Treat Kids in the Juvenile Justice System as … Kids
We are youth advocates who were incarcerated at the ages of 14 and 15 — and we don’t want the juvenile legal system to do to others what it did to us and our peers. When a person under 18 comes into the justice system, they must be treated not as an adult, but as a child, a kid.
Today’s system hurts instead of helping detained kids, who are more likely to come from low-income families and already be trauma-impacted before being arrested. Direct file is not treating kids as kids. [Editors’ note: Direct file applies to charges that automatically send a youth to adult court without any room for a judge to consider individual circumstances.] Forcing youth with no money to pay the courts isn’t treating kids as kids. Overuse of placement and detention is not treating kids as kids but rather as case numbers, giving a punishment rather than supportive services.
One of us was incarcerated at age 15 and ordered to pay the courts thousands and thousands of dollars — money that was literally not possible to pay. This added another hardship to the incarceration, not just for one of us, but for our family, putting them in debt before they could think about buying food, paying for gas, electricity or housing — which was already a burden, because of the rising housing cost crisis in Philadelphia. Because young people can’t pay, the courts never receive the money, but families go into debt or the youth is kept on court supervision longer.
How is this justice? It just increases poverty and trauma. It helps no one.