Jentink-Bristol could’ve gotten off probation at 15 had she paid off her fines and fees. But her probation officer told her that she had to remain under supervision until she cleared her debt, which included the cost of her public defenders, stays in detention, and restitution to the victims of her crimes. Jentink-Bristol no longer had a relationship with her mother and couldn’t afford to pay. Her job at an ice cream shop for six hours a week making $10 an hour was just enough to buy her own food and necessities, with nothing left over for her debts. 

Remaining on probation for an extra two years came with consequences. She had to get the court to sign off on a robotics class she wanted to take that ended after her nightly curfew. She wasn’t allowed to attend public school with the kids she grew up with and instead had to go to a school for kids who had been arrested.

The experience left Jentink-Bristol feeling anxious, depressed, and confused. “I had my mom yelling at me to pay these fines and fees. I had the court yelling at me to pay these fines and fees. As a kid, you don’t know what the heck is going on,” Jentink-Bristol, now 19, told Bolts. 

She was finally able to pay off her debt after she was given a stipend for participating in a university program where she shared her story. Jentink-Bristol wanted to make sure that other kids didn’t have to go through the same problems. As part of the program, she teamed up with other children, advocates, and politicians to craft a series of bills to eliminate most fines and fees for juveniles in Michigan altogether. 

The bipartisan legislation that Jentink-Bristol helped inspire passed in December 2023 and was recently enacted, on Oct. 1. Under the legislation, children are still responsible for paying restitution to victims, but courts are no longer allowed to charge kids for costs related to their proceedings, such as the cost of court-appointed counsel or detention, two categories that account for the majority of court fees. 

The bills also apply retroactively, clearing any previous debt kids and their families accrued in the juvenile justice system and forbidding judges from jailing children because of court debt or refusing to participate in community service. 

With the enactment of the bill, Michigan became the latest of 17 states to abolish most fines and fees for kids, and one of 10 to do so since 2021. The move is part of a national shift to alleviate children and their families from being saddled with debt that is not only costly to families and their kids, but also local governments who rarely recoup the majority of the costs. Advocates say the state still has to do more work to create a fairer juvenile justice system, however, and are pushing legislation that would improve public defense for kids during the lame duck legislative session ending on Thursday. 

“It was very relieving because I do have younger sisters… say they get wrapped up in that [system], they won’t be going through as much pain in a struggle as I was,” said Jentink-Bristol. “If that had happened while I was going through it, it would have saved me so much pain and suffering.”

While the proposal to eliminate fines and fees for children was first introduced in 2021, it didn’t gain traction until the following year, when a statewide task force formed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer released a report on its investigation into the juvenile justice system. The task force found that youth were being charged attorney fees, which in turn resulted in them waiving their right to counsel or pleading out quickly to avoid bigger bills. As of 2019, the report found, kids and their families, who were also on the hook for the debt, owed a median of $850 dollars for reimbursement costs such as out-of-home placement, evaluation, and treatment; roughly one in ten kids paid more than $1,000, according to the report. 

The panel also noted that the system disproportionately targeted Black kids. They were detained at a rate of six times the rate of white youth, and Black children stayed an average of seven days longer, sticking them with costly fees for each day. Members of the task force unanimously recommended that the state eliminate all fees and court costs except for restitution and payments to a fund for crime victims. 

Jennifer Peacock, policy director at the Michigan Center for Youth Justice (MCYJ), told Bolts that many families were unable to pay for their kids’ court debt and faced consequences such as garnishments on their wages and tax returns. Judges could set a bench warrant for a kid’s arrest if they didn’t show up to a hearing about their payments. Often, as in Jentick-Bristol’s case, they couldn’t get off probation until they cleared their debt, said Peacock. 

“They’re going to stay in the system for longer, potentially deepening their involvement. Maybe they drop out of school to get a job. All of these things we see happen,” she said. “It’ll really harm the whole family unit.” 

Prior to the passage of the legislation, some counties in Michigan experimented with getting rid of most fines and fees kids face in the youth justice system. Among them was Macomb County, a Republican-leaning county neighboring Detroit that took action in 2021 after debating the consequences of its fine system on children. 

The county had charged families $11.7 million in fines and fees between 2017 and 2019, according to a report by MCJY. They were the highest numbers reported in the state. One father, for example, racked up $100,000 in debt because of his child’s arrest. The county was collecting very little of that debt, however. MCYJ researchers found that Macomb County was still waiting for $92 million in debt to be paid back. From 2015 to 2019, the county’s collection rate was just 7.2 percent. 

The impact on families was devastating. Youth justice researchers spoke with 21 families in Macomb County with an average of $87,000 in court debt. Among them, one parent said she had her state tax refund garnished for 10 years and still had $67,000 in debt after her son spent less than a year in detention more than a decade ago. The county offered options to help alleviate debt, such as a deferral for families who fall under the federal poverty guidelines, but the process to do so was often disjointed and arduous. 

