RePath Round Up--Juvenile Justice Edition
Outrageous screen time, a webinar you don't want to miss, and a very, very guilty Sam Bankman-Fried
Out here in the field, I fight for my meals. I don’t need to fight to prove I’m right. I don’t need to be forgiven. Don’t cry, don’t raise your eye, it’s only teenage wasteland. The exodus is here, the happy ones are near.
Let's get together before we get much older.
The Who, Baba O’Riley from The Kids are Alright
The age of TikTok is here. Teenagers in the US are growing up in a different world. In 2023, the average teenager in the US spends an astonishing 7 hours and 22 minutes per day looking at screens. This means that 43% of their waking hours are spent watching videos, gaming, and scrolling social media. And don’t forget the incessant dings and buzzes—the average US teenager receives 237 notifications on their smartphone per day.
TikTok alone consumes 1 hour and 53 minutes of an average teenager’s day. Every. Single. Day.
What does all this mean? Well, there’s the mental health crisis with a 40% increase in persistent sadness or hopelessness. There are the lawsuits blaming mental illnesses on the social media companies. And there are the elusive algorithmic impacts. If the algorithm controls the mindshare, it may control the minds. Why, for instance, do the majority of young Americans think Hamas was justified in its attack on Israel where their parents overwhelming think the opposite? Could it be that Israel is losing the TikTok war to an army of paid bots and influencers that support Hamas? Is that why the anti-Israel sentiment is so prevalent on college campuses or why this happened at Harvard and Cornell? Or are the passions of youth impervious to such influences?
And what does all this change mean for juvenile justice?
We are here to help you get your screen time in. Click here to join us for a webinar we are hosting on Wednesday to discuss how this shifting landscape is impacting juvenile justice across the US. We will be talking about social media, technology, and current challenges in juvenile justice with our expert panel. We will also be discussing two important questions with all of our attendees:
What is the best change your agency has made to improve juvenile justice in the past few years?
If you had unlimited resources, what is the one single change you would make to improve juvenile justice over the next 10 years?
Just a few push ups. As it turns out, at the same time we have an increasing mental health crisis that coincides with a massive increase in screen time use, we are getting more and more evidence that exercise may just be the best treatment for depression, anxiety and distress.
Maybe the schools can help. They probably would if kids still went. Minnesota public schools have reported a reduction in attendance statewide for all public schools from 79% to 46% over the past 4 years. Across the US, attendance rates have similarly plummeted and there are an estimated 6.5 million new chronically absent students.
On the plus side, youth violence predominantly occurs in the hours immediately after school release. So, maybe the absenteeism will level that out.
Any good news? Yes. There has been a massive reduction in juvenile incarceration. There are a lot of murky and incomplete statistics in criminal justice, but it is demonstrably clear that juvenile incarceration is much, much lower than before. Across the US. we have seen a 77% decline in youth incarceration since 2000 with a similar reduction in youth arrests as well:
So we must have an excess of juvenile justice staff, right? Nope. Apparently, there’s a staffing crisis.
Over 200 individual state and local juvenile corrections and probation agencies representing 37 states and over 190 counties reported that they are facing greater staffing difficulties than at any time in the past 10 years. And it’s not only government agencies that are dealing with staff shortages — 85% of agencies reported that their community-based service providers are also facing moderate to severe staffing challenges.
They don’t just take your money in D.C. Police in Washington D.C. report 821 carjackings this year compared to 395 this time last year. Police suggest driving the center lane to make it just that much tougher on the carjackers.
Also in D.C. DC police alerted residents that a judge has released a person onto the streets who attacked someone with a machete on H Street last week. Police warned that there could be another attack on the victim with potential harm to others in the area. As always people, make sure to drive in that center lane.
You know how everyone gets searched before they visit inside a prison? They may not do such a great job with that. With the cooperation of cell phone companies, South Carolina officials have figured out a way to disable contraband cell phones inside their prison facility. Since June, they have disabled 790 contraband phones in a facility that houses only about a 1,000 inmates. Wonder if those inmates are still getting their full 7 hours of daily screen time?
The last remaining US prison ship is set to close. In other news, the US still has a floating prison ship. You wouldn’t need three tries to guess where it is. We see you NYC.
Al last—“Alleged” crypto fraudster is no longer alleged. Sam Bankman-Fried, actual convicted crypto fraudster was found guilty by a New York jury last night on all 7 counts of defrauding customers out of billions from his crypto exchange companies. His sentencing will take place in March and he will be facing up to 115 years in prison. He is also awaiting trial on additional charges relating to alleged foreign bribery and bank fraud conspiracies.
