In California, justice for juveniles

Reform is needed, but it's too soon to do away with California's Division of Juvenile Justice.

Lawmakers created the California Youth Authority in 1941, making in the process a bold statement of purpose and conviction: Juvenile delinquents are redeemable. They should no longer be imprisoned with adults but instead given a chance at basic education and job training. Rehabilitation, not punishment, is the proper goal of an enlightened and effective juvenile justice system.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-juvenile-justice-california-20120327,0,7438880.story

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"The opposite of poverty is not wealth . . . In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice."

In a recent TED talk, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

The video is available at http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.html 

Pew Forum Chaplains Survey Released

The Pew Research Center recently interviewed more than 700 adult correctional chaplains in a nation-wide chaplains survey sponsored by the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC.  

Some key findings include:

• About three-quarters of the chaplains say that a lot (26%) or some (51%) religious switching occurs among inmates in the prisons where they work. Many chaplains report growth from religious switching in the numbers of Muslims and Protestant Christians, in particular.
• Nearly three-quarters of the chaplains (73%), for example, say they consider access to religion-related programs in prison to be “absolutely critical” to successful rehabilitation of inmates.
• At the same time, a sizable minority of chaplains say that religious extremism is either very common (12%) or somewhat common (29%) among inmates. An overwhelming majority of chaplains, however, report that religious extremism seldom poses a threat to the security of the facility in which they work, with only 4% of chaplains saying religious extremism among inmates “almost always” poses a threat to prison security and an additional 19% saying it “sometimes” poses a threat.

More information is available at: http://www.pewforum.org/Social-Welfare/prison-chaplains-exec.aspx