Several activities have been in the works, some for a number of years, related to Juvenile justice. A positive one occurred last spring when on May 17, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life without parole for crimes other than murder. On any given day, approximately 9,500 juveniles under the age of 18 are locked up in adult penal institutions. An estimated 2,500 juvenile defendants in the United States are serving life-without-parole sentences-the vast majority for homicides. Because of the variety of flawed policies and laws governing juvenile incarceration, in 44 states and the District of Columbia, juveniles, as young as 14, can be tried in the adult criminal system. Forty states either permit or mandate the jailing of young people in adult facilities before trial. They can be prosecuted as adults in many states without review by a judge or a court hearing. Judges in juvenile courts are often excluded from the decision to prosecute children and teens as adults. These decisions are made at the discretion of prosecutors, no matter how minor the infraction might be. This includes the category of status offenders who are in court for truancy, alcohol possession, curfew violations, or running away. Finally, data report that Black and Latino children and teens end up in adult facilities in numbers disproportionately higher than their representation in the general population. Nationally, three out of four youth admitted to adult prison in 2002 were either Black or Latino.
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