Blog: Juvenile Justice Reform

Youth Today tipped me off to an upcoming one-hour webinar on conducting mental health screenings and assessments in the juvenile justice system.
It's sponsored by The Council of State Governments' Justice Center and will be held June 30, from 3pm - 4pm EST. Among other things, the webinar will "showcase '10 steps' that have proven to be necessary for effective implementation of mental health screening in juvenile justice settings."
Follow the links to register.

*Photo copyright Adam Foster | Codefor; reposted under Creative Commons license.

• Charging families for detained children? That's what San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing, along with a host of other fees, to balance the city budget. Although the fees would be waived for foster children and families making 30% or less of the local median income, the proposal has come under serious fire from the City Supervisor.
• Three youth in the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice facility have swine flu, and 18 other youth and two staff members are showing flu symptoms as well. Does your facility have a plan for what it would do in a similar situation? June 21st UPDATE: six youth at a Louisiana juvenile justice facility have come down with the flu. It's not clear if they're suffering from swine flu, but officials took the precaution of suspending weekend visitation to prevent the flu from spreading.

Connecticut’s juvenile court caseloads dropped by a third in the past four years as prevention and early intervention paid off. A report released by the National Juvenile Justice Network and the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, Turning It Around: Successes and Opportunities in Juvenile Justice, shows how Connecticut’s system has improved since 1993, when it was so bad a federal judge had to step in to protect kids in detention.

Recently, I interviewed Estella Rebeiro, senior juvenile probation officer at the Reclaiming Futures site in Bristol County, MA, about a local implementation of the Changing Lives Through Literature program, which I introduced in a post last month. Ms. Rebeiro is also a certified schoolteacher and has served as co-facilitator of the Changing Lives through Literature Program for the local juvenile court since 2001. (See part two of her interview here.)  
What are your overall impressions of Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL)?
 
It’s the most exciting and rewarding thing I do as part of my job at the court. I’m elated to even talk about it.

Still a little bit of lead time on this one: the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) will hold its annual national juvenile justice conference in Chicago July 12-15, 2009.
 
The agenda will cover juvenile and family law topics, including trauma, custody and visitation, divorce, child abuse and neglect, truancy, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, crossover youth, substance abuse, and Reclaiming Futures.
 
Registration is open to "all judges, prosecutors, family law attorneys, defense counsel, administrators, planners, social workers, psychologists, mental health professionals, CASA workers, and those interested in the improvement of juvenile and family justice."

Missed last week's webinar Mac Prichard and I did on using social media for juvenile justice?  No fear.
You can download the PowerPoint presentation and a resource sheet packed with helpful weblinks from the webinar's sponsor, Coalition of Juvenile Justice, or from Reclaiming Futures, where you can also grab a recording of the webinar itself.  

A few weeks back, I posted a "parents' bill of rights" from Texas, so it's only fitting that I also post a strength-based bill of rights for youth in the justice system (see p. 3 of the linked document) created by Laura Nissen, the National Director of Reclaiming Futures.
Now there's a model bill of rights for children in the justice system from the Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, and a list of states introducing it as legislation this year: California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. 

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has announced two more grants related to youth mentoring. Their deadlines are almost upon us, so here's the details:

Looking for a succinct, convincing brief to support your case that keeping teens out of the justice system actually cuts crime and saves money?
Look no further than the Justice Policy Institute's (JPI) new brief, The Costs of Confinement: Why Good Juvenile Justice Policies Make Good Fiscal Sense. For example, check out the charts on pp. 10-11. They show that the 10 states that lowered youth populations the most in juvenile justice facilities between 1997-2006 saw violent offenses go down 9%, and non-violent offenses dropped by 16%. 
Yet the 10 states who put the most kids into juvenile justice facilities during the same time period saw their violent offenses go up by 8%. While their non-violent offenses did decline, they only declined by an average of 10% -- a 6% smaller drop than was seen in states who locked up fewer kids.