When Jeremy Taveras was 16 years old, back in 2012, he was arrested for gang-related activity. Things were turbulent at home, and he was struggling in school.

Celestino Vicente has been in pretrial detention at South Bay for five months. Held on gun and assault charges, he has been deemed too dangerous to be granted bail. It’s serious stuff that Vicente knows could cost him his freedom for a very long time. But he doesn’t want his alleged crime to define him. “Everybody needs to be seen as a citizen first,” Vicente, 37, said.

In her bid to become San Diego’s next district attorney, Geneviéve Jones-Wright made a bold claim about how she would handle young people accused of committing serious crimes.

The career public defender seemed to tell the American Civil Liberties Union in a questionnaire that she’d refuse to try juveniles as adults. The questionnaire asked whether she’d decline to seek sentences of life without parole for any person under 25 at the time of their offense.

Democrats running for governor are campaigning on prison reform, with many of them calling for cutting the inmate population in half. The eight Democrats seeking to challenge Walker say they want to lower costs by scaling back the number of inmates. Many of them are calling for legalizing marijuana, releasing some inmates early, closing one or more prisons and ending parole and probation revocations for violating supervision rules.

Following an extensive study and training program, the Depke Juvenile Complex requested and passed an audit conducted late last year under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

There's a growing movement to change the criminal punishment system in this country, and it's being led by men and women who've lived it. As the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls puts it: "Nothing about us without us."

One week after a gunman took the lives of 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) in Parkland, Florida, students across the country stood in solidarity with students from MSD and walked out of their classes to demand action on gun control

When Illinois effectively banned punitive solitary confinement at juvenile detention centers, we eagerly bid adieu to such cruel and unusual punishment.

Nearly two-thirds of the children sent to the custody of the Alabama Department of Youth Services in 2016 did not commit a felony. Most were locked up for misdemeanors and probation violations. It costs taxpayers a lot of money, and it apparently is not the path to ending recidivism as these young offenders grow into adulthood.

Most Florida counties are failing to provide an alternative means of rehabilitating kids who commit minor crimes that keeps them out of the criminal justice system, where they can acquire a rap sheet that trails them for life. 

If you’re 17 in Missouri, you’re not considered an adult. You can’t vote, serve on a jury or buy cigarettes. However, if you’re charged with a crime, you’re automatically tried as an adult.

New York took an enlightened step in criminal justice last year when Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation raising the age at which young people are treated as adults to 18 from now on. But what of those already behind bars?

“ Getting mail in prison is like hitting the lottery ,” says successful entrepreneur and “returning citizen” Marcus Bullock, 36. That knowledge inspired him to launch Flikshop, a simple app for your phone that allows you to send a postcard to an incarcerated friend or family member.

I spend my Wednesday afternoons at State Correctional Institution-Graterford, a maximum-security prison about an hour away from Temple by car. Here, 10 inmates and the 10 students in my Death and Dying class join together in an Inside-Out course designed to foster transformative learning experiences between people who are incarcerated and those who are not.