Treat Kids with Dignity & Compassion
CONTEXT
Growing adolescent development research shows that part of normal development for teens is to take risk, act impulsively, and succumb to peer pressure - characteristics often associated with delinquency. Additionally, arresting and prosecuting youth greatly harms children, their families, and their communities. Both arrest and detention can be traumatizing for youth, and for youth who have already experienced trauma, can trigger a post-trauma stress response. Incarcerated youth are at risk of physical, emotional and sexual abuse while detained. Arrest and detention frequently hinder access to education and employment, which, in turn, can lead to worse health outcomes. Cascading evidence points to an increase in school officials coordinating in-school interrogations of young people with police, the combined impact by age AND race in contributing to the over-policing of people of color, and the overall evidence that all young people need extra protections at all times. In 2017 and 2018, 924 individual youth were charged with 1,140 offenses in Washtenaw County.
DEMANDS
The Prosecutor must:
Divert youth to existing developmentally appropriate, rehabilitative wrap-around community-based alternatives, making any interaction with the court system unnecessary.
Require public reporting on youth in the adult system.
Require judicial review of all transfer cases. Use discretion with transfer laws for youth up to ages 14-18.
Provide effective legal representation to youth.
Restrict the use of segregation in jail, due to its traumatic impact on adolescent development and on transgender youth.
End the option of blended sentencing (sentencing that pushes youth as adult sentences towards ‘most of natural life’).
Always decline to prosecute youth for misdemeanors and school-based arrests, including truancy.
Disregard mandatory minimum sentences.
Interrupt the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline by not charging children in foster care for curfew violations, running away, homelessness, survival sex, and violation of court-imposed conditions.
End the practice that disallows youth with criminal background records to participate in restorative justice programming.
Develop community based restorative justice programs that are not entrenched with law enforcement.
Refuse to incriminate youth due to past criminal record or association and proximity to “crime”.
The Prosecutor must advocate for:
Eliminating the presence of law enforcement officers at Washtenaw County schools and transit stops, and replace them with restorative justice facilitators, peer-to-peer models, and other evidence-based program models.