Nicole Faulds, the county’s juvenile court administrator, told Bolts that county leaders recognized that the system needed an overhaul when MCYJ approached them with their findings. “I think to see the hard numbers was a good thing. I don’t think we really had a full understanding until we saw that,” said Faulds. “This really demonstrated that we aren’t collecting a lot of money, and it’s a hardship to the people that we deal with.”

A county judge in May 2021 abolished fines and fees for juveniles and discharged all outstanding debt kids and their families had accrued. County commissioners got on board after they saw the harm the bills had on families and weighed the high cost of collecting against the low collection rate, said Faulds.

Since then, Faulds said, the county’s juvenile justice division hasn’t faced any budget cuts because of the move away from fines and fees. She added that she’s noticed that more families are willing to work with the department now that money isn’t a factor. “We’re able to just provide services without having to have parents weigh the cost or be concerned about that down the road,” she said. “They’re not worried about every time they have to come to court that they’re going to have to pay for their child’s attorney if they have a court appointed attorney.” 

Faulds testified in the legislature last year in favor of scaling up her county’s reform statewide, and eliminating fines and fees for Michiganders in the youth justice system. 

Nationwide, state politicians have been increasingly open to abolishing fines and fees for kids. In 2023, Texas became the first southern state to get rid of all juvenile court fees. Arizona passed a bill the same year eliminating juvenile fees and created a process through which youth and their families could ask for forgiveness on outstanding debts. This year, Washington legislators greenlit a bill to waive remaining court debt after passing legislation in 2023 that abolished all fines and fees. And other campaigns are underway to pass legislation similar to Michigan’s, such as Pennsylvania.

Amy Borror, senior youth policy strategist at The Gault Center, a national youth justice advocacy organization, said that the issue caught the attention of criminal justice reform philanthropists who gave money to campaigns to end youth court debt. Once the issue was in front of lawmakers, Borror said they were receptive to passing legislation, largely because they hadn’t ever considered how much kids had to pay. 

“Lawmakers, the general public, are not aware that children were in juvenile court with, in some states, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt,” she said. “Once they learn that, policymakers often are very open to making changes. A lot of these kinds of issues happen without people even knowing that they’re going on.”

As Michigan advocates cheer the enactment of the legislation, they’re also pushing the passage of another reform to improve juvenile defense in the state. The bipartisan bill, House Bill 4630, would bring juvenile defense into the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission, a statewide agency that currently oversees public defense for adults. Under the commission’s umbrella, the agency would create standards for lawyers working on children’s cases aimed at ensuring that they’re consistently providing quality representation. 

Both legislative chambers have passed a version of the bill, the House in October and the Senate just last week. But they need to reconcile their versions by the end of the legislative session, which ends on Dec. 19. 

Currently, there are no statewide standards for juvenile indigent defense and each county is responsible for determining funding and how it assigns lawyers to those cases, meaning that sometimes kids are appointed lawyers who have no experience working with children, said Peacock of MCYJ. “This bill is just key to make sure that these young people are having some consistency,” she said. “When is counsel being appointed? How qualified are they in public defense? And also, are they even familiar with working with young people?”

Greg, a youth mentor who was formerly involved in the juvenile justice system, recounted to Bolts his own experience with public defenders when he was a kid. He was arrested for the first time at age 11 after he stole a bike from Kmart so he could fit in with the other kids in his neighborhood. He was detained for two weeks over the charge. He also had to pay for a court appointed lawyer, who Greg said pressured him to plead guilty. After his initial charge, he estimated that he picked up 15 more charges in the juvenile justice system as he kept committing crimes to bring in money for his family and to make a dent in his court bills, which amassed to more than $10,000. 

Now 30, Greg, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because he feared professional repercussions, told Bolts that his court appointed lawyers didn’t explain the legal process and its accompanying fees to him and his family. “They was asking me all these damn questions,” he recalls, “And all they were saying is guilty, guilty, guilty. Let’s plead out.”

“The 11 year old in me didn’t have a clue.”

The post How Michigan Stopped Saddling Children with Millions in Court Debt appeared first on Bolts.

Last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods, and said: “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”

Price was talking about her childhood. She described how she was arrested as a teenager, how she spent time in foster care, and how the criminal legal system might have been her future if things had gone slightly different. 

Price—battling a recall attempt that kicked off just months after she took office as Oakland’s first Black female DA—had shown up to the town hall that night to defend her vision for the office, which included an unwavering refusal to over-criminalize young people. She ran on a 10-point plan to reform criminal justice. And since taking office, she has instituted policies to keep 16- and 17-year olds in the youth justice system instead of transferring them to adult prisons, and reevaluated how the county treats young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. These issues, Price said, were what had inspired her to run for DA in the first place. She told the crowd, “When I looked at our racial disparities for our young people in Alameda County, I could not look away.” 

