<
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/hawaii-brought-population-girls-prison-zero-rcna41532>
"Hawaii reached the milestone earlier this year of having no girls in its only
youth correctional facility — a first in state history, officials say.
It was a jubilant moment for the facility’s administrator, Mark Patterson, who
has worked to reduce the youth prison population for nearly eight years.
A decade ago, more than 100 adolescents were imprisoned at the facility. When
Patterson arrived two years later, the number had dropped by about half,
according to data from the state's Department of the Attorney General and
Office of Youth Services.
For Patterson, who came to the youth facility after running Hawaii’s Women’s
Community Correctional Center, reducing the girls population required
decreasing the number of young people put on probation, as violators often got
sent to his facility. It also meant addressing the fact that they were the
“most vulnerable of the high-risk” and often had suffered heavy trauma related
to things like sexual exploitation, abuse at home or exposure to drug
addiction, he said.
“When I talk about zero girls in the system, it’s because it was a conscious
effort to focus on a particular profile of girls in our systems,” Patterson
said.
Patterson and other state officials and juvenile justice reform advocates set
out to keep at-risk youth from engaging in behaviors that get them sent into
the system in the first place, an effort that, when applied broadly, helped
reduce overall female probation sentences by more than two-thirds from 2014 to
2021, according to the state Department of the Attorney General. Experts say
Hawaii can be a model for other states on how to institute alternatives to the
more traditional punitive models of justice for girls and boys."
Via
Future Crunch Oct 7, 2022:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-us-crime-conservation-argentina-evs-china/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
