The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When David Muhammad was 15, his mother moved from Oakland, Calif., to Philadelphia with her boyfriend, leaving Muhammad in the care of his brothers, ages 20 and 21, both of whom were involved in the drug scene. Over the next two years, Muhammad was arrested three times — for selling drugs, attempted murder and illegal gun possession. For Muhammad, life turned around. He wound up graduating from Howard University, running a nonprofit in Oakland called the Mentoring Center and serving in the leadership of the District of Columbia’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Then he returned to Oakland for a two-year stint as chief probation officer for Alameda County, in the same system that once supervised him. Muhammad’s unlikely elevation came during a remarkable, if largely overlooked, era in the history of America’s juvenile justice system. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77 percent. Can that progress be sustained — or is America about to reverse course and embark on another juvenile incarceration binge?

Transcript

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0:00.0	An American story that we all know, and that I've lived for a lot of my life, is the story of rising incarceration.
0:13.0	The United States prides itself on being a nation of freedom and liberty.
0:19.0	And yet, we have the biggest prison system in the history of the world.
0:25.1	And for many decades, that system was just growing and growing, including when it came to
0:31.3	young people.
0:33.0	But what if there was a disruption in that narrative?
0:36.8	What if the story changed?
0:40.1	My name is James Foreman Jr.
0:42.3	I'm a law professor at Yale University
0:44.7	and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
0:49.9	I became a public defender in the middle of this hyper punitive era.
0:56.0	For six years, I represented young people in the juvenile and adult court systems.
1:01.4	This was Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, when people were talking about locking up more of everybody.
1:09.6	More young people were being charged as adults and even being sent to death
1:13.7	row. The mantra of the day was, if you're old enough to do the crime, you're old enough to do the
1:20.7	time. As a defense lawyer, I was in the courtroom every day arguing for alternatives to prison for my clients.
1:30.4	I would point to job training programs and mentoring programs, after-school tutoring, and mental
1:36.8	health treatment. And the judge sitting across from me would often say things like, well, counselor,
1:46.4	you know, I understand that your client has had a challenging life, but part of what I have to do is send your client a message. So I'm
1:53.7	going to give them a month or two months behind bars. I could see that these judges were telling
2:00.8	themselves a story, which was that a relatively short
2:04.7	amount of time behind bars would be a wake-up call. In their mind, they were helping these kids.
	...

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