Price was making this appeal in enemy territory. Montclair, whose location abutting a freeway may have made it a target for theft, had not voted for her. Neither had the rest of the Oakland Hills, where handsome Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets perch high above the much poorer city with which they share a chief prosecutor. And so after the DA spoke about racial disparities in youth justice—87 percent of children in the county’s juvenile system are Black or Latino—and emphasized her belief in redemption for young people, a member of the neighborhood association that hosted the event took the mic and asked about “one of the elephants in the room”: a series of recent robberies allegedly committed by teenagers. Rumors had been going around that Price’s office had let the young people go without so much as a charge. 

The issue of youth crime has become a flashpoint in Oakland politics. Local news stories of retail theft, robberies, and a small number of serious crimes have captured public attention. People grimace over the news that more than half of Oakland’s students are chronically absent from school, double the national average. This spring, The Berkeley Scanner, a local paper that has been relentlessly critical of Price, broke the news that the DA had decided to keep in the juvenile system a young man who was 17 when he opened fire at a birthday party, killing teenage brothers Angel and Jazy Soleto. This outraged members of the Soleto family, who later held a press conference supporting the recall.

Citizens at the town hall—and especially those backing the recall effort—are looking to the DA to use her prosecutorial powers to halt what they see as a crime wave. “It has gotten out of hand,” one attendee told local news outside the event. Violent crime was up in Oakland in 2023, sparking talks of a “crime surge,” though homicide numbers were lower than in 2022; overall crime is now down 33 percent this year, with reduced rates of homicide, assault, and burglary. Only robbery numbers are up. Still, residents are frustrated at the feeling that nothing is being done to stop young people who commit crimes from developing into violent and unaccountable older people.

Price, meanwhile, wants people to see how the system’s traditional response often forges broken adults as well. With her invocation of her younger self, the DA was asking the town hall attendees to consider an alternative path for young people who have committed crimes. Given the right guidance and resources, she argues, someone they see as a threat now could grow up to become someone like her. In these differing visions lie the fundamental problem: How should the state meaningfully intervene in a young person’s life? What is the line between doing nothing and sending a kid to prison? 

At one point, Price made a request to the audience in Montclair. She asked people to volunteer with the organizations and advocates who work with young people—plenty of whom went through the criminal legal system as teenagers themselves. 

These youth justice workers are Price’s partners in trying to enact a system that prioritizes care over criminalization. For the most part, they argue that the inflamed rhetoric around youth violence bears little resemblance to the teenagers and young adults they see in their daily work. “It feels like young people are being scapegoated,” Dieudonné Brou, the youth advocacy and program coordinator for the nonprofit Urban Peace Movement, told me. 

“We’re hearing things like this is as bad as we’ve ever seen it—without any mention of the pandemic,” and how it affected young people’s mental health and development, said Vamsey Palagummi, the managing director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ). Palagummi spent time in juvenile hall and on probation as a teen and now works on a number of county initiatives that focus on juvenile justice. The recall, he said, “has absolutely consumed our work daily, whether we’re in the commission spaces, whether we’re on the streets talking to folks.”

As recall proponents argue that the county’s approach toward youth crime has become too lenient, people who work on juvenile justice point to a complex mix of issues—legislative changes, resource allocation, trauma and mental health needs—that shape the system long before the district attorney comes into play. Ultimately, Price’s position, influential as it is, represents just one point in this matrix of courts and probation and youth services and school. 

“We also have to work in collaboration with many other actors who are able to intervene in many other points in this complex arena,” Cynthia Chandler, the Alameda County DA’s senior assistant policy chief, told me. “The DA can only intervene in a very small subset of harm.” And by definition, by the time the office is poised to intervene, that harm is almost always already done. 

Palagummi said he appreciates that the DA’s office seems to be considering how to “provide the support that this young person needs, thinking outside of the box, working more with community members,” but he added, “quite frankly, it’s not too different and drastic from the previous administration.” The problem, advocates argue, is not that the system has changed too much or too swiftly—it’s that it hasn’t changed enough.

In theory at least, the juvenile justice system is predicated on the notion, backed by extensive scientific evidence, that young people are both less culpable for their actions and more capable of change than older adults. In this sense, it’s arguably the most compelling place to make the case for criminal legal reform, because it’s where the connections between societal and personal adversity—poverty, discrimination, disinvestment, abuse—and crime are the most obvious. 

“I don’t think that punishment is often, if ever, the answer for young folks,” said Celsa Snead, the executive director of Oakland’s The Mentoring Center, whose work on violence prevention puts the organization into contact with adolescents caught up in the criminal legal system. “Rehabilitation, support, recognition, accountability—all those things are important.” 

With youth crime rates broadly declining since the mid-’90s, many states have tried to overhaul their youth justice systems, with varying degrees of success. Hawaii has touted its investments in community-based alternatives to youth incarceration; in 2022, the state announced that it had reached zero girls in juvenile detention. Maine, meanwhile, has attempted to transform its own approach to juvenile justice, but failed to provide and fund the services necessary to do so, leaving the state a “cautionary tale about the path to reform,” as a joint investigation by the Bangor Daily News and The New York Times put it.

