{"id":227938,"date":"2016-03-01T13:37:26","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T13:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=227938"},"modified":"2016-03-01T13:37:26","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T13:37:26","slug":"trial-fire-prosecutors-sending-juveniles-adult-courts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/trial-fire-prosecutors-sending-juveniles-adult-courts\/","title":{"rendered":"Trial by Fire: Prosecutors Sending Juveniles to Adult Courts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Beginning in the 1990s, in response to an increase in juvenile crime, influential criminologists filled the airwaves with predictions of a coming wave of “superpredators.” As reported in a New York Times Retro Report, “The Superpredator Scare<\/a>,” these criminologists mistakenly believed crime would keep climbing, and fostered a myth that demonized youth, in particular young people of color. These experts believed<\/a> that we would soon see “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” kids, many “who pack guns instead of lunches” and “have absolutely no respect for human life.”
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Most states reacted to these now famously false predictions by enacting so-called reforms to make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults. The trend was to expand the “transfer”<\/a> of youth from juvenile to adult courts, a policy we are still paying for today<\/a> with harsher penalties and an increase – not a decrease – in recidivism. According to\u00a0Al Jazeera America,\u00a0currently in the United States, about 250,000 juveniles are “tried, sentenced or incarcerated each year as adults,” – a truly staggering number.<\/p>\n

There are well-known negatives to sending kids to adult prisons. Truthout’s research has found that there are fewer resources vital to teen development in adult facilities, as well as a high risk of assault, rape and suicide. Such dangers for juveniles have led to the criticism of juvenile transfer policies from numerous organizations and researchers according to the well-respected national initiative, the Campaign for Youth Justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beginning in the 1990s, in response to an increase in juvenile crime, influential criminologists filled the airwaves with predictions of a coming wave of “superpredators.” As reported in a New York Times Retro Report, “The Superpredator Scare,” these criminologists mistakenly believed crime would keep climbing, and fostered a myth that demonized youth, in particular young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":227939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-227938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}