Media Justice Blog

‘It shouldn’t be that easy’

Department officials estimate that about two-thirds of the 1,200 inmates in the state's eight juvenile justice facilities have been diagnosed with a mental illness and that half the young men and nearly all the young women have thought about or attempted suicide before they enter the system.

While it may be impossible to eliminate all suicide risks behind bars, the state has failed to take simple steps to protect these teenagers from themselves.

Tags: 15-19, African American, criminal charges, drugs, family violence, fatherlessness, government involvement, gun violence, male, may 2010, mental illness, murder, non CPS, police involvement, poverty, prison industrial complex, suicide

Bloody Urban Landscapes

Driving through some of this city’s neighborhoods is like driving through an alternate, horrifying universe, a place where no one thinks it’s safe to be a child.

You follow a map in which the coordinates are laid out in blood. Over there, in front of that convenience store, is where Fred Couch, 16, was shot to death last December. The Couch boy went to the same school, Christian Fenger Academy, as Derrion Albert, an honor student who was beaten with wooden planks and kicked to death three months earlier in a broad daylight attack that was recorded on a cellphone by an onlooker.

Tags: 15-19, African American, church involvement, community involvement, CPS, drugs, family violence, fatherlessness, fenger high school, gang violence, gun violence, murder, New York Times, north west side, Prologue Early College High, south side

Chicago’s real crime story – City Journal

This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over
the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s
community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side
neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost
in the mists of time.

Tags: 10-15, 15-19, African American, carver high, chicago reader, church involvement, city journal, CPS, criminal charges, drugs, family violence, fatherlessness, fenger high school, gang violence, government involvement, gun violence, invisible boundaries, january 2010, male, murder, police involvement, poverty, robeson high school, roseland, school violence, sexual violence, south side, street violence, the ville, west side