In recent years, California has sought to reshape its youth justice system, but its efforts at improvement have had mixed results. For a long time, young people convicted of serious offenses and kept in the juvenile system—in Alameda, about five people a year—would be sent to youth prisons run by the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, which were rife with abuse, violence, and neglect. But a “realignment” law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 closed down the remaining facilities and put youth custody in the hands of counties—specifically, their probation departments. Now, teenagers from Oakland who would have once been sent to state facilities that could be hundreds of miles from the Bay Area are housed in juvenile detention centers much closer to their communities. 

“While that’s a great thing, because DJJ [facilities] were essentially gladiator schools and really horrible places, and young people now have an opportunity to be closer to home, from my perspective, we’re replicating a lot of the harms that we worked really hard to rally against,” said Palagummi.

Since the realignment law, Palagummi and Brou have both remarked that judges are sending more kids to juvenile hall’s “secure track”—essentially, long-term confinement. They worry that judges are expanding their criteria to determine which young people deserve this comparatively punitive outcome (their observations are borne out by Probation Department data).

At the same time, Palagummi said, not enough investments are being made in the sort of care and support-oriented services that kids need. The problem is not in overall criminal legal funding levels, he said, but in how the money gets allocated: “We firmly believe that there are enough resources as it exists right now to provide robust therapeutic services.” On the realignment commission, he tries to advocate for using state juvenile funding “to focus more on diversion and community based solutions” rather than things like overtime for probation staff, a significant chunk of the current budget. Palagummi also cited a therapist shortage combined with a higher level of need after the pandemic’s total disruption to kids’ school routines and mental health. “We do not have 24/7 clinicians—we don’t even have clinicians that can work regularly on the weekends,” he said.

Groups like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) now have contracts to send “credible messengers,” formerly incarcerated adults who can act as mentors, into the juvenile detention facilities to work with young people. But these types of offerings are still a small part of the overall system, and they’re up against a daunting level of need. Teiahsha Bankhead, RJOY’s executive director, told me that the org also ends up providing critical post-release services for kids—holding welcome-home circles within 24 hours of release, helping them out with groceries, or calling them a rideshare so they can make it to a new job—without a formal contract. (RJOY is currently in the process of applying for one.) “I get kids who are from juvenile hall calling me, my staff, telling us that they’re hungry,” she said. “I don’t care who’s funding us. We’re going to respond to that.” 

Today, Brou is in his mid-30s, a UCLA graduate who runs a footwear company in addition to his work with Urban Peace Movement. The organization is a member of the Alameda County DA Accountability table, a coalition of local organizations who have pushed Price to, among other things, end the practice of transferring youth to the prison adult system in her first 100 days in office. 

Brou knows intimately the harms that can befall a young person in an adult prison. After first coming into contact with the criminal legal system in middle school, he was arrested again at 18 and entered a California prison about a year later. In total, he was incarcerated for seven years—an eternity for an 18 year old, but far shorter than the average young person transferred into the adult system, who, depending on the severity of their crime, might receive a sentence of multiple decades.

Soon after his arrival at High Desert State Prison, about 250 miles away from home, Brou was stabbed in his sleep during a riot. He remains traumatized by the experience. “When I’m sleeping, my family has to be cautious about the way they wake me up,” he said. 

Brou said that any personal growth that he underwent in prison happened in spite of the environment. “There’s no real rehabilitation taking place in the adult system,” he told me. He also stressed that he had other advantages, like a family that cared for him and supported his efforts to enroll in school upon returning home, that many young people lack. “There’s plenty of other young men, I remember they would go home, and they would be back [in prison] within a week,” he said. “I know I can easily be in those other guys’ situation where they’re going back to a traumatic environment where there’s no real support there for them, and then they’re going to be faced with those same decisions.” 

Price has little sway over many aspects of the youth system, but one power the DA does enjoy is the ability to set charging priorities. In May 2023, Price released juvenile sentencing guidelines prohibiting transfers into the adult system absent “extraordinary circumstances” or a highly vulnerable victim. Chandler says that while the office is reviewing a small number of transfer requests made under Price’s predecessor, no new transfer processes have been initiated during her administration. 

Price’s commitment to this directive has drawn fire from critics, including Brenda Grisham, one of the organizers of the recall effort. “I don’t care if they’re 16, 17—when they use an adult gun to kill somebody, they need to be held accountable more than the juvenile system gives them,” she told me. Grisham’s son was murdered in front of her in 2010, but his killer was never caught. She feels as though Price has not done enough to listen to victims’ families or establish transparency about her office’s charging and conviction rates.

Snead of The Mentoring Center told me she suspects that people tend to conflate keeping a young person in the juvenile system with a lack of consequences for their actions. “The philosophy that says if you’re not charging 16 and 17 year olds with crimes as adults [you’re letting them off easy]… what they’re really saying is that you’re not punishing them,” she said. But she stressed that the youth system has always, at least theoretically, centered rehabilitation over punishment—Price didn’t come up with that paradigm. 

