You can hear the story I did for WBEZ right HERE. All last week our Inside and Out series looked at what happens when young people land in Illinois’ youth prisons. But there are also kids who start on a path towards prison they take a peek and decide it’s not for them. Sometimes they have help…

This story was produced for WBEZ.  You can listen right here. If you look at all the arrests of juveniles in the city of Chicago, you’ll see that about a quarter of them-and that’s almost 5,000 a year-take place on the grounds of Chicago Public Schools. Even when that arrest is the end of it,…

Listen to my WBEZ story right HERE. Thousands of Chicago area kids are arrested at school each year. Some of those arrests are for offenses as serious as carrying guns to class. Other times, they’re for incidents as minor as lobbing apples across the lunch room in an overzealous food fight. But even an arrest that is never brought…

The retail theft class you just heard about is run by the probation department in partnership with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. On the day reporter Linda Paul was there, Assistant State’s Attorney Maryam Ahmad captivated the young people and adults with some frank talk on legal theory and real life stories. Ahmad gave a presentation designed to…

There are many more black and brown young people in our jails and prisons than you’d predict, if you just look at their percentages in the population at large. The numbers are simply out of whack. And that’s got a fancy name. It’s called D-M-C: disproportionate minority contact. Juvenile justice experts say it’s not rocket…