While the number of children charged with crimes in Indiana has decreased since 2010, the number of Black youth being detained without conviction still remains high.

Cameron Washington, 16, was one of those kids just three years ago.

He was sent to the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center, which sits right in the middle of the historically Black east side Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, for a firearm charge.

“I have done things in my life I’m not proud of. I know what it is like on both sides of the fence. I know what it’s like to be behind a gun and I know the other side,” Washington said.

Washington was one of more than 400 kids in Indianapolis alone whose case was filed by the Marion County Prosecutors Office between January 2020 and March of 2022. There have been challenges tackling disparities in the juvenile justice system for decades and city officials, state lawmakers and local organizations’ next tasks have been trying to eliminate these inequities.

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New B.O.Y, new approach

Washington was instructed by the judge in his case to attend New B.O.Y. (Breed of Youth), a mentoring and development program after completing his probation for the firearm charge. The community-based program focuses on school-level intervention for at-risk youth, and works with those who have been in the system.

As is the case with Washington, the organization gets referrals from Marion County Juvenile Division.

“Once I make that phone call and do an intake for a young man, I’ll often hear parents say, ‘I wish we had known about you sooner,’” said Kareem Hines, New B.O.Y’s founder. 

Hines said they will often get young men who are immersed in street culture and who have been affected by trauma and struggle to build new relationships.

“It’s hard for them to see outside their neighborhood, to even see past tomorrow,” Hines said.

Indiana juvenile detention rates for Black youth

There are more than 515,000 white youth and more than 93,000 Black youth younger than 18 in the state. While the rate of arrests is relatively the same across racial lines, Black youth charged with a crime have a 30% chance of being detained compared to 15% of white youth, according to the 2022 Indiana Juvenile Justice Racial and Ethnic Disparities Plan. 

What is unknown in the data set examined by the plan is what specific crimes were committed, which would impact detention rates.

What the data does show is white youth are diverted out of the juvenile justice system more often than African American youth, making them less likely to have a juvenile record or become repeat offenders.

A short stay in detention has been associated with serious harm to a youth’s mental and physical well-being, stifled education, reduced employment prospects and further justice system involvement, according to a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private philanthropy that focuses on developing solutions for problems like youth detention.

One of the foundation’s calls to action would be to invest in partnerships with community-based organizations like New B.O.Y. 

“Having mentors like Kareem, who has been like a father figure in my life, built me up and changed my mindset. They’re elevating me to things that I never thought I could do before,” Washington said. “Now, I’m able to talk to my community and hold stakeholders accountable for the decisions they make that affect kids and that’s powerful.”

Lawmakers have also made efforts to address the high rate of youth incarceration in Indiana.

Lawmakers pass juvenile justice legislation

In 2022, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed House Bill 1359 into law, a package of juvenile justice policy reforms aimed at improving youth outcomes and using state resources more efficiently. The legislation mandates using risk assessment tools to divert youth away from the system to achieve more consistent and equitable decisions. 

It also recommends not detaining children under 12 years old when possible and requires the development of a statewide plan to collect and track key juvenile justice data, according to the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments. 

Almost half of U.S. states, including Indiana, do not have a minimum age for juvenile adjudication, which means they can detain children of any age. The National Juvenile Justice Network recommends all states set the minimum age of prosecution at no lower than 14 in accordance with the standards set forth by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

For the 2022-23 school year, the youngest student arrested on school grounds in Indiana was 8 years old.

A total of 155 children, aged 12 and under, were arrested at schools that year.

On the prosecution side of juvenile justice, at least in Marion County, their focus is keeping kids accused of lower-level offenses from going the traditional criminal route.

There were signs of sexual abuse at youth center. State kept sending boys and money anyway.

“I think we’ve done a pretty good job of trying to keep the lower-level stuff out of the juvenile justice system,” Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears, who stepped into the role in 2019, said.

“We’ve really tried to increase our robust relationships with the schools to make sure that we can identify kids who are maybe going on the wrong path or don’t have the support they need.”

According to the Marion County Probation Department, 726 youths were sent to juvenile detention last year. In 2022, that number was just below 600. 

Mears said the reason for the uptick can be traced to an increase in youth being arrested for more serious crimes. 

“We are seeing an increase in gun crimes and gun violence,” Mears said. “The No. 1 charge that we have right now in our juvenile court is dangerous possession of a firearm, which is anyone under 18 having a gun. That’s by a pretty significant margin.”

Black youth were eight times more likely to be shot in Indianapolis compared to youth of any other race or ethnicity, according to data compiled by the Indianapolis Gun Violence Project for the first half of 2023.

The prosecutor said the vast majority of juvenile cases that have come across his desk in the last year and a half have been African American boys.

That’s by design says Anthony Beverly, who has been the executive director for Stop the Violence Indianapolis, Inc. for nearly two decades. 

Law prompted by IndyStar/ProPublica reporting increases scrutiny of abuse at youth centers

“These systems are messing up our guys, racist policies that are designed to keep their foot on the necks of Black people and people in poverty,” Beverly said. “We look at the gun violence and yet we change a law that says you can have a gun at 18. You can’t buy cigarettes, you can’t go to the club to drink alcohol but you can have a gun. Make it make sense.”

Beverly runs multiple community programs for teen boys, including one that advocates for kids in the courtroom – even if they don’t want the help at the time.

“Street culture has taken over everything in these kids’ lives and it’s been exacerbated through music and social media,” Beverly said. “Social media is a big issue. One of the things that’s most notable is this idea that if you claim to be a tough guy you have to prove it.”

He often tells the boys in his programs that the world is bigger than their neighborhood, but he knows that notion is harder for them to understand when the neighborhood has been their whole world.

Washington, the teen in New B.O.Y, and a few other boys in the program spoke about their experience at an April 30 meeting hosted by the Marion County Public Health Department. The public meeting, organized to address youth gun violence, was held at Martin University, the state’s only predominately Black institution, located in Martindale-Brightwood.

Hines with New B.O.Y wants community leaders to change their approach when it comes to creating real connections with youth because even with so many organizations, he feels there’s a disconnect. 

“There has to be an intentional ecosystem that includes the kids, but we have to go where the kids are,” Hines said at the meeting. “We have to stop inviting them to these high-level meetings using some language that goes over their heads just to be transactional.”

Teens from New B.O.Y. start CC Cares nonprofit and host food giveaway

New B.O.Y. mentoring program helps young men “turn pain into purpose,” like two teens who started a nonprofit after respective struggles with DCS and the juvenile justice system.

A part of that ecosystem includes lawmakers, and even with data still being collected, Hines wants to make sure that Indiana’s juvenile justice plan keeps in mind the racial and ethnic disparities of Black youth in the system when coming up with recommendations for solutions.

At the core, Washington feels like a lot of adults don’t understand the reality of young people’s lives and that’s why he wanted to create a non-profit as his way of helping his peers. 

“Because no one gave to us in the system, but we’re feeding into our community,” Washington said. “Like a seed, we water the seed, we feed the seed and it grows.”

New B.O.Y is helping them get there.

Jade Jackson’s reporting on was undertaken as a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism grantee of its 2023 Impact Fund for Reporting on Health Equity and Health Systems. Contact Jade Jackson at Jade.Jackson@IndyStar.com. Follow her on Twitter @IAMJADEJACKSON.