NEWS
August 2, 2009
The case of 17-year-old Lamont Davis, who was arrested last month and charged as an adult with shooting a 5-year-old girl in the head and wounding another youth, should have been a wake-up call for the state Department of Juvenile Services. The teen had been under DJS monitoring for a year when the shooting occurred, and during that time he had been arrested four times. He was awaiting sentencing in juvenile court after confessing to an assault and robbery committed in April. Anyone looking at Mr. Davis' record could have guessed he should never have been allowed back on the streets.
NEWS
By Anthony J. O'Donnell | July 28, 2009
In May 2005, then-Mayor Martin O'Malley announced a 10-point plan to reform Maryland's juvenile justice system. He told Marylanders that "the community deserves juvenile justice that is responsive, effective and accountable to the public." Now, more than four years later and almost three years into his term as governor, the juvenile justice system in Maryland remains, as it was described in the O'Malley transition report, dangerously dysfunctional. Two years ago, Mr. O'Malley appointed Connecticut's juvenile justice director, Donald W. DeVore, to head Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services.
NEWS
By Julie Bykowicz | July 19, 2009
At 17, Lamont Davis has been arrested 15 times since age 10, including charges of drug dealing, carjacking with a handgun and assaults. Yet he's spent just a handful of weeks in juvenile treatment facilities over the years and was sent home in July after admitting to charges in a robbery. Days later, the Baltimore teen was arrested on charges that he critically wounded a 5-year-old girl as he shot at another youth. That Davis now faces more serious criminal charges than ever, city prosecutors and some public officials say, highlights a dangerous problem in the juvenile justice system: Because it emphasizes rehabilitation over punishment, teens who are lightly sanctioned for early offenses sometimes graduate to more violent crimes.
NEWS
July 12, 2009
Lamont Davis, the 17-year-old arrested and charged as an adult in the shooting of 5-year-old Raven Wyatt, should never have been on the streets. He had been arrested 15 times since he was 10, and he had been committed to the custody of the Department of Juvenile Services since February 2008, during which time he was arrested and charged in four separate incidents. Yet in June, a juvenile court judge let him out of the secure detention facility where he had been held after his last arrest in April for assaulting and robbing a teenage girl.
NEWS
By Julie Bykowicz | June 15, 2008
Kory Johnson said he has never been in trouble with the law, but the 15-year-old East Baltimore resident and his mother marched yesterday to call attention to Maryland's "broken" juvenile justice system. "Punishment without rehabilitation is not the answer," said Francine Tucker, Kory's mother. The group of about 120 marched from the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center on Gay Street to the state Department of Juvenile Services headquarters on Fayette Street, chanting "juvenile reform" to the tune of "We Shall Overcome."
NEWS
June 12, 2008
Maryland is a wealthy state, but the well-being of its children doesn't reflect that prosperity. Even though the percentage of children living in poverty is the lowest in the country, children in 18 other states fare better than Maryland's 1.3 million kids. That's the overall assessment of how Maryland ranks on 10 measures of child well-being, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual Kids Count. Rather than bemoan the findings, Maryland should use them as a guide to improving the lives of its youngest citizens.
NEWS
March 16, 2008
Farron Tates sits in a Baltimore jail cell charged with murder. He's a 16-year-old who started selling drugs on the corner to make some money. His early troubles with the law mirror the experience of many Baltimore kids in the juvenile justice system. Truants or worse, they get arrested once, twice, often for the same type of crime, and end up back on the street with little supervision at home or from the system. But in Farron's case, the juvenile court lacked a critical piece of information about his home life - his mother had her own troubles with drugs and the law. Until now, there has been no requirement or policy that juvenile caseworkers conduct criminal background checks on the parents or caretakers who supervise their young charges.
NEWS
By Gadi Dechter | January 22, 2008
Friends and family will gather tomorrow in Westminster to remember East Baltimore teenager Isaiah Simmons, whose death at a private reformatory one year ago helped spark reforms in Maryland's long-troubled juvenile justice system. Simmons died Jan. 23 while being forcibly restrained by staff at the Bowling Brook Preparatory School in Carroll County. His death was ruled a homicide and misdemeanor charges are pending against six former counselors. The death of the 17-year-old father of a toddler girl was a catalyst for immediate changes to the state's juvenile justice system: The 50-year-old private academy was closed, and officials banned face-down restraints - of the sort used on Simmons - at state-run institutions.
NEWS
December 29, 2007
Mentors can turn kids away from life learned on streets Julie Bykowicz captures the pessimistic attitude of city's juvenile justice system in "Arrest a child, rescue a life" (Dec. 23) - an article that underscores the incongruous correlation between incarcerating a child and delivering that same child from harm's way. But it is no wonder that expectations are so low for a child caught in a city juvenile justice system that is more often measured by its failures than its successes and in a city where we are more likely to note the number of yearly homicide victims and shootings among the young than the number of high school graduates and youth leaders.
NEWS
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson | September 13, 2007
Four years before an indifferent, drowsy press and public finally fumed at the news that a prosecutor and judge tossed the book at six black teens in a small Louisiana town for beating up a white teen after a racially charged incident, investigators sternly warned that the state's juvenile justice system was horribly mangled. The legislative investigating team found that the state couldn't lock up juveniles fast enough for mostly nonviolent crimes. The team noted that the sentences slapped on them were wildly out of proportion to their crimes, and that the kids had almost no access to counseling, job and skills training, and family support programs that could ensure that they didn't wind up back in the slammer.