Why Juvenile Justice Matters
We hear a lot about over-incarceration in America, but we rarely have a conversation about how this starts with the juvenile population. For years, common thinking was that if you locked a kid up, you’d teach them a lesson–scare them straight. Now, research has shown unequivocally that the opposite is true. Lock a kid up and you’re building a pipeline to adult prison. So how does a system that was designed to be punitive, help young people rehabilitate? And how do we account for the disproportionate black and brown youth that we lock up in America? FLY, a leader in juvenile justice programs and reform, has some answers.