Thursday, November 29, 2012

'Kids in Cages'

UT-Austin's alumni magazine, The Alcalde, has a pair of stories related to juvenile justice that merit Grits readers' attention. The first is about LBJ School instructor Michelle Deitch titled "Kids in Cages." Michele's been working in recent years on the issue of juveniles certified for trial as adults, and your correspondent in the past was privileged not just to speak to her class but once even hosted one of her students as an intern. The second piece, titled, "In prison, youth are prey," was authored by Jorge Antonio Renaud, a former inmate turned reform activist and UT alum who Grits attended school with back in the day. Here's a neat promotional video that accompanied the stories online:


RELATED: See a lengthy piece from The Daily Beast titled "Should juvenile criminals be sentenced like adults?"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What another incredible story about how our culture lives in so many uncaring, unfeeling ways. Shouldn't this and other stories make us want to live in a better world? How many of you are willing to take note and attempt to help right so many wrongs?

Phillip Baker said...

Sadly, Anonymous, a meanness of spirit has a grip on a whole lot of our fellow Americans, doubly so in Texas. They certainly do not care about the conditions of our prisons, nor the plight of kids in adult prisons. And despite the many exonerations here and elsewhere, those folks have not raised a single cry of outrage about the sad state of our deeply flawed justice system. Support for the death penalty remains strong. This is decidedly not the Texas I grew up in.