May 6, 2011 | 11:14 AM | By

How LGBT youth experience the justice system

FILED UNDER: Corrections, Juvenile Justice, LGBT, Public Intellectual

Still Burning

The new magazine, Public Intellectual, has dedicated its inaugural issue to matters of policing and surveillance, and is well worth taking a look at. One piece in particular that might be of interest to Informant readers is by Angela Irvine, who helped run an investigation into experiences of LGBT youth in the criminal justice system for the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Perhaps the most shocking piece of her piece, which draws on a survey of 2,200 youth nationwide, comes near the middle:

Michael, a thirteen-year-old bisexual boy in Minneapolis, was taken from his parents at a young age and placed in a foster home. He ran away from foster care and was briefly homeless. At school, he was being bullied because of his sexual orientation, and recently, he was detained for having sex with another boy in his group home.

Like transgender youths, boys and girls caught having consensual sex with kids of the same gender are considered difficult to place in foster and group homes. Probation staff and the courts don’t usually want to hold boys like Michael in detention, yet feel that they don’t have a choice unless the child has a decent place to go.

But the system wouldn’t have faced this dilemma in the first place if Michael hadn’t been arrested for consensual sex. Straight kids usually aren’t arrested for having sex, but if they are, a number of group homes would be available to take them in. Sexual orientation lies at the heart of this institutional conundrum and leads to unnecessarily long detention periods.

It’s a little-understood, yet widely accepted fact of the juvenile justice system just how much discretion individuals in the system have over who does and doesn’t get placed in detention. We talked about this phenomenon in our recent examination of Santa Cruz County’s complete turn-around in how they deal with juvenile offenders. In Santa Cruz, probation officers noticed that they were detaining a lot of kids for what they decided were the wrong reasons: administrative reasons, like keeping them overnight so that they could properly interview the child; practical reasons, like it was hard to get ahold of their parents or there wasn’t a Spanish-speaking staff member on-hand who could communicate with parents. The idea that kids who should be in the foster system are ending up in detention because the system doesn’t know how to handle their sexual orientation is another such dilemma–one that’s rarely discussed.

Other pieces in the Public Intellectual’s inaugural issue include an examination of the policing technique called “kettlling” and a hashing out of the real connection between the economy and crime levels.

  • http://www.outinocala.com Ted Larson-Klebes

    I am a retired teacher. The last 8 years of my teaching career was in a juvenile incarceration facility for boys 13 to 18 y/o. I accepted my sexuality at the age of 14 and have been gay all my life and I am now 67 years old. As much I would have liked to confide my own sexuality with a number of boys who were identified as Gay, Bisexual and Transgender, but I could not jeopardize my own job. This was a different time with a homophobic attitude. I know I could have helped some of these boys in a better way if there were no restrictions regarding exposure of my own sexuality. I saw them struggle to survive the bullying and the name calling and so much more. All of those boys were sentenced at felons. How I wish I could have been in a position to counsel or just talk to them as several would act out the sexual identity and making their life even more miserable and I could see that the corrections staff were not educated in dealing with this kind of situation then and I guess not now. Our juvenile criminal justice system needs to be looked in a different way now that LGBT equality is in the forefront of every new election.

  • Guest

    Who cares

  • Gay.Guest

    Grow Up.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Ekirk81 Evan Thirdleg Kirk

    What a sad life you have, to troll NPR sites with the lamest of rhetorical questions. Obviously people care, even if you don’t.

  • Guest

    lol

  • Guest

    Actually I’m 100% not trolling. I’m telling the unmitigated truth. Go ahead, go google unmitigated. I’m tired of wasting time on anyone who buys into this kind of garbage when we have real problems

  • Anonymous

    Nobody is born a thief, nobody is born a murderer, nobody is born a homosexual. Our characters are formed by choices we make minute by minute during the days of our lives. The tragedy is that nobody loved these kids enough to tell them the truth, loved them enough to teach them right from wrong, loved them enough to warn them that this lifestyle is a sure path to self-destruction.

  • Samantha M

    I believe it is this misinformed line of thought that continues to promote hatred in our society. Children are born in to circumstances that can potentially lead them towards destructive criminal paths. On the other hand, there are plenty of upper and middle class criminals who are driven by greed.

    But to say one’s sexual orientation is a choice continues to promote a violent society where bigots attempt to smite others because the former cannot show an ounce of compassion. Whom one is attracted to is not a choice; it is a force of love.

  • GAYtheist

    @MaryWaterton:disqus Please do not compare homosexuality to murder or thievery. Being gay is not a choice. One may choose to conceal his or her identity, but concealment is much different from true change. I am gay, and I have two of the most loving parents in the world. I have not had any communication about my sexuality with them because I know what conflict it may create. For almost twenty years, I learned lessons of right and wrong, though my gayness persisted. I prayed over and over to a god in which I truly believed, hoping for relief from the horrible weight of my sin. Now I am a gay Atheist, and no amount of prayer will ever change that!

    The children in the article are in an incredibly unfortunate situation. In a country that likes to elect self-hating closeted gay Republicans and clergy to make the rules, these poor kids will continue to be victimized. It’s a sad narrative for a country which could be the greatest in the world.