Of course, part of the issue is that some parents who’ve lost children to gun violence may want punishment—faith in personal growth and transformation can be difficult to extend to someone who has taken any possibility of a future away from your own children. Relatives of the Soleto brothers, who were killed at the birthday party, have said they thought the case should qualify as one of the exceptions that Price leaves room for in her youth sentencing policy. Grisham agrees. “Nobody said anything about locking people up and throwing away the key,” she said. “Over the course of 25 years, they could become a better person.” (Twenty-five years is the minimum sentence for first-degree murder within the adult system.)

Still, California law leaves the window for a transfer to adult court quite narrow. Owing to recent reforms passed both by the legislature and directly by voters, only minors who are at least 16 years old are eligible to be tried as adults, and then only if the court finds that the teenager in question is “not amenable to rehabilitation” within the juvenile system. According to data from the Alameda County Probation Department, only five teenagers in the county were recommended for transfer to the adult system between 2016 and 2022, when Price’s predecessor was in office. 

In March 2023, when Price’s office announced that the young man who allegedly killed the Soleto brothers would be kept in the juvenile system, CURYJ defended the decision, noting that the probation department also recommended that he be kept in juvenile court. The group has worked with the defendant since he’s been in custody. “While we’ve seen some young people who may not be tried as adults… it’s not like we’re letting kids free,” Palagummi said. He noted that the juvenile detention population has stayed essentially the same since Price took office. 

Another of Price’s campaign promises centered around establishing “age-appropriate programs” for transitional-age youth accused of a crime—essentially, an attempt to extend the rehabilitative principles of the juvenile system to young adults under 25. “When a child reaches the age of 18, that is not some magical line that they cross where they’re ready for the world,” Price told The Imprint after her campaign. 

These efforts are still preliminary. At various town halls, press conferences, and rallies, Price has touted a pilot program that pairs young men between 18 and 25 charged with firearms possession with a mentor, hoping to intervene in their lives, avoid the life-changing consequences that can attend a criminal record, and stop harm before it happens—a rare case where the DA may have some power. 

The DA’s office told me this program currently has three participants, who are being mentored by the Alameda County Probation Department. Participants who are selected have to choose to go through the program rather than follow the traditional path through the criminal legal system. It’s too soon to draw any real conclusions, according to Chandler. Still, she said, “our team has viewed it as successful in that no one who has been involved in this pilot project has engaged in any kind of recidivist behavior.” She said the office is in talks with the court to expand the program, and is also planning to establish other early-intervention models for young people under 18, though they’re far from being ready to implement anything. 

In the future, participants will be working with Youth Alive, an independent public health organization, through their Pathways program, a 12-month-long intensive case management and life-coaching process. “We’re helping them get those supports they need to live a healthy life, whether that be support in getting back in school, in finding a job so they have income security, making sure they have housing security,” Youth Alive’s executive director, Joseph Griffin, told me. “For many of them, what got them to this point was just a mere matter of survival.”

Youth Alive’s intensive mentoring has proved transformative for some of its past participants. “Today, we have many of them who are in college, who are gainfully employed, who have families, who got back in school and back on track,” Griffin told me. But the pilot program through the DA’s office only has the resources to work with six individuals for now, meaning that the vast majority of 18-to-25 year old Alameda County residents will still be routed through the traditional criminal system. Griffin said he hopes the DA’s office will partner with other organizations and county departments to expand the services available for that age group, including people who might not jibe with the Youth Alive model. “It’s important [for the DA] to really keep eyes open and recognize that addressing violence and addressing the type of healing and support that’s needed isn’t one size fits all,” he said.

During her campaign for DA, Price talked often about restorative justice. “Our goal is to keep people out of the system and to create a pathway that does not involve punitive prosecution,” she told me about a month before her election. But fully integrating restorative justice into the criminal legal system would require a level of transformative change that still feels a long way off, the youth justice advocates I interviewed said—even for young people, who already benefit from a more restorative approach than their adult counterparts. 

Grisham, the recall proponent, said that she hasn’t seen restorative justice as she understands it being employed in the Alameda County criminal legal system. “Restorative justice is the person that committed the crime is supposed to go to the person that they harmed and make amends,” she said. “None of that’s being done… none of the victims I know have talked to the people that killed their kids.” 

Palagummi argues that restorative justice can be practiced even without this type of formalized sit-down, though he said that CURYJ tries to engage with families of victims whenever they can. He praised organizations like RJOY’s work with young people in custody, but noted that “we have yet to see anything formalized as part of the court process” with regards to restorative justice. “We would love to see just more intentionality around that, but it would really take a paradigm shift from all parties, not just the DA’s office,” he added.

The idea of some greater paradigm shift toward restorative justice for youth offenders may have seemed possible, if optimistic, when Price swept into office in November 2022. Now, though, as her November 5 recall election date draws nearer, and voters bay for more punishment, including for young people, it seems positively fanciful. 

