Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CfJJ), a youth rights organization, will hold a 5K walk/run benefit race on Sun., Oct. 14 at Jamaica Pond.
The event marks National Youth Justice Awareness Month, which is observed by various youth rights advocacy organizations.
CfJJ, headquartered downtown, advocates for policies that prevent juvenile delinquency and keeps young people out of the adult criminal justice system. The organization notes that in Massachusetts, 17-year-olds are treated as adults by the court system.
One of CfJJ’s recent efforts was a study in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts called “Arrested Futures: The Criminalization of School Discipline in Massachusetts’s Three Largest School Districts.”
The study examined the use of police officers to enforce discipline in Boston, Springfield and Worcester schools. The study criticized what it described as the overuse of arrests for relatively minor behavior problems and the great expense of police officers. One case cited involved an 11-year-old arrested on multiple charges, including assault and battery, for running out of a school assembly and throwing a snowball at a teacher.
For more information about CfJJ, see cfjj.org.
From press materials.