By: Marcellus Campos-Reese

2,572. That’s the number of young people who have been in custody in Alameda County’s Probation Department from March 2010 until March 2011. The department -- which covers the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward and others -- estimates that on average as many as 270 young people come through its offices each day.

David Muhammad is the department’s new chief probation officer, and brings a lot of experience with him, some highly personal. Muhammad grew up in Oakland and went through the juvenile justice system himself. Eventually, thanks to what he calls “luck”, he ended up going to college. He went on to work in New York and Washington DC to reform those cities’ juvenile justice systems and served as the executive director of the Mentoring Center in Oakland.

As the new chief, Muhammad wants to encourage young people on probation to do better: “What I want to do is incentivize achievement. If you have a 1.0 grade point average and you raise that by one point, to 2.0, we want to get you 6 months off probation,” said Muhammad.

Muhammad wants to give the same incentives to adults in the system. “So if you are 19 in adult probation and you don’t have your high school diploma? You get your high school diploma (and) we want to get you 6 months off probation. For every six month of steady employment, we want to get you 3 months off probation.”

Atlanta has just become the second largest school district to ever be put on probation, according to the New York Times.  Atlanta schools were threatened with losing their accredidation this fall because school board members could not resolve internal conflicts.  An independent accredidation group called AdvancED gave the 49,000 high schools nine months to shape up.

Students in Atlanta fear the loss of accredidation because it would jeopardize their ability to apply to colleges and receive scholarships.  Probation comes as a blessing for those students graduating this spring.

Listen to Atlanta student opinions from the past couple months here.

Immigration is an issue that constantly has me on the edge of my seat, always waiting to hear what’s going to happen next. But, as I sit on the edge of my seat, nothing seems to be happening -- at least in Washington. There’s still no immigration reform, yet immigrants continue to face discrimination. In Pottsville, Pennsylvania a group of football players beat a Mexican immigrant to death, apparently just for being Latino. Read more...

According to the associate press, earlier this week 18 year old brain Skully and three other Caucasian teens were sentenced to three years probation for the 2008 beating death of a Mexican immigrant in eastern Pennsylvania.