Yesterday, a press release was sent out alerting the media to the resignation of Kurt Friedenauer, head of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. Not many news outlets picked it up, but we’ve put together extensive coverage of juvenile justice in Illinois in our series “Inside and Out.”

WBEZ’s Steve Edwards caught up with Rob Wildeboer, who reported the bulk of our coverage on the Illinois Dept. of Juvenile Justice to get his take on what this means for the future of the department and ultimately for juvenile justice in Illinois.

When it comes to justice, do white kids catch breaks that other kids don’t?

I saw Mary Mitchell’s column in the Sun-Times yesterday.  She wrote about the girl from Wilmette who’s been charged with a serious hit-and- run accident. A total nightmare for everybody involved. Somehow the girl accused of the crime was able to skirt time in a Cook County Jail cell and was detained instead at the jail’s hospital facility. A poor youth of color, or any youth without access to resources, might not have fared as well, Mitchell seems to say.

Of course, it isn’t clear if there were other issues, such as health concerns, involved.

The driver, who’s 18, is technically an adult according to Illinois law. That’s why she was sent to Cook County Jail instead of the JTDC, which is essentially Cook County’s jail for kids. Anybody who’s ever walked into the juvenile detention center — can sense that there’s something funny going on. Something that doesn’t smell like justice. Because there are hardly any white kids there. At all.

That must mean that white kids don’t break the law, right?

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A solitary confinement cell door at the youth prison in Joliet. (Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz)

Over the past few months we’ve been experimenting with different multimedia on the Inside and Out website. We want to get better and better at making use of public documents, and sharing them.

This morning we aired a story on solitary confinement as part of our series on juvenile prisons in Illinois. As a companion to the story, we’ve added some web extras that we want to draw your attention to.

DocumentCloud is a program that allows us to post and annotate primary source documents on our website. So now in addition to listening to the story on confinement, you can see first-hand some of the documents we obtained in order to report the story.

For today we’ve posted two documents we obtained from the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice through the Freedom of Information Act.

The first of these documents is a formal outline of the procedures for juvenile confinement at the youth prison at Joliet, where the feature story is set. Readers can now look at the same guidelines that are given to prison employees. Read the rest of this entry →

Here’s a couple photos from the big Inside and Out event last night at the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone, just south of the University of Chicago.  It was a community conversation about the disproportionate number of black and Latino youths involved in the juvenile justice system. We co-sponsored the event with the Invisible Institute. We will be airing the conversation sometime in the near future.

This morning we wrapped up our second week of stories and conversations about the juvenile justice system in Illinois. We’re calling the series Inside and Out.

As our reporting during the series has shown, this is a hot issue with a lot of passion on all sides. No one is opposed to making the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice work better. It’s just about how the state goes about it. And that brings us to an example from earlier this week of how – at times – it seems like the pitch of this debate has gotten so tense that no one can hear each other.

On Tuesday late afternoon – and into the evening – a state Senate Appropriations Committee met in Springfield, and it ended with quite a bang. I was a couple hundred miles away in Chicago when this hearing took place. But the following is what I’ve been able to confirm from multiple sources (several on the understanding that they would not be named). Read the rest of this entry →

For the past few months we’ve been talking about Illinois’ Department of Juvenile Justice as part of our series Inside and Out.

Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz

We’ve tracked down kids with warrants out for their arrest, spent the day with a probation officer, examined suicide attempts among incarcerated youth and reported from inside one of Illinois’ eight youth prisons. One thing we haven’t done yet is to compare Illinois with other states to see how our juvenile justice system stacks up.

Illinois spends an average of $233 per day to incarcerate a single youth. That’s more than $85,000 per year per child.

That number is one thing.  Turns out–comparing it in an apples to apples way is quite another. Read the rest of this entry →

I have been handing people a scepter (invisible) and making them emperor for a day. Telling them they’ve got some money and power and asking: So what are you gonna do about Illinois’s juvenile justice system?

My latest emperor — or victim, depending on your perspective –is Richard Hutt, an attorney supervisor with the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender’s Office.

Hutt, it turns out, is a decisive emperor.

Here’s what he decrees: Shut down the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.

That’s the juvenile jail where the county houses hundreds of young people waiting for trial, or in some kind of trouble with authorities.

Why does Hutt want it closed? Because it’s become the default, he says — the quick fix dump spot, used when we don’t know what else to do with a troubled kid. And that’s a problem, he says. Because locking a kid up is the surest way to ensure that the kid comes back to get locked up again some day. That’s what research says.

So when does Hutt want to shut the place down? Tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry →

In today’s installment of “Inside and Out,” we meet Mario – a young guy who grew up steeped in violence. He took two bullets at age nine, suffered abuse at home, was hit by a car, beaten with a brick, and forced to bury some of his closest relatives. Until just a few years ago, the way Mario coped with all that baggage was by dealing out violence of his own. He’s a case study in how trauma can affect the behaviors and brains of young people. The Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice is beginning to incorporate an understanding of those affects into its practices and programs.

It’s important to note that this science is relatively new – the brain research in particular has really flowered in just the last decade or so. As the science has advanced, so has an interesting controversy over how to diagnose this condition in young people. The closest thing to an established diagnosis is post-traumatic-stress-disorder. But that’s problematic for a kid like Mario. Trauma experts like Carl Bell and Bessel van der Kolk (fun fact – his son Nick works for Vocalo and blogs here regularly!) say PTSD better describes someone who has a “normal” state of development, which is then affected by a trauma – as in an adult soldier exposed to combat. Read the rest of this entry →

You mouthed off to WHO ?? Hey, KWA (Kids With Attitude): Better watch it.

“I’m gonna kick your butt ” said in a threatening enough way, in the wrong place to the wrong person can land you in a heap o’ trouble young man. Or – young lady.

You brush off the arm of a teacher or security guard who has detained you — and you can be arrested and charged with assault. You make a threatening enough remark to someone– and you can be arrested and charged with an assault. Teachers and administrators are in a protected class. So if you verbally threaten them – it’s an aggravated assault. You’re in even deeper trouble.

And that may be a good thing. We absolutely must protect teachers, principals, security guards and other students – everybody. But where do you draw the line? When is it youthful bravado and  mouthing off ? And when is it serious enough that it warrants an arrest?

An arrest that can become a gateway to the juvenile justice system.

I’m part of the team  on the Inside Out series about kids who intersect with the juvenile justice system.

Along the way, found a FASCINATING statistic:
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We’ve been listening to a lot of young people and adults for the stories of Inside and Out. What they tell us is gripping and thought-provoking. And for an editor like me, the words they choose to tell their stories are fascinating in themselves.

Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz

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