For Immediate Release: September 17, 2024
Contact: Jeff Biddle Jr., Executive Director, Midian Leadership Project, midianleadership@gmail.com, (304)-382-8288
Charleston, WV – West Virginia’s criminal legal system for children is at a crossroads. Juvenile reforms implemented in the 2010s led to decreases in the number of criminal cases filed against youth. But as West Virginia emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend reversed, and criminal filings have increased each of the last three years. As cases filed against children have risen over this period, so have the number of kids behind bars.
The harms of youth incarceration are well-documented. We know that incarcerated children can be punished in ways that isolate, dehumanize, and undermine rehabilitative goals and that youth incarceration does not prevent future contact with the criminal legal system. We also know that the criminal legal system for children disproportionately harms Black kids.
In the spring of 2023, the Midian Leadership Project (Midian) teamed up with the American Friends Service Committee to host listening sessions with young adults who had spent part of their childhood in the criminal legal system to better understand how criminal system fines and fees affected them. Shortly after, Midian partnered with the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy (WVCBP) to ask the broader question: What does it cost a child to be exposed to this system?
This report is our organizations’ joint attempt to combine the stories we heard at our listening sessions, research on fees and fines in the judicial system, and data about the criminal legal system in West Virginia to provide a fuller accounting of harms done by the system and what it might require to truly interrupt these harms.
Our research began with a look at the financial penalties imposed by courts: fines, fees, and restitution. But as we reviewed the data and spoke with those personally impacted by the criminal legal system, we learned that the most serious costs are those that go uncounted.
“Criminal cases extract wealth from children and their families in several ways that go unrecorded. Some costs are directly ordered by the court, such as paying for GPS monitoring or drug screens, while others are not ordered by a court, but are the result of court actions, like needing to miss work to attend a hearing,” explains WVCBP criminal legal policy analyst, Sara Whitaker. “Beyond those financial costs, children impacted by this system are burdened with trauma that lingers for years and a criminal record that follows them into adulthood, negatively affecting their education, employment, and housing opportunities.”
Our most significant finding was how the criminal legal system pours additional harm on top of pre-existing harm. For many children in the Mountain State, adversity begins long before they face the criminal legal system. And over the last three decades, we have learned how childhood adversity can have profound and long-term impacts on people’s well-being, including increasing their likelihood of criminal legal system involvement.
The criminal system for children claims to exist for the purpose of rehabilitating kids; in reality, it does the opposite. The system compounds old traumas by separating the child from whatever protective factors they might have access to. Then the system adds new traumas caused by isolation, stress, exposure to abuse, and more. As one listening session participant described the system simply: “It’s not designed for children. You’re supposed to be loved.”
We know that the criminal system for children fails to improve the lives of those it supposedly serves and that even bold, expensive efforts to “reform” the system, like the creation of youth reporting centers explored in our research, functionally serve to expand the system and the harms it perpetrates.
Our report concludes by offering three basic strategies for how advocates might thread the needle of helping children, without growing the system that is harming them:
We also emphasize the importance of disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline.
“The school-to-prison pipeline is a concerning national issue where children are systematically funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children, who often have histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, would benefit more from supportive services than from punitive measures,” says Midian Leadership Project COO, Turan D. Rush. “I’ve personally witnessed the challenges my friends faced within the school system, providing me with firsthand insight into these issues. Understanding and sharing these stories is essential to addressing and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. The experiences of my friends highlight the racial and socioeconomic inequities and financial and social costs that are prevalent in disciplinary practices applied to youth in West Virginia.”
Read our full report here.
