In 2001, Radio Diaries gave both Judge Jeremiah, a Rhode Island juvenile court judge, and Matthew, a 16-year-old repeat offender, tape recorders. Judge Jeremiah released Matthew early, for good behavior. Two weeks later, Matthew was arrested again for selling drugs. Through their diaries, Matthew and the judge tell the same story from two different sides of the bench. 

A year and a half after this story aired, our friend and diarist 18-year-old Matthew Omisore was killed. 

Professor Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the Independent Expert behind the UN Secretary-General's Study on Violence against Children and a world-renowned advocate of child rights, attended the 16th Session of the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice this week in Vienna, Austria. In an interview with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Mr. Pinheiro outlined several ways in which violence against children and crime intersect. On the subject of Internet-based child abuse and child pornography, for example, he emphasized that legal protection for children has not grown to match the rapid growth of the web. "Most important is to deal with the children [exploited by web-based abuse] as victims and handle their recovery," he said. "We need to be much more careful than we are." Mr. Pinheiro also cited a crucial link between child protection and justice in the handling of crimes such as trafficking and prostitution. "In many countries, children involved in prostitution are criminalized and even punished because they are involved in something illicit. This is unacceptable," he asserted. We must make sure not to indict the victims. This would be the worst thing that could happen." Indeed, many marginal activities associated with children and youth - such as street begging and loitering in gangs - are criminalized, and Mr. Pinheiro believes this is a mistake. In most cases, he said, there are adults behind these activities, and the children are being victimized by those adults. "If you take, for instance, the gangs in Central America, most of the homicides and heinous crimes are not being committed by adolescents, but are being committed by adults," he pointed out. "In Brazil, in my own country, I would say that 95 per cent or more of the homicides are committed by adults. "Thus you don't have to criminalize every organization of youth, which is precisely what happens," added Mr. Pinheiro. "You just detain every child or adolescent with tattoos, even if you don't have any indication that they committed crimes." For Mr. Pinheiro, the bottom line is that the victimization of children globally is a much larger problem than crime among children, and this must be the starting point for any discussion of this issue. "The number of children as victims is far greater than the number of children as perpetrators," he said. "The problem is that you have the perception of children and adolescents as responsible for the high rates of homicides. This doesn?t correspond to reality, but adolescents are the new scapegoats of the 21st century." The 16th Session of the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice took place all this week, with meetings concluding today.

At overcrowded and underfunded public schools across the country high suspension rates are exacerbating existing achievement gaps. Often, chaos in the classroom is to blame, keeping students from concentrating on their classes. On this edition we’ll hear excerpts from Russell Long’s film “Room to Breathe” which takes us to a middle school in San Francisco, California, that began teaching mindfulness in the hopes of giving students the skills they need to focus on learning. 

Remorse, which premiered March 21, 1996, on All Things Considered, explores the death of Eric Morse, a five-year-old thrown from the fourteenth floor window of a Chicago housing project by two other boys, ten and eleven years old, in October, 1994. The documentary was reported by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman -- both residents of the Ida B. Wells housing development, where the crime took place, and both sixteen years old. Remorse marks the return of Jones and Newman to NPR's airwaves. In March of 1993, at age fourteen, they collaborated with producer David Isay for the radio documentary Ghetto Life 101, an audio diary of young people growing up on Chicago's South Side. When Eric Morse fell to his death in 1994, LeAlan and Lloyd felt compelled to pick up their tape recorders once again. They spent a year reporting the case and interviewed everyone from Eric's mother, Toni Morse, in the only interview she's granted to the press, to Vince Lane, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, to the father of one of the assailants. They set out to learn about the story from the inside, to see how a tragedy like this can touch a community, and to bring to light the scars it left behind. Remorse won the Grand Prize Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Peabody Award in 1995.

Jeff's reputation as a bully was something of a legend in the coastal town where he grew up.  Eight years later, and with a chance to start over again, Jeff knows why he bullied...and why it might still work for him.  Can you grow out of bullying?  And what would it take for bullying to seem less useful in the first place?

This piece was produced by Jones Franzel with funding from a Transom Donor Grant.  It is presented by Blunt Youth Radio's Incarcerated Youth Speak Out Project.

There is a national substance abuse epidemic and teens are especially vulnerable. In Part I, SQRadio profiles recovering teen addicts and "recovery schools."

Frankie always thought his family was pretty normal until the day the FBI showed up. His dad had been hiding from the law for 15 years, and Frankie had no idea.

“I was coming home from school. I got off the school bus. My Dad and Mom were in the kitchen fixing a waffle iron. And about 10 minutes after I got off the bus, all these cops pulled in our yard. And my Dad looked out the window and he looked at our family in the kitchen. 

This story is part of the Teenage Diaries series produced by Radio Diaries for NPR. Since 1996, Executive Producer Joe Richman has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to document their lives. In December of 2012, Radio Diaries will revisit five of the original diarists 16 years after their first recordings. The series airs on NPR’s All Things Considered. 

Juan and his family crossed the Rio Grande illegally into Texas four years ago. Now they live in a poor community just this side of the US-Mexican border.

This story is part of the  Teenage Diaries series  produced by Radio Diaries for NPR. Since 1996, Executive Producer Joe Richman has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to document their lives. In December of 2012, Radio Diaries will revisit five of the original diarists 16 years after their first recordings. The series airs on NPR’s  All Things Considered.     

To mark the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11, Radio Rookies, WNYC’s Peabody Award-winning youth journalism program, presents “Our 9/11: Growing Up in The Aftermath”, an hour special hosted by NPR’s Brooke Gladstone. 

Last spring, Radio Rookies put out a call for young people to tell us about their 9/11.  In this hour, six young people report on the ways that day and what came after shaped who they are now.  Some faced deep personal losses and others felt changed because they were so young when the towers fell.  Eric’s older brother Paul worked in Tower 1 and never made it home.  Jillian lost her father, a New York City police officer.  Norhan suddenly found herself the target of other kids’ animosity and fear because she is Muslim.  Brendan and Joey weren’t personally affected by the attacks, but they felt called to service.  Erin, whose father was a New York City firefighter, spent the months after 9/11 attending funerals and watching her father struggle to recover from injuries both physical and psychological. 

For more on WNYC's "Decade Nine Eleven" project, please visit our website:
http://www.wnyc.org/series/911-tenth-anniversary/

(The working title of this program was "The 9/11 Generation Speaks")