About 100 UF students and Gainesville residents discussed Alachua’s criminal justice system Wednesday night.
Three panelists spoke at the Bob Graham Center for Public Service’s event in Pugh Hall about providing more services for mental health, keeping children out of adult courts and the high number of minorities in Alachua’s jails.
Tony Jones, the Gainesville police chief, said there should be a more open dialogue between police and Alachua residents.
He said a large number of minorities in Alachua are arrested every year.
“I began to see a pattern,” he said. “I begin to see, particularly with youth, a disproportional number of children of color being arrested in Gainesville.”
Stacy Scott, the public defender for Alachua’s eighth judicial circuit, said prosecutors shouldn’t have the final say in juveniles being tried in adult courts.
“No one person should get to choose whether a child’s life gets thrown away into the adult system,” she said. “Kids make decisions at age 14, 15 and 16 that they would never make at age 45 and age 50.”
Steve Pittman, the chief operating officer for Meridian Behavioral Healthcare, said there should be more funding for mental health care in Florida’s criminal justice system.
He said after people leave jail, there needs to be a plan to help them.
“The lucky ones have a family, but there’s a lot of unlucky ones that don’t have that support system,” he said.
Ramsey Touchberry, 20, asked Jones about police raids on underage drinkers in Midtown bars during the question-and-answer session allowing the panelists’ speeches.
“It feels like we are incriminating a bunch of our youth that don’t necessarily need to be,” the UF telecommunication sophomore said.
Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @k_newberg.
