The Center for Public Integrity

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.”

Criminal-justice experts in Georgia say that locking up kids for indiscretions like repeat truancy, running away, even underage smoking, could end up costing that state millions in federal aid if these policies aren’t halted.   

Read about this detention philosophy, called “bootstrapping,” in a story posted by the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange in Georgia.

The JJIE story cites an expert report commissioned by the Governor’s Office for Children and Families, which you can read here. 

As the JJIE’s story describes, some Georgia judges resort to ordering confinement for juveniles if kids fail to comply with a court order to stop a status offense, which is an offense only because a juvenile, not an adult, committed it. These infractions can range from drinking to violating curfews.  

Since 1974, Congress has blocked states from locking up kids for more than just a few hours before or after a court hearing on a status offense. An exception allows longer jail time for violating court orders. In Georgia, however, experts found that an increasing number of kids have been confined for failing to stop behaviors as minor as running away. Some judges have even confined kids to help them escape abusive homes or to give them shelter, the report found.

But federal law’s intent is to shield kids who haven’t committed real crimes from sharing detention space with serious young offenders, experts said. And Congress, they said, is poised to possibly tighten up allowances to allow confinement of status offenders. A number of states already forbid such confinements.    

A new study in Pediatrics looks at the issue of teens and “sexting,” which can get a student expelled and arrested in some states on criminal charges.

The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange’s take on the study, based on a survey with kids, says it dispels some of the most frightening notions about an activity that schools and legislators have been rapidly criminalizing. 

But the debate rages on over how to deal with sexting’s most damaging consequences, which have been linked to teen victims’ suicides, while balancing sensible responses to rash teen behavior, as the JJIE explored in a previous report.

California’s state Senate approved a bill in 2011 to punish student sexting with mandatory expulsion, but the state’s Assembly stopped short and didn’t pass the proposal. Various states have looked at requiring mandatory counseling for a first offense. The Center for Public Integrity recently investigated extremely high expulsion rates in California’s Kern County.

Students in Kern County, California should beware of indulging in a nasty habit that plagues 17 percent of adults there. 

In line with its tough reputation for school discipline, Kern’s schools were tied for first place among California counties last year for booting out kids because of infractions involving tobacco — either smoking or chewing it. The state’s discipline records don’t include details about which particular habit turned out to be the last unlucky strike for a student.

The percentage of adult smokers in California dropped to a record low of about 12 percent in 2010, according to California Department of Public Health. In 2009, the last year for which county figures were available, the department estimated that Kern’s rate of 17 percent was one of the highest in the state.

Given that schools in Kern expelled more than 2,500 students last year, the number of those ousted for tobacco – eight – seems pretty modest. But that’s the largest number for any county except for Riverside County, where schools also expelled eight students for tobacco; Riverside’s smoking rate was almost 13 percent in 2009.

Kern and Riverside really stand out, because 42 out of 58 counties in the Golden State didn’t expel a single kid for indulging in tobacco last year. 

In fact, for all of California, there were only about 40 expulsions for tobacco-related offenses, according to an analysis done by the Center for Public Integrity.

The numbers were a bit of a moving target. The Center’s initial analysis found about 70 expulsions statewide for tobacco. The figures were updated after schools in Southern California’s Orange County told the California Department of Education that they had erred in their reporting. That county’s initial report of 39 tobacco expulsions fell to just two.

Stay tuned for more on expulsions, suspensions and other juvenile-justice related info.

Did schools in Sacramento County, California, really suspend 6,645 students last year for having a firearm at school? What about Alameda County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where raw numbers fed into a state database had 6,594 kids suspended for packing a gun?

Clearly, the answer is no. But we found these funny figures — and another huge error — while digging into raw numbers that California’s schools must submit to the state’s Department of Education after the close of each academic year. The department adds up the raw numbers of disciplinary actions and categorizes them by county, district, school and infraction and posts the information on its website for the public to see starting in September. 

The Center discovered the mistakes while sifting and adding up raw data as part of an investigation into extraordinarily high rates of student expulsions in Kern County in the Golden State’s Central Valley. We wanted to compare which of 34 separate education code violations led to kids getting suspended and expelled in each California county.

Alameda has problems with youth violence, to be sure. But it was beyond belief that one school, Arroyo High School, could have had 1,198 suspensions for violating a specific state education code prohibition on guns.

We had the same thought in regard to Sacramento’s numbers. The county’s Twin Rivers Unified district initially appeared to have reported a cluster of thousands of suspensions, specifically for guns, which made us wonder if the county's overall figures were inflated. One school, Foothill High, seemed to have suspended 689 kids for guns, based on the raw numbers filed. Yes, Sacramento County also has some problems with youth violence. But a reality check was in order.