One issue may be how the office is explaining its distinct approach to the public. Price’s first goal in the 10-point plan she campaigned on was to “restore public trust in our criminal justice system,” but her administration’s relationship to the press ranges from bewilderingly disorganized to outright antagonistic. As I reported this piece, Price’s office stalled on my requests for an interview with the DA for months, while declining my entreaties to speak with any other member of the office who worked on youth justice until the last possible second.

Price’s sense that she has been subjected to unfair scrutiny and criticism because of her identity and goals for the office is doubtless legitimate. “Reform prosecutors are under a serious microscope,” Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me. “There’s very little grace or forgiveness given even though prosecutors all over the country are making mistakes and errors all the time.” And a special level of vitriol has been reserved for Black female DAs who advance a reform agenda. 

The recall against Price, which is majorly funded by one of the biggest donors to the successful effort to oust DA Chesa Boudin just across the bay, was launched before she’d had a chance to prove herself in the job, and Price has received little support from Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently announced he’d be sending National Guard prosecutors to take over narcotics cases from the Alameda DA’s office—an act of preemption that feels more in line with recent moves by hard-right Southern governors like Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Florida’s Ron DeSantis than the act of a fellow Bay Area Democrat. But Price and her deputies’ unwillingness to communicate clearly about their policies and practices may have left the office more vulnerable to criticism, good and bad faith alike. 

There is no public polling available to give a hint of how Price may fare in November, but the recall committee has raised well over $3 million in their efforts to oust her, including large donations from real estate interests and hedge fund managers. A committee defending the DA has raised less than 10 percent of that. And even if Price holds on to her seat, she will still be attempting to realize her agenda in more or less the same climate as now: up against the disorganization of her own office, a generalized backlash to criminal justice reform, and a voter base with little patience for the time it would take to bring about the change in people’s lives that might reduce crime in the first place. 

“It took us 30 years, with those old policies, to put us in this predicament that we are now,” Brou reflected when we spoke. “It’ll take just as much time for us to get out of those practices of punishment, and really focusing and really investing in rehabilitation, alternatives to incarceration, and healing.” That’s the sort of work that can’t be measured on the same timeline as district attorney elections—or recalls, which happen even quicker.

The post In Oakland, a DA’s Vision for Youth Justice Collides with a Recall Movement Leery of Second Chances appeared first on Bolts.

In Allegheny County primary elections, Pittsburgh-area Democrats nominated candidates for two key local posts who vowed transformative change, voting to oust the punitive, longstanding district attorney  and selecting an anti-carceral Democratic socialist as county executive. 

In the Democratic primary for Allegheny County DA, public defender Matt Dugan beat incumbent Stephen Zappala easily, with over 55 percent of the vote as of press time. Dugan had focused his campaign largely on convincing more moderate suburban voters of the need to overhaul an office that has presided over vast inequalities in arrests and prosecutions, which disproportionately target majority-Black neighborhoods in the county.  

“From a criminal justice reform perspective, and more generally a social justice perspective, it tells me that more people from a broader swath of communities are starting to grasp that the criminal justice system is unfair, full of waste, and too often inhumane,” Rob Perkins, president of the progressive Allegheny Lawyers Initiative, told Bolts Tuesday night. “In other words, my suburban neighbors are starting to get it.”

But reform advocates aren’t celebrating just yet: Zappala, who has held the post since 1998, is headed for a rematch with Dugan in the November general election because local Republicans, lacking their own nominee for DA and aware that Zappala could lose in the primary, organized a write-in campaign for him in the GOP primary. GOP write-in ballots have not yet been tallied but an unusually large number were cast, indicating the effort likely succeeded; Zappala confirmed Tuesday he would accept the GOP nod.

“We haven’t really thought about November, but we fully expected him to do this,” Dugan told Bolts on Tuesday night, adding that the DA’s office would change under his leadership. “We’re going to talk about opportunities, not just prosecute. … We’re going to talk about building better systems such that folks don’t have to live with gun violence and criminal justice issues.”

The last time Zappala stood for re-election, in 2019, he was both the Democratic and Republican nominee. That year, reform advocates tried to unseat him in the primary and general elections, but had trouble convincing residents of more suburban, majority-white areas to pay attention to the deadliness of the local jail and the disproportionate punishment and incarceration in Allegheny County’s minority communities. 

As Bolts reported in April, the weight of the local criminal legal system is felt acutely in a handful of neighborhoods and towns that skew much poorer and have higher Black populations than in the rest of this highly segregated county—for example, the county jail population is 66 percent Black, though Black people account for only 12 percent of the overall county population.

“They don’t just take us one by one,” Terrell Johnson, a formerly incarcerated and wrongfully convicted Pittsburgh man told Bolts last month. “They can put an indictment down and get 15-20 Black men outside of their households. That’s what it is. It’s still that way.”

But in Dugan’s victory Tuesday, people working to upend this system see hope because he has promised to divert more people toward treatment and services and away from incarceration; pursue shorter sentences, including for parole and probation; dramatically reduce the local jail population; and interrogate questionable past convictions secured under Zappala.

“We’ve been thinking through these issues for a long time,” Perkins said. “This is a big night for us.”

