Blog: News

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• One of the two juvenile court judges involved in the Pennsylvania kids-for-cash scandal pleaded guilty on April 29th. (Missed the story? We linked to a story in The New York Times last year about the two judges who apparently accepted money to funnel kids into a private juvenile detention facility.)
• It doesn't really cover juvenile drug courts, but the Organization of American States (OAS), American University, and others have just published an overview of a survey of drug courts in 12 countries, giving an interesting (and positive) international picture of the intervention.
• Helping kids in trouble with the law be successful means helping them be successful in school and on the job. So you might be interested in this paper from The Urban Institute, "Improving Education and Employment for Disadvantaged Young Men: Proven and Promising Strategies."  It reviews the "evidence base on programs and policies such as youth development for adolescents and young teens; programs seeking to improve educational attainment and employment for in-school youth; and programs that try to 'reconnect' those who are out of school and frequently out of work, including public employment programs." Next, it reviews promising and proven strategies for helping affected youth. (Hat tip to @isaac_outcomes.)

News - Juvenile Justice System and Alcohol and Drugs

• Teens trapped in prison: "Nearly 10 percent of the inmates in Illinois' juvenile prisons have essentially completed their sentences — in some cases more than a year ago — but are stuck behind bars because they have no place to go, state records show." (Hat tip to the Campaign for Youth Justice.)
• Are teens in the criminal and juvenile justice systems getting younger? No, according to an analysis performed by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. The lead author of the study also teamed up with a professor of womens' studies at the University of Hawai'i to author an op-ed in The New York Times called "The Myth of Mean Girls." (The title says it all.)

Juvenile Justice System - Grants

Here's links to several funding opportunities and a specific fundor. Not all are juvenile-specific. The pool of plausible applicants for several of these will be quite narrow. 

• First, a national mentoring grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), which is intended to provide support and enhancement for community-level mentoring programs for "high-risk populations that are underserved due to location, shortage of mentors, special physical or mental challenges of the targeted population," and so on. OJJDP also issued a similar grant solicitation on a regional, multi-state level. Application deadline (for both): April 22, 2010.
• Alternatively, you can start a new family drug court or enhance an existing one with OJJDP grant funds. Though not focused on teens in the justice system, these funds could provide needed support for substance-using adults in your community's dependency court. Application deadline: April 27, 2010.
• You could also bid on providing technical assistance to the State Advisory Groups (SAGs) in juvenile justice. Applications are due April 29, 2010.
• If you want to do research in the juvenile justice system, Youth Today lists a few more funding opportunities.
• Finally, you might be able to get useful project support from the Public Welfare Foundation, which likes to focus on systemic change. Juvenile justice is a focus area for the foundation. 

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• Last year, the results of a a 20-year study in Canada showed that contact with the juvenile justice system makes boys more likely to commit crimes as adults. But according to a Youth Today article [subscription required], other researchers are coming up with similar conclusions. The question is, as the author of the article asks, what will juvenile justice system policy makers do about it?
  

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• The New York Times published a strong editorial arguing for immediate and decisive action on the part of the federal government to address shockingly high rates of sexual abuse in juvenile detention centers and prisons around the country. (Last week, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) published the first-ever report of its kind on the sexual victimization of teens behind bars.)
• James Bell of the W. Haywood Burns Institute seized on the BJA's report to deliver another eloquent, blistering column on the state of the juvenile justice system this week: "Captured by the Clueless." If you're interested in Bell's work on disproportionate minority contact, you should also check out his interview with John Kelly of Youth Today.
• Gotham Gazette published an excellent look at New York state's struggle to get rid of the "culture of violence" in its juvenile justice system. (Hat tip to @policy4results.) Staff-vs.-youth violence has been documented in reports by the U.S. Department of Justice, a task force set up by the governor of New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights Watch. The Gotham Gazette piece does a good job of explaining the frustrations of reformers as well as the counter-arguments of union representatives. But what resonated most strongly with me was this quote:

The 17-year-old who spent time in the state's facilities said the workers' attitudes varied. "Some staff was like, 'Let them be kids'; other staff was like, 'They did a crime.' Others were like, 'I just don't care 'cause I still get paid.' There was some staff that really helped me and there were others that didn't care," she recalled.

Only recently, I shared our 10 most popular posts, eight of the best resources published on this blog on improving adolescent drug treatment, and a list of positive activities for kids in the justice system. (That was all to celebrate the blog's first birthday, in November.)
But looking back over our posts for 2009, I see we never compiled a list of the most important stories of the year. Stories, in other words, that might herald major shifts in policy, breakthroughs in the research, or that were important enough to make the national news.  Those, then, comprise the 20 stories I've collected below.

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) is pleased to announce its 2010 Annual National Conference, Hill Day and Member Meeting, to be held April 10-13 at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown, Washington, DC.
The theme of the conference, “Ensuring School Engagement and Success for Youth At-Risk” is expected to draw more than 250 juvenile justice practitioners and advocates from across the U.S. and its territories.
 
Primary goals for the 2010 CJJ annual conference include:

Juvenile Justice System News (Mostly)

• Work in the juvenile justice system? Seen kids hammered for minor drug offenses because they occurred within 1,000 feet of a school? Well, those laws may not work very well. In 2008, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) did a thorough analysis and critique in one Massachusetts community, called The Geography of Punishment: How Huge Sentencing Enhancement Zones Harm Communities, Fail to Protect Children. (Also, if you happen to have a used Mac laptop you want to give away as a tax-deductible gift, PPI could use one for its many volunteers. Just use the contact form on the PPI website to learn more.)
• Here's a sobering Washington Post editorial on the sexual violence and exploitation endured by young girls on the margins of our society. And guess where many of these girls end up? The juvenile justice system. (Hat tip to Nancy Gannon Hornberger and the Act-4-JJ Facebook page.) Corroboration comes from a new study for the National Institute of Justice showing that poly-victimization is pervasive among girls in the juvenile justice system, based on a sample of girls in South Carolina.

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• The Coalition for Juvenile Justice has an update on the Congressional reauthorization of the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), one of the key engines of juvenile justice reform. (Thanks to the Coalition for Juvenile Justice for sharing its slide deck.)
• Big news from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, in the juvenile "kids for cash" case. The state Supreme Court overturned thousands of juvenile adjudications made by former Judge Mark A. Ciavarella, Jr., because he consistently failed to inform juveniles of their right to representation. Only the cases of youth still under court supervision would be eligible for retrial. (Hat tip to Youth Today.)