We say it again: kids should not be put in adult prisons in Pennsylvania
Watch the full discussion here.
It is simply wrong to put children in adult prisons. Conservatives and the most progressive Democrats agree on that. It is wrong to throw children as young as 10 years old into cells where adults shiver from both fear and cold. It is downright wrong to write off young lives as if they were nothing; nothing at all.
This policy of allowing judges to send kids to adult prisons is hurting Pennsylvanians, child advocates representing conservative and liberal perspectives told PennLive’s Editorial Board last week. It’s a serious waste of taxpayer dollars to spend up to $200,000 to send a kid to jail. And it makes our street even more dangerous when kids turn into hardened criminals in jail.
Logan Seacrest and Ann Phelan, with the conservative Washington-based organization called R Street Institute, joined Autumn Talley and Andre Sims of Care, Not Control, to ask Pennsylvania lawmakers to do something to reform the juvenile justice system.
They want lawmakers to pass House Bill 1381. They say it would be a major step toward stopping the state-sanctioned abuse of children in Pennsylvania. We thank State Rep. Dan Miller (D) for sponsoring it, and we thank both groups for urging state legislators to pass it.
The awful atrocity of imprisoning Pennsylvania’s children should have stopped long ago. It is truly heartening to see both conservatives and liberals coming together to protect Pennsylvania’s children, To be honest, it’s barbaric to throw children into jails where many adults don’t survive. Any enlightened society would have stopped it decades ago.
At the very least, it should have stopped two years ago when a task force of experienced Pennsylvania legislators Gov. Tom Wolf appointed to the Juvenile Justice Task Force were alarmed at what their year-long investigation found.
Children need to be protected, nurtured, and guided. None of that happens in an adult prisons. People die in Pennsylvania’s prisons. Check out PennLive’s extensive reporting on this issue. Children who are sent there have little hope of living full and productive lives.
The report from the Governor’s Juvenile Justice Task Force found that children who were not violent or even guilty of serious crimes were being taken from their families and put in prisons where they were likely to be hardened into real threats to society. Some have been kept in solitary confinement in dismally bleak and cold jail cells. And for what? Many of them simply had no money to pay fines for petty misdemeanors.
We’re not making this up, folks. Read the report for yourself. It’s just too awful to believe our society supports treating kids this way.
A group of bipartisan Pennsylvania lawmakers concluded Pennsylvania is exposing its kids to conditions as bad or worse than what happens in repressive countries around the world. And while the kids who suffer are not all Black or Brown, most of them are. The task force concluded racism is a big player here. And it’s past time to call it out.
The Governor’s Task Force on Juvenile Justice Task Force reported all this and more at the end of their investigation in 2021.
It was a bipartisan coalition, that Sens. Lisa Baker (R) and Jay Costa (D) co-chaired with Reps. Tarah Toohill (R) and Mike Zabel (D). They met with PennLive’s Editorial board in July 2021 to report their findings, which were a scathing rebuke of the state’s treatment of minors in custody. They all vowed to work to end it.
Six months later, nothing had changed.
In February 2022, we asked these same lawmakers to speak again to the Editorial Board about what came of their work, and they declined to do so. We called out the Pennsylvania legislature for doing nothing to stop the brutality the task force had documented so well.
It’s now February 2024, and House Bill 1381 is the first concrete sign of hope to save Pennsylvania’s children. There’s nothing stopping Republicans and Democrats from working together to pass this bill. We beg them to do what is right, pass the bill, and stop sending kids to jail.
Putting kids in adult prisons is just plain wrong. It’s past time to stop it.