Even more harmful, she said, is moving children to adult jail. These conditions in the jail are extremely harmful to children, said Rachel Gassert, the policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. Yet despite an effort to keep kids awaiting trial in a separate facility, the juvenile jail is overwhelmed and understaffed. The following year, the city unveiled its expanded juvenile jail. In 2015, the City Council passed and the mayor approved an ordinance to provide 12 beds in the juvenile detention center, known as the Youth Study Center, specifically for juveniles who are under adult jurisdiction. With an increase in arrests of children, the juvenile detention center has become overcrowded, forcing a growing number of children to be detained with adults. The district attorney has used this rhetoric to justify his practice of charging an increasing number of juveniles as adults, and despite efforts to end the practice, the city continues to hold kids in adult jail.Ĭity officials told a local reporter that so far in 2019, almost 250 children have been arrested for crimes ranging from car theft to murder. His office opened 735 juvenile felony cases in 2018. “The revolving door we complain about at the adult jail has nothing on the cartoonish speed of the one spinning at Juvenile Court,” he said in February. Violent crime rates in New Orleans are the lowest they’ve been in decades, but according to Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro Jr., the “quality of life in New Orleans is being deeply affected by the scourge of juvenile crime.”Ĭannizzaro, who has served in the city since 2009, frequently speaks out about what he sees as an increase in violent youth.
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