As Allegheny County pivots now to what could be another competitive DA election in November, less mystery surrounds the critical county executive race after Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Sara Innamorato, a progressive state representative who was endorsed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and won the Democratic nomination with 37 percent of the vote, as of press time, will face Republican Joe Rockey, who ran unopposed in the primary and who polling suggests is a longshot to defeat her. 

Allegheny is a blue-leaning county that voted for Joe Biden by more than 20 percentage points in 2020, making any Democratic nominee a strong favorite; still, Republican candidates retain much more of a path to victory than in other urban counties like Philadelphia.

As Bolts reported this month, the county executive race carries particularly high stakes for Allegheny County’s system of youth incarceration: the local youth lockup, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, was shuttered in 2021 amid repeated violations of state standards, and the question of how—or whether—to open a new detention facility will fall largely to the next county executive. 

In contrast to Rockey and her two primary opponents, Innamorato has questioned whether Allegheny County needs a detention center for children. Amid calls from police and her opponents to reopen the shuttered youth jail, Innamorato told Bolts earlier this month, “I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?”

Jay Moser, the former principal of the school that operated inside Shuman, said he’s excited by Innamorato’s win.

“The problem is so much broader than just saying, ‘Oh, those kids are bad,’” Moser told Bolts late Tuesday. “There are issues that need to be addressed systematically: poverty, racism, lack of opportunity. With her philosophy on governing, there’s no doubt in my mind that she will usher in changes, that we won’t just focus on punishment first.”

One of Allegheny County’s loudest anti-carceral voices, county council representative Bethany Hallam, also won her countywide election Tuesday, crushing challenger Joanna Doven in a Democratic primary—a third critical victory for the left in the Pittsburgh region.

“It’s a strong rejection of the status quo,” abolitionist organizer Tanisha Long, who has been part of the years-long push to reduce incarceration, told Bolts on election night. “People are sick of feeling like Allegheny County is not for everyone.”

The article has been corrected on May 17 to clarify that write-in ballots in the Republican primary for DA have not yet been tallied.

The post Reformers Soar in Pittsburgh Primaries, Opening New Chapter for Decarceral Efforts appeared first on Bolts.

Allegheny County hasn’t operated a facility dedicated to youth incarceration since then, and instead has shipped kids to detention centers in other counties and sometimes even outside the state, while also implementing more at-home supervision like ankle monitors. 

Heading into Tuesday’s election for county executive, which could determine the future of youth detention in the Pittsburgh region, social workers and reform advocates who’ve worked closely with Allegheny County kids are imploring the leading candidates to reject any new youth jail and to support alternatives that keep kids in their homes and communities. 

“We want as few young people out of their homes as possible,” Sara Goodkind, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored a broad report about Shuman last year, told Bolts. “We know through decades of research that youth detention is associated with increases in recidivism, decreased chances of graduating high school and an increased chance of being arrested as an adult.”

The outgoing county executive, Rich Fitzgerald, cannot run for re-election. In February he announced his intent to “re-establish a county-run facility, or to create a public-private partnership” for juvenile detention in Allegheny County, but has not revealed any plan or proposed timeline since then. Fitzgerald’s successor will have a four-year term and will be instrumental in whatever happens next, as they will inherit broad power over contracts, administrative appointments, and capital budgeting for any potential new or repurposed facility.

The candidates looking to replace him have signaled they’d take the county in different directions. Two of the Democrats who lead in polling, John Weinstein and Michael Lamb, say Shuman should be reopened, though with structural improvements to the building, either for the long term or until the county can replace it with a better facility. 

A third frontrunner in the Democratic primary, Sara Innamorato, a progressive lawmaker who led the field in one public survey last week, has taken a more open stance, questioning whether the county really needs a juvenile lockup.

The Democratic primary victor will face Republican Joe Rockey, who declined to be interviewed for this story but who, according to the Pittsburgh radio station WESA, also believes the county must reopen a youth detention facility. He faces steep odds in this strongly Democratic area in the November general election, polling far behind his potential opponents.

Like the ongoing debates over the adult criminal legal system’s disproportionate impact on Black neighborhoods in this highly segregated area, the varying proposals for youth incarceration carry particularly high stakes for Black children and families in Allegheny County. The ACLU of Pennsylvania found that Black students grades 5-12 in Allegheny County were arrested at nearly nine times the rate of white students during the 2018-2019 school year, and that Allegheny County arrested students at more than double the statewide rate and nearly four times the rate in Philadelphia. 

As of Wednesday, 31 kids 17 or younger were incarcerated in the Allegheny County Jail, the adult facility, according to county reports. Twenty-eight of them were Black.

Weinstein, the Allegheny County Treasurer and one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for county executive, believes that closing Shuman sent a signal that children can commit crimes without threat of punishment. Youth gun violence has increased dramatically since 2020 in the area, and local police have pointed to examples of children sent home after being arrested and accused of violent acts.

“Kids are not stupid. They know there’s no Shuman Center and they’ll push the envelope,” Weinstein told Bolts. “There’s no fear now.” 

