Will Loretta Lynch finish what Eric Holder started?

The nation’s first black attorney general will no doubt be remembered for many things, but the steps Eric Holder took to address draconian policies that doom vulnerable children to prison may end up being among his most far-reaching initiatives.

But whether Holder’s impact is lasting  depends in part on his successor. Recently, President Obama nominated Loretta Lynch — currently a U.S. attorney in New York — to replace Holder. If she’s confirmed, will she continue to push local and state governments to dismantle the destructive “school-to-prison” pipeline and to reform juvenile justice practices that derail so many salvageable young lives? We hope so. It’s a big and complicated task but an essential one, because our country simply cannot continue on its current path.

{mosads}We now have the world’s largest prison population and the highest per-capita incarceration rate. This rate has more than quadrupled in the past 40 years and is unprecedented in world history, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Yet our schools are needlessly feeding children – disproportionately children of color – into a grossly unfair and highly ineffective juvenile justice that makes them more likely to fail and end up in adult prisons.

Holder took concrete steps in four areas to make our system fairer for young people and more effective at reducing crime. First, he worked to identify and address the role of childhood trauma in the cycle of crime. Second, he challenged local practices that funneled youth of color into court at disproportionate rates. Third, he intervened to stop physical, sexual, and psychological abuses in juvenile lockup. Fourth, he moved to strengthen due process protections for youth. While these are not the only four areas needing attention in the juvenile justice system, they are among the most critical. 

Holder’s work in the first area — childhood trauma and crime — got off the ground in 2012, when his National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence reported that a shocking 60 percent of America’s children have been exposed at one time or another to crime, abuse and violence – some of them repeatedly, and usually without proper treatment and support.

The report, part of his Defending Childhood initiative, noted that when repeatedly exposed to violence, children’s brains adapt to focus on survival, which “dramatically reduces their ability to delay impulses and gratification, to a degree even beyond that of normal adolescents.” Unsurprisingly, many suffer from trauma and other mental health problems that lead to their involvement with the justice system.

The impact of untreated trauma from exposure to violence is most often felt in communities of color, which struggle with chronic poverty, violence and victimization at disproportionate rates, and where effective treatment is often unaffordable or unavailable. Children affected by trauma rarely get the help they need in the juvenile justice system.

Holder deserves considerable credit for leading the effort to spotlight the problem and recommend ways to deal with it. Coordinated work to address trauma in communities wracked by violence would make our neighborhoods safer. It’s imperative that the Department of Justice (DOJ) continue this vital work.

It’s also crucial that the new attorney general adopt Holder’s second strategy: using the DOJ’s law enforcement powers to address injustice and racial bias at the local level.  

This means taking action in places like Meridian, Mississippi, where an investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that public schools and the juvenile justice system were systematically violating the rights of children, almost exclusively children of color. Students, some as young as 10, were routinely arrested in school for minor infractions such as being tardy or violating the dress code. Denied counsel and due process, these children were put on probation and sometimes even hauled away by police to serve suspensions at the juvenile detention center.

Under Holder, the DOJ launched an investigation and entered into a consent agreement with the school district to address its overzealous disciplinary practices. Also, after confirming that this arrangement between the school and juvenile detention center functioned as a school-to-prison “taxi service,” the DOJ filed suit against the police department, the county and juvenile judges. The suit is currently being litigated.

The DOJ also must maintain focus on the third issue – that is, flexing its muscle to stop the abuse of children in jails and prisons, as it did at the for-profit Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi. A DOJ investigation there found rampant sexual abuse and violence, prompting a federal judge to call the facility a “cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts.” Following an SPLC lawsuit, youths were removed from the prison and housed in a separate facility where appropriate educational, mental health and rehabilitative services were required by a consent decree.

Finally, the DOJ should continue to actively defend due process in juvenile court. Another DOJ investigation found that juvenile courts in Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee, were routinely violating children’s due process and equal protection rights – abuses that primarily affected African-American children. That probe led to a memorandum of understanding between the DOJ, Shelby County, and the juvenile court of Memphis designed to protect children.

Holder’s intervention in these and other cases is exactly what we need in an attorney general. We can only hope that Lynch, if she is made attorney general, will show that Holder’s tenure was not a singular exception, as the New York Times pointed out in an editorial, but a new beginning for a country that still believes in justice for all. 

Bryer is the director of the National Juvenile Justice Network in Washington, DC. Owens is the director and managing attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi office, which is a member of the National Juvenile Justice Network.