Friend,

Our latest report, Only Young Once: Dismantling Georgia’s Punitive Youth Incarceration System, investigates not only policies and practices producing harm and racial disparities in Georgia’s youth legal system, but also the political culture that undergirds it. In Georgia, overemphasis on punishment pushes Black children out of traditional schools and promotes the prosecution of children as young as 13 as adults for certain offenses.

Policies that emphasize youth incarceration over rehabilitation have political roots going back decades in the state. Rather than providing young people with needed services, this approach has led to vast racial disparities, systematic school pushout, well-documented harms meriting federal intervention, and significant fiscal waste. There are three significant concerns that our report addresses:

• Georgia’s youth legal system is designed to incarcerate and punish, not restore or rehabilitate children.

• Georgia has a school-to-prison pipeline that is fueled by a reliance on zero-tolerance policies and alternative schools.

• Georgia’s youth legal system is fiscally wasteful and disproportionately impacts Black children.

“In order to disrupt Georgia’s school-to-prison pipeline and the impacts of youth incarceration, we also have to adopt reforms and disrupt the culture that keeps punitive measures popular,” said Delvin Davis, SPLC senior policy analyst and author of the report. “Otherwise, Georgia’s youth prisons will continue to harm generations of Black youth — just as they were designed to do.”

In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center