A Culture of Caring
Like a born politician, Mark Steward, director of Missouri’s Division of Youth Services, seldom forgets a name. Ambling through the gleaming halls of the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center in St. Louis on a recent summer afternoon, Steward stopped in several classrooms to shake hands and chat with the teenage residents, who are also some…
Cruel Convergence
For thousands of children with debilitating mental illnesses, the get-tough juvenile-justice culture of the 1990s could not have come at a worse time. The new punitive policies emerged in tandem with the slow breakdown of the public mental-health system, and the confluence has led to a pervasive criminalization of juvenile mental illness. The excesses of…
Voice-Over America
The story of Kenneth Tomlinson’s efforts to impose his right-tilting version of “balance” on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has incited national controversy. But while that tale is well-known, Tomlinson’s malign influence on another respected media institution, the Voice of America (VOA), has received far less attention. What’s happened at the VOA — which…
Bayou Betterment
The former correctional officer mops sweat off his brow as he plays two-on-one basketball against kids he would have once called offenders. Michael Gaines gestures toward the man who’s trying to block a layup by one of the kids. “In the old days, he would have just stood here in his uniform and watched while…
Race and Redemption
As an attorney for the Youth Law Center, litigating largely over conditions of confinement, James Bell spent some 20 years in courtrooms across America. The scene was always much the same: Even in communities that were overwhelmingly white, those arrested, detained, and convicted were overwhelmingly black and brown. Nonwhites, as Bell saw it, were being…
Communities Helping Kids
With the temperature creeping above 97 degrees in Austin, Texas, Melissa Barlow hurtles along Interstate 35 in a Toyota Corolla, the air conditioner blasting. It’s a Thursday in June, and she has a tight schedule. Barlow supervises caseworkers in an innovative program that helps youthful offenders stay at home — instead of prison — while…
Adolescents, Maturity, And The Law
Anthony Laster was a 15-year-old eighth-grader with an IQ of 58 who was described by relatives as having the mind of a 5-year-old. One day in 1998, shortly after his mother died, Anthony was hungry, so he reached into the pocket of another student in his Florida middle school and took $2 in lunch money.…
Detention Redemption
Santa Cruz County’s juvenile hall sits on a pine- and oak-studded hillside across from a state park. It is a low-slung building made of concrete block with doors painted a bilious shade of green. From outside, it hardly looks like a national model for juvenile-justice reform. But inside, empty cells stand as testament to what…
Race and Redemption
As an attorney for the Youth Law Center, litigating largely over conditions of confinement, James Bell spent some 20 years in courtrooms across America. The scene was always much the same: Even in communities that were overwhelmingly white, those arrested, detained, and convicted were overwhelmingly black and brown. Nonwhites, as Bell saw it, were being…
Reforming Juvenile Justice
In 1899, Illinois and Colorado established a new “Children’s Court.” The idea was to substitute treatment and care for punishment of delinquent youths. These changes were promoted by child advocates such as the famous social activist Jane Addams and crusading judges like Denver’s Ben Lindsey, as well as influential women’s organizations and bar associations. Over…
The Conservative as Liberal
Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey by Linda Greenhouse (Times Books, 258 pages, $25.00) The day that former president Lyndon Johnson died, January 22, 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun announced the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion throughout the nation. The media led with Johnson’s passing, while Blackmun,…
The Collapse
Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War by Anthony Shadid (Henry Holt & Co., 448 pages, $26.00) The relentless carnage and rising illiberalism of Iraq are inducing shellshock in the advocates of the war. Among conservatives, the palpable despair has prompted dead-enders at The Wall Street Journal to bitterly…
Who Gives a Flying Flag?
Looking at the reactions of the right-wingers to l’affaire Novak-Rove-Wilson-Plame, you’d have to conclude that, for them, national security is a sometime thing — a talking point or a symbolic flourish, but not a real-world imperative involving actual lives, dangers, and government workings. The smears and (to be generous) fat, sloppy errors directed against former…
Student Body Right
It was over cantaloupe and cottage cheese that the Lord told Pat Robertson to build a university. The year was 1975, and the minister, then 45, was running so late for a meeting that he decided to head to a nearby coffee shop, get his “famous” snack, and wait the meeting out. It was at…
The Good Fight
Outside the National Press Club on the morning of August 3, the Washington summer was as hot and oppressive as ever. But inside, Warren Rudman and Lee Hamilton, two grizzled veterans of the national-security world, called for cool at the launch event for a new group dedicated to ending “the partisan rancor in Washington” on…
How Times Have Changed
Back in the late 1970s, when gasoline prices zoomed and oil companies were making money hand over fist, our government enacted a windfall profit tax to return some of those unjustified gains to the public that was paying for them. Today, as gasoline prices have again skyrocketed, the federal government’s reaction is exactly the opposite:…
Letting Go of Iraq
The establishment of a pro-Iranian, Islamic government in Iraq was not exactly what the Bush administration told us to expect from the war. But it may well be the result, and I am beginning to think that there is nothing that the United States can or should do about it — except to disengage from…
Inferior Design
On September 26, an event that the national media will surely depict as a new Scopes trial is scheduled to begin. Hearings will commence in a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district over its decision to introduce “Intelligent Design,” or ID, into its biology curriculum.…
Pop-Aganda
In early March, George W. Bush named his longtime adviser Karen Hughes the administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Apparently, it’s a woman’s job: She was the third to be named to that post since September 11. At her confirmation hearing, she spoke in familiar terms about the daunting task of…
Day 1,461 and Counting
This September 11 will mark the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The media will focus on the ceremonies at the former World Trade Center site, the Pentagon, and other cities and towns around the country that will honor the dead. The Bush administration, meanwhile, will do its best to remind…
Always Political
Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $23.00 ) When John Roberts testified before the Senate in 2003 on his nomination to a federal appellate court, he described a process that had been used to vet judicial candidates while…
Dossier: Back to School
The percentage of schools that during the 2002–03 school year flunked the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act were 5 percent in Alabama, 14 percent in Wyoming, 40 percent in Illinois, and 76 percent in Florida … 99 percent of California schools are projected to fail proficiency tests…
First Do Some Harm
Mohammed, a 36-year-old graduate of Baghdad University’s College of Art, says he was examined by an American physician in a detention facility near Baghdad International Airport shortly after being arrested in late 2003. “The doctor said, ‘Maybe you have a bullet wound you are not aware of,’” recalls Mohammed, sitting in a hotel room in…
