The Center for Public Integrity

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.

While New York and California consider dramatic juvenile-justice reform, Georgia is debating how to change an already troubled system now being rocked by the recent killing of a youth in lockup.

Georgia has 26 youth jails and prisons right now, and the state is considering how to enhance security and create more space — perhaps adding another prison — while cutting some rehabilitation staff to save money.   

Lawmakers will consider proposals to cut teachers and community-based rehab staff, while possibly spending $1 million more to organize two “SWAT teams” and nearly $8 million more on a new 80-bed youth prison to increase capacity, according to our colleagues at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange in Georgia.

In a recent briefing, the state’s new juvenile-justice commissioner told Georgia lawmakers that some workers in lockups had admitted sexual contact with wards, and that the turnover rate for guards was increasing, up to 54 percent in 2011.

Youth prison guards make a starting salary of $24,000, and can earn far more if they land a job in a different correctional setting. Guards have also complained about a lack of training and fear on the job, according to reports.

A shop owner in New York City has learned the hard way that the city’s ban on real-looking toy guns is not a game.  

The city’s Consumer Affairs division has fined the shop in Brooklyn $30,000 based on a $5,000-per-toy fine, as reported Tuesday in the New York Post here.

The huge fine, which sparked some protest as an excessive burden on small business, underscores the public divide over regulating replica guns to prevent accidental shootings. 

New York’s ban is designed to protect kids from getting shot by police, supporters of the law say, as well as to reduce the likelihood of fake guns being used to commit robberies and other real crimes.

After police killed a teen with a BB gun in Texas on Jan. 4, the Center for Public Integrity reported on the history of kids being shot or nearly shot by police, and how proposed replica regulations have ignited opposition from gun interests in California and other states.  

As the Post reported, the manager of a store called 99¢ Target argued that reasonable people wouldn’t confuse the toy shooters he was selling with real firearms. The guns had an orange tip, as required by federal law, but were not brightly colored, which is the city’s requirement.

The owner was offered a settlement of a lower negotiated fine of $5,400, but he said he couldn't afford it. He declined to pay it and insisted on a hearing, which he lost. A city Consumer Affairs spokeswoman defended the fine: “Realistic-looking imitation guns are illegal and dangerous, and just last week, a 15-year-old in Texas was killed while holding one of these guns.”