An interesting program in Mahoning County designed to teach young people about the criminal justice system.

A new teen court makes youthful offenders accountable to their peers and offers participants a hands-on learning experience on the justice system.

The program, designed for first-time juvenile misdemeanor and status offenders, was launched last month at the Mahoning County Juvenile Court in the Martin P. Joyce Juvenile Justice Center.

Ten other Ohio counties have teen courts.

It serves as a peer-sentencing court for cases such as shoplifting, disorderly conduct, harassment, truancy and fighting.

State lawmakers have still not come to a resolution on whether young people who sext will be charged with as sex offenders. While the ACLU supports not charging underage people with felonies, we advocate that this should not be a matter for criminal courts, but for education of students and parents.

A Warren County state representative is concerned a bill crafted a year ago to address “sexting” between minors has not passed the legislature.

State Rep. Ron Maag, R-Lebanon said he’s reached out to state Rep. Tyrone Yates, D-Cincinnati, who chairs the House Criminal Justice Committee, on Substitute House Bill 132, which would make the creation, exchange and possession of nude materials between minors by a telecommunication device a first-degree misdemeanor.

The bill would not rule out the possibility of a felony charge, which could be reserved for cases where the true intent of the crime is malicious.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court categorically forbidding schools from doing so, a school in Iowa strip searched a group of students because a sum of money went missing.

School’s in! September’s here; pencils are sharpened, apples are polished, and — in one Iowa town where administrators’ summer reading list clearly did not include Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding — female students are strip-searched on suspicion of theft.

The Des Moines Register reported over the weekend that on Aug. 21, the third day of school, a student at Atlantic High reported $100 missing from her purse. Five girls who were somehow deemed persons of interest in the case were asked to strip in front of a female counselor and their accuser (!?). (No boys were involved because apparently none were around when the theft was believed to have occurred.) Lawyers (yuh!) for the girls’ families told the Register that (paraphrase) each girl stripped in varying degrees. One 15-year-old “was asked to remove all of her clothing including her undergarments.” Another asked if she could lift up her bra and was told that wasn’t good enough. One was searched twice. At least two were permitted not to remove their underwear because it was more revealing than the others’ and therefore an unlikely hiding place. [End of repellent soft-core juvie prison scene]

Students, have you been strip-searched at school? Tell us about it.

The Times takes a stand on finding better way to address the juvenile justice problems facing our nation.

In the 1990s, states and localities began sending more and more children to juvenile lockups, often for months, while they awaited trial for nonviolent offenses or even noncriminal behavior like being “unruly.” This was a disaster. Children who spend time in detention are far more likely to leave school, suffer alcohol or drug abuse problems or commit violent crimes as adults.

A far better approach — for these young people as well as overburdened government budgets — is to lock up only truly dangerous children and enroll the rest in community-based monitoring programs.

A deeply troubling snapshot of the state of our mental health services for juvenile offenders.

The teenager in the padded smock sat in his solitary confinement cell here in this state’s most secure juvenile prison and screamed obscenities.

The youth, Donald, a 16-year-old, his eyes glassy from lack of sleep and a daily regimen of mood stabilizers, was serving a minimum of six months for breaking and entering. Although he had received diagnoses for psychiatric illnesses, including bipolar disorder, a judge decided that Donald would get better care in the state correctional system than he could get anywhere in his county.

That was two years ago.