Presenter: Tony Li, Psychology, Global Public Health Scholars
My internship was with MaryPIRG's Juvenile Justice Campaign, an on-campus non-profit organization, the 2019 Fall semester. The goal of our campaign was to spread awareness about the issues that lie within juvenile incarceration, such as with mass incarceration, discrimination, mental health, and poor rehabilitation, and to educate others about them. My role within this organization was as a grassroots coordinator and the head of recruitment, where I was heavily involved with getting the student body involved, and encouraging them to engage in future activism. Some of the events that we ran were a film screening and an educational panel, where matters of juvenile incarceration were shared with the student body to reduce stigma. Currently, we are working to use the momentum we gained from last semester, to push for a bill to be passed this semester, regarding prison reformation and rehabilitation services.
I enjoyed your presentation and your genuine passion about this topic is great to see. I actually have not heard about this organization on campus before, but your presentation has brought me some interest in it. Spreading awareness about such a huge problem is a great way to enact change. How has this campaign specifically addressed the huge racial and socioeconomic disparities?
Great project! You mention that you were interested in this field as you wanted to be a psychiatrist for a detention facility in the future, and that there were a lack of people doing this job. Is there a lack of psychiatrists in general, or is this shortage specific for the prison system? Why do you think this shortage exists? Thank you for talking about and working with this topic!
Hi Beverly! Definitely, the communities and backgrounds of these incarcerated youths have an effect on their rates of incarceration. For example, unfortunately in Maryland, African American youths are eight times more likely to be arrested than Caucasians (Check out this website for more information: https://www.nokidsinprison.org/explore/maryland/?section=race-interactive).
Usually, it is these youths from more minority/marginalized communities and backgrounds that have these higher incarceration rates.
Also, through crime statistics data, countries already have access to a mostly representative scale of their at-risk populations, but for the countries that do not, I would agree with the idea that there need to be critical evaluations of their incarcerated populations to see who is more at risk; in order to prevent their cyclical and generational incarceration…
Amazing project! How do you think the community and background of these youths affects the rates of incarceration? Do you think implementing a way to find out which youths are more susceptible to being incarcerated and providing those communities with certain resources can help reduce the rates of mass incarceration? If not, what are the resources other than emotional support that can be provided to incarcerated youths to reduce repeated offences?