He continued, “The police officers know this. I’ve talked to judges, and they’re unbelievably frustrated by it. Even if they’re putting ankle bracelets on, the kids go out and commit the crimes with the bracelet on.”

Weinstein called for reopening Shuman with more mental health staff and workforce training than previously existed there.

“We’re gonna rebrand it, totally revamp it,” he said.

Lamb, the Pittsburgh City Controller and another leader in Democratic primary polling, says that Shuman likely needs to reopen, albeit maybe only in the near-term until Allegheny County can find a better facility to house children accused of violent crimes, like assault. 

“First and foremost, I do believe we need a center for juvenile detention,” Lamb told Bolts. He said it’s important that any new center not look or feel like a traditional jail—like Shuman, with its sally port entry, intake station, and cells with concrete floors, metal toilets, and skinny windows. 

Lamb criticized the current practice of shipping kids to other detention centers up to a three-hour drive away from Pittsburgh, but also said he wanted Allegheny County to make space to house children accused of crimes in some of the 55 out of 67 Pennsylvania counties that currently don’t have their own youth detention centers. According to a state report, the percentage of children detained more than 100 miles from home increased tenfold between 2012 and 2021, from 2 percent to 19 percent. 

Goodkind said she worries some county officials are too focused on how the next center should be designed.

“My concern is these proposals to build a fancy, new, kinder, gentler youth detention center,” she said. “I think we need a vision of a world where youth incarceration is obsolete. And to get there, we can’t be focusing on our efforts to have a better detention center.” 

Tammy Hughes, a school psychologist and professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said officials don’t have to strain to imagine a world in which kids who break the law aren’t incarcerated. As in other states, many Pennsylvania counties have recently gotten rid of juvenile detention centers in favor of more home confinement or other in-the-community options. Fifteen juvenile detention centers around the state closed between 2006 and 2021, the state reported.

Hughes pointed out that non-white kids are referred to the juvenile justice system more often even though white youth often commit crimes at similar rates.

“This place really leans into punishing Black and brown kids,” Hughes said. “This starts in preschool. We see three-year-olds in our clinic, expelled for ripping papers off the wall, for noncompliance, talking back, not listening. That’s an application of rules gone awry. That’s ‘zero tolerance.’ But with white kids we give a lot of grace, like, ‘I know I made mistakes when I was 14.’”

Innamorato, a state Representative, is the only leading candidate in the Democratic primary for county executive who isn’t convinced Allegheny County needs to re-open Shuman or replace it with another detention center. She hasn’t committed to opening any particular facility, but says if the county does re-establish one under her watch, it would need to be non-carceral. She told Bolts that even children accused of violent crimes should not be held in traditional jail cells.

“I’m really trying to separate the two conversations,” she said. “We tend to talk about Shuman Center as a building that is there and should be repurposed and so what is it going to be? I want to flip that conversation and say, ‘What do our young people need so they don’t end up in a detention facility?’”

Innamorato told Bolts that the University of Pittsburgh research project Goodkind co-authored, titled “Post-Shuman Visioning,” was foundational to her current views on juvenile crime and detention in the county. In the absence of any firm plan for the future of youth detention in the county, Goodkind said, her team saw an opportunity to center the experiences of children who had been previously jailed inside Shuman. When asked about their time at Shuman, they overwhelmingly said they wished for more counseling and therapy, with specific resources for those who had experienced sexual violence and other forms of trauma. They asked for more structured activities, training in financial literacy and education on their own legal rights, and more opportunities to connect with their families. One child told the researchers that Shuman was a place that “grooms kids for crime, not healing.”

Innamorato told Bolts, “If we aren’t intentional about the way that we’re architecting this system moving forward, we’re going to continue to put kids through a system that hurts them further, and then put them out in the world where they don’t have access to resources. And we expect them to thrive?”

If Innamorato wins and charts a new path that doesn’t involve replacing Shuman with another youth lockup, it would build on other victories for criminal justice reformers in western Pennsylvania. In 2021, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to ban solitary confinement in Allegheny County, although the county’s adult jail has continued the practice. That same year, Pittsburgh elected Ed Gainey mayor after he ran on a platform of racial justice; local police accountability advocates say they have confidence in him. Other elections next week could change the course of the criminal legal system in Allegheny County: in addition to key county council races, the county’s longtime and punitive district attorney faces a public defender who has secured key endorsements and appears viable.

People who have worked with kids in Shuman and in similar settings told Bolts that next week’s election could signal another turning point for youth detention in Allegheny County. Jeff Shook, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh, said that he’s urging whoever wins to prioritize community investments that aren’t based in punishment and incarceration.

“If you invest in health care, people do better, and you have less crime,” Shook said. “If you invest in education, young people do better, and there’s less crime. We need to raise wages. We need to think about what the pathway is to good jobs, to jobs that are sustainable and promote wellbeing. I think those are the conversations we should be having, as opposed to asking, ‘What kind of center should we build?’”

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