It is often said that “The children are our future.” It is vital to deeply consider the weight of those words as we examine a staggering and grim reality in America, a crisis that’s unfolding before our eyes affecting the future of our children. The situation at hand is not only alarming but also heartbreaking. Our juvenile detention centers, especially in cities like Detroit, are overcrowded, underfunded, and are effectively operating as warehouses for our Black youth, rather than platforms for their rehabilitation and redirection.
The predicament we see our young people facing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Context matters — the environmental factors, the role of their families, the resources they have access to. The palpable sense of despair, the embedded trauma that pervades our communities — especially in places like Detroit, and more broadly, in America — is deeply rooted and often inherited. We’re born into a world of trauma and adversity, and without the necessary resources to navigate these challenges, we’re stuck in a grim cycle. This isn’t just an occasional story, it’s a daily reality playing out on the streets of our cities.
In Detroit, a city already battling its own demons, the crisis is more pronounced. The youth population in juvenile detention is disproportionately Black, a mirror of the systemic bias that plagues every corner of our criminal justice system. To put this in perspective, according to the Sentencing Project, Black youth in Michigan are four times as likely to be detained or committed than their white peers. This is not just a crisis, it’s an emergency. And this emergency is certainly reflective of systemic racism.
Adultification is the term used to define how Black children are viewed as older than they are. Systemic racism has forced Black children into social, emotional and physical adult roles before they are adults, contributing to adultification. This gut-wrenching reality is what showcases in instances of healthcare and the juvenile detention system.
“An alarming truth that I saw present in my work in terms of how our system perpetuates these realities is a key word called adultification, where you impose adult brain developments and adult responses on children and Black youth; both boys and girls are most likely to be adultified,” said attorney Erin Keith. “This idea that even though you’re 12 you know right from wrong and at 12 you should be able to process things maturely because these young men and women are seen as adults through the lens of people whose bias adultifies them.”
These detention centers are often under-resourced, and young people, instead of getting the help, education and therapy they need, find themselves living in harsh conditions parallel to adult prisons. This punitive approach not only strips these children of their childhood, but it also fuels a cycle of recidivism, crime and hopelessness. Once a child enters the juvenile justice system, it’s challenging to get out, especially for Black children who face significant barriers in education, employment and social services.
This crisis goes beyond Detroit’s borders and spills onto the national landscape. It doesn’t just impact the incarcerated youth; it destabilizes families, communities and the entire social fabric of Black America. The detention of a single child can ripple through generations, leading to further disenfranchisement and systemic neglect.
Where did we go wrong? Our society is inclined to penalize rather than to understand; to reprimand instead of rehabilitate. But it is not too late to change our approach. We need to invest in alternatives to incarceration, such as mental health services, community-based programs, educational support and restorative justice initiatives. We must tackle systemic racism head-on, challenging the laws and practices that disproportionately impact Black youth and fuel this crisis.
“Not that young people shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions, but you have to think about the ways that trauma impacts brain development. Many kids have extensive trauma history that most people would not have survived unscathed,” said Keith. “I think that when a child is exposed to an environment where they’re not nurtured and where they are deemed as bad kids – that is the natural progression to continue to move throughout that system because that’s what they know.
“The juvenile system purpose actually is supposed to be rehabilitation and [is] actually supposed to help kids and a lot of the times it’s not rehabilitative, it’s further traumatizing. You have kids being handcuffed, being held in solitary confinement, not having access to showers; how would that make you less likely to offend?” Keith stated. “We have this old school mentality like if we brutalize kids just enough, we’ll scare them straight, but the data and the research show that approach does not result in safer communities or better outcomes for young people.”
Detroit’s Black youth are not merely statistics in a report, they are our children. They have dreams, they have futures, and they have the potential to become leaders, innovators and agents of change. Yet, our current system is casting them into a world of darkness.
This is a call to action. We can no longer stand by as our children are funneled into a system that perpetuates the cycle of poverty, crime and despair. We have to fight for policy reform, for social justice, for better funding, for transparency and for accountability.
The juvenile detention center crisis is not a stand-alone issue. It’s a clear reflection of the broader systemic injustices in America. And if we hope to break the cycle, to give our children the future they deserve, we must start by confronting and uprooting these deeply entrenched systems of inequality and bias.
To quote the great Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We must commit to changing the narrative for Detroit’s Black youth because their plight is America’s plight, and their dreams, our dreams. Only then can we hope to realize a future that is fair, equitable and just for all.
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