The Concrete Jungle: Where Dreams Are Made of . . . and Now Where Children Are Protected

The tragic and unsettling story of Kalief Browder has notably emerged as a prominent illustration of our criminal justice system’s historical failure to protect our youth. Kalief’s story gained massive media attention with the help of a TIME documentary series featured on Netflix and famous A-listers such as music artist Jay-Z and TV host Rosie O’Donnell. It is hard to ignore the fact that Kalief Browder was cheated by the system; he chose suicide to escape his demons, which developed after undeserved time spent at Riker’s – a place he would have never experienced had he initially been tried as a juvenile in Family Court. Kalief Browder’s devastating story, along with many other similar stories, provoked valid concerns about criminal procedural policies in New York. Fortunately, Kalief did not die in vain; on April 10, 2017, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo signed the New York State Raise the Age reform bill into law. In October 2018, this law commenced New York’s progressive journey of raising its juvenile age from sixteen years old to eighteen years old. Although this change is a tremendous step for the State’s criminal justice system, its execution has and will require considerable adjustment and adaptation by departments and courts throughout the state. This Article discusses the history of the Raise the Age Campaign, the reasons for its promulgation, the potentially significant impact of the new law on our current system, local strategies for implementation, and additional steps beyond raising the age that must be taken to further resolve our system’s juvenile delinquency issues

We All Need Somebody to Lean On: Using the Law to Nurture Our Children, Beginning with Third-Party Visitation

Perhaps one of the single most important aspects of a healthy childhood is emotional support from healthy caregivers. As it stands, New York’s visitation law prohibits third-party caregivers from stepping in and providing children with this important psychological and emotional need by automatically denying them standing to seek visitation in court. In New York, third-party standing for visitation is denied solely on a procedural basis, irrespective of the child’s personal familial situation, namely whether their parents are completely unavailable. Specifically, when a child’s parents become unavailable due to death, incarceration or otherwise, and such child becomes a ward of the foster care system, the child’s aunt, uncle, or other third-party caregiver cannot petition for visitation of that child under current New York law. As a result, the child is effectively deprived of necessary emotional connections unless the third-party caregiver decides to formally adopt him or her. New York’s Domestic Relations Law does not explicitly prohibit third-party visitation, but rather this current, nonsensical application of New York visitation law has developed through the judiciary, which is supposed to serve as these children’s last line of defense. Thus, this piece respectfully calls for the court of this progressive State to join other neighboring states in fostering relationships between children and healthy caregivers by awarding standing for visitation to third-parties when both of the child’s parents are completely unavailable to take care of them