Monica Potts asks whether opening juvenile court hearings and records could help uncover systemic abuse and corruption.
Barbara White Stack‘s reporting uncovered systemic mistreatment of abused or neglected juveniles within Allegheny County courts: Workers in group homes for juveniles sometimes had worrisome criminal histories, state agencies had broad powers to take children from their parents, and physical restraints were overused on children in group homes. Early in Stack’s reporting on the juvenile-justice system, the paper won an appeal arguing in favor of opening “dependency” cases to reporters and the public to prevent such abuse. Like most juvenile-justice proceedings, they had been closed. Before that, Stack had to work her way into the hearings and gain access to records and get special permission from judges. “This situation should be anathema in a self-governed, democratic society,” she wrote for the Journalism Center on Children and Families in 2007. “How can taxpayers decide policy about child welfare and juvenile delinquency when they have no idea what goes on behind those closed doors?”
