Dear Friend,
I wanted you to know that an investigation we published on Friday in collaboration with The Washington Post has already had impact.
The story revealed that 19 state juvenile-justice agencies regularly or sometimes require parents to pay for the cost of their children’s incarcerations. Counties in another 28 states also routinely engage in the practice. These costs are often crippling to families already struggling with poverty and with the trauma of seeing a son or daughter in jail.
Parents are charged even if the case against their child is ultimately dismissed. For example, when Mariana Cuevas’s son was released from a California jail after being locked up in a juvenile hall for more than 300 days for a homicide he did not commit, the state still tried to collect $10,000 for his imprisonment.
The City of Philadelphia, where the story was focused, announced a few hours after our story was published that it would end the practice of charging parents who have kids in detention. You can read our post on this development here. You can also watch an NBC News report on our investigation here.
Juvenile defense lawyers, law students, and other advocates have been working around the country to change these punitive laws and regulations. In Philadelphia, it was students at Temple University’s Justice Lab who first identified the problem, but our story clearly prodded officials to finally take the plunge. As Laura Fine, co-founder of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project in Philadelphia, told reporter Eli Hager upon hearing the news, “Nothing about the legal landscape has changed in the 10 months since we first brought this to them, yet it happened today. I don’t think it could be clearer that the timing of the national attention was what did this.”
That’s what The Marshall Project was founded to accomplish. Thank you for your support of our work.
My best,
Bill Keller
Editor-in-Chief, The Marshall Project
This email was sent to [email protected]
why did I get this? unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences
The Marshall Project · 156 West 56th Street · Suite 701 · New York, NY 10019 · USA
