his expelled son’s suicide last year, a  Virginia dad is hoping his state will enact a law requiring schools to immediately contact parents when an investigation begins that could lead to a child’s suspension, expulsion or involvement with law enforcement.  

Across the country in California, the American Civil Liberties Union, representing students, took action last year when a high school in the city of Davis let police in to interrogate two students about journalistic reports they had produced on graffiti  there.

Steven Stuban of Virginia’s Fairfax County links his son Nick’s suicide last year to an emotionally tough expulsion from his high school the year before.  According to media reports, Stuban said that over the course of days, staff at the teen’s school questioned the 15-year-old multiple times and made him submit written statements after he was accused of buying synthetic marijuana pills.

Stuban said he and his wife were notified only after the questioning that Nick was being suspended with a recommendation for expulsion based on violation of a “zero tolerance” policy. 

A new report released by the National Institute of Corrections slams the U.S. record of sending juveniles to adult prison, and lists multiple reform ideas for federal, state and local leaders to consider. 

In the 1990s, nearly every state in the country took steps to make it easier to try minors as adults and send them to prison, according to the report, “You’re An Adult Now,” which was released in December. The institute is part of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

The report comes out as prosecutors in California warn that they may put even more minors in adult prison if state lawmakers proceed with a budget proposal to close the last three youth prisons operated by the state.

Critics say those California youth prisons, down from a total of 11 and today holding only 1,100 wards, are expensive failures which, historically, had up to 80 percent recidivism rates. Prosecutors argue they’re needed because some counties don’t have the capability of handling high-level young offenders now in state custody.

In assessing the U.S. record of incarcerating minors as adults, the National Institute of Corrections report notes research finding that youth put into the adult criminal justice system are 34 percent more likely to be subsequently re-arrested for crimes than youths that are kept in the juvenile system.

The report also criticizes “significant gaps” in information about the management of an estimated 250,000 minors that are put into adult criminal justice systems every year in the United States.