Transcript The Cradle to Prison Pipeline Powerpoint

Thwarting the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline:
Systemic Change through Restorative Juvenile
Justice
Aliyah Vinikoor
September 18, 2009
What is the “cradle-to-prison pipeline”?
Rather than embarking on a path to college and
success, from birth children-of-color are funneled
down a path toward prison. Institutional racism
and poverty conspire to place these youth at
disproportionate risk than whites. The entrypoints to the cradle-to-prison pipeline are many
and every further step into its realm magnifies its
impact upon youth’s lives.
Statistics:
 Nearly 2 million juvenile justice cases are handled each
year
 Children of color are overrepresented in the system
overall by a 2:1 ratio—despite comprising only 1/3 of
American youth
 A Black boy born in 2001 has a one-in-three chance of
being imprisoned in his lifetime; a Latino boy one in six
 Youth of color face “cumulative disadvantage” once in the
system:
 Black youth are 4 times more likely to be in juvenile detention
 77% of juveniles sent to adult prison are African American
95% of NYC youth detained in
state facilities are Black or
Latino
- NYC Department of Juvenile Justice
How did we get here?
The juvenile justice system was born out of the notion that
youth are fundamentally different from adults and thus
deserve differential treatment. In response to the spike in
juvenile crime during the 1970s and 1980s, however, state
policies universally shifted from a rehabilitative to a
retributive model. This coincided with other punitive policy
shifts such as the dismantling of the welfare system and the
expansion of the prison-industrial-complex. Many localities
began reflexively incarcerating young people presenting little
or no public-safety risk. Indeed, many in juvenile justice are
simply high-need—youth failed by every other societal
system: economic, educational, mental health.
What feeds the pipeline?
Macro-level contributors
Micro-level contributors
Macro-level contributors
Micro-level contributors
 Retributive youth justice policies
(i.e. criminalizing at a younger
age, imposing harsher sanctions,
and jailing in adult facilities)
 Neighborhood policing strategies
(i.e. racial profiling)
 Schools: poor education, “zerotolerance” policies
 The dismantling of the welfare
system and its impact on underresourced communities
 Poverty, especially extreme
poverty
 Poor family functioning
 Lack of health care for
mothers and children
 Childhood trauma and mental
health issues: 92% of juvenile
offenders are contending with
serious past trauma
 Foster-care involvement
 Juvenile-justice involvement
“The most dangerous place for a
child to grow up today is at the
intersection of race and
poverty.”
-Marion Wright Edelman
Outcomes:
 Taxpayers spend an average $200,000 annually per child in
detention
 In New York City, 81% of young males and 46% of young
females recidivate within 18 months
 Many youth become gang-involved, or solidify affiliation,
while in facility
 Youth re-enter their communities and families with lasting
trauma and barriers to employment & educational
opportunities
 Communities of color become further targeted,
marginalized, stigmatized, and fractured
73% of incarcerated adults have
been involved in juvenile justice
Rather than ensuring public safety
and the welfare of our children,
our juvenile justice system is a
leading perpetrator of violence.
Juvenile Justice in Crisis
Restorative Juvenile Justice: An
Alternative
Restorative justice is a participatory
process by which stakeholders in a
particular offense collectively deal with the
problem and its implications for the future.
Restorative Juvenile Justice:
 In both theory and practice attempts to repair harm to a community
 May take many forms, such as peace circles, victim-offender mediation,
or youth court
 Is currently used most often as a back-end solution to youth crime
 Has its roots in indigenous approaches to justice: it is anti-oppressive in
nature and can redress historic inequities
 As a relational model, better fits the developmental needs of youth
 Better serves the needs of victims
 According to research, is more cost-effective, prevents reoffense at
higher rates, and more humanistic than retributive or rehabilitative
justice models
 Is wholly in concert with social work values
Why now?
 Lawmakers are exploring more cost-effective juvenile justice
solutions
 States are increasingly redirecting public resources for juvenile
institutions into evidence-based alternatives
 Violent crime is actually trending down
 Institutional responses to crime are increasingly inappropriate, while
the public is increasingly supportive of alternatives
 The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act is up for
reauthorization this year
 President Obama and others must be pressured to make restorative
justice a focus
With our skills, ethics, broad access to
youth, and presence across systems, social
workers are uniquely positioned to
advocate for and facilitate such programs
How can social workers get involved?
 Advocate for the elimination of bias across
justice systems
 Develop and implement more communitybased alternatives to juvenile incarceration
 Work to ensure that restorative justice
practices operate systemically to truly
dismantle the cradle-to-prison pipeline
Dismantling the pipeline requires a
concomitant shift in our violent culture.
Since our back-end interventions are only
effective if they reverberate with the
broader social environment, restorative
practices must be systematically employed
on the front-end to truly redress
institutional racism.
Social Workers: Moving restorative justice
from back-end to front-end
Early Prevention:
 Focus on early intervention: advocate, support, and work
for preventive measures that target child poverty and
service gaps (i.e. education and comprehensive health &
mental health programs)
 Help communities nurture extant assets and marshal
resources: broker connections, shore up local institutions,
dismantle barriers to services
 Integrate non-violent approaches into the total lifespan of
a child—in the home, school, and community
Moving restorative justice from back-end
to front-end (cont.)
School Social Work:
 Integrate non-violent approaches into the total lifespan of
a child—in the home, school, and community
 Incorporate alternatives-to-suspension in schools:
formalize restorative justice responses to student conflict
 Promote non-violence in school curricula and emphasize
empathy and connection in the classroom
Moving restorative justice from back-end
to front-end (cont.)
Collaboration:
 Collaborate between youth-service systems to address cooccurring problems
 Implement a “system of care” treatment model that
provides holistic, efficient, and socially-just services to
youth who are at-risk
 Institute more “community justice centers” that offer
immediate and community-based wraparound services
Moving restorative justice from back-end
to front-end (cont.)
Community Organizing & Advocacy
 Agitate for system-change: Fight alongside communities to end the
pipeline and demand community-determined alternatives
 Political education: Shift focus of public discourse to root causes and
explore how the current system affects our youth and broader society
 Persuade lawmakers to establish meaningful alternatives to our
overreliance on prisons
 Empower youth to employ restorative practices and serve as peer
mediators in schools, facilities, etc.
 Incubate restorative justice responses in social work schools and develop
them throughout our praxis
Summary
 Our current system doesn’t work—it’s costly, inhumane,
counterproductive, and racist
 Youth involved are those who have been failed by every
other system
 We need a new response to crime that values
responsibility and healing rather than punishment
 Restorative justice, as a community-directed
intervention, can be employed on both the front-end
and back-end to foster what prevents crime and
violence: hope, agency, and connection
 Social Workers are charged with helming this
movement to end the cradle-to-prison pipeline by
intervening at every entry-point
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Letter from Birmingham City Jail, 1963
Questions?
Aliyah Vinikoor
[email protected]