Marginalized Youth Need Real Change in Schools, Courts, Other Systems
The Juvenile Justice Exchange, Sharif D. El Mekki | Published on 4/14/2021
“Are juvenile injustice centers not worthy of monitoring precisely because they are overflowing with Black, brown and poor throwaway human beings?” A friend of the author shared with him that “he doesn’t go to court expecting to get justice; he goes to expose the injustices that many Black children, in particular, often confront, including in their schools and in courtrooms. . . . We need more people like that lawyer. We need education and justice system professionals who love children, who are more concerned with nurturing our young than merely cashing a paycheck to do damage control among our troubled, yet promising, young people.”
(In Illinois, children held in youth prisons have access to an ombudsperson, but the same isn’t true for youth who are presumed innocent and held pre-trial in local detention centers.)