The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’

周日读物:《当美国清空其青少年监狱时发生了什么》

The Daily

2025-02-23

44 分钟
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When David Muhammad was 15, his mother moved from Oakland, Calif., to Philadelphia with her boyfriend, leaving Muhammad in the care of his brothers, ages 20 and 21, both of whom were involved in the drug scene. Over the next two years, Muhammad was arrested three times — for selling drugs, attempted murder and illegal gun possession. For Muhammad, life turned around. He wound up graduating from Howard University, running a nonprofit in Oakland called the Mentoring Center and serving in the leadership of the District of Columbia’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Then he returned to Oakland for a two-year stint as chief probation officer for Alameda County, in the same system that once supervised him. Muhammad’s unlikely elevation came during a remarkable, if largely overlooked, era in the history of America’s juvenile justice system. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77 percent. Can that progress be sustained — or is America about to reverse course and embark on another juvenile incarceration binge?
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  • An.

  • American story that we all know and

  • that I've lived for a lot of my life is the story of rising incarceration.

  • The United States prides itself on being a nation of freedom and liberty,

  • and yet we have the biggest prison system in the history of the world.

  • And for many decades, that system was just growing and growing,

  • including when it came to young people.

  • But what if there was a disruption in that narrative?

  • What if the story changed?

  • My name is James Forman Jr. I'm a law professor at Yale University

  • and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.