Blog: News

Back in March, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) offered $3.6 million for three new Reclaiming Futures sites. Today, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) approved an additional $2.3 million to support those three new Reclaiming Futures sites and provide technical assistance training to the existing 23 sites around the country.

There's so much going on, I had to post another news roundup this week:

• A proposal in the North Carolina legislature would raise the age at which juveniles can be prosecuted from 16 to 18 -- a welcome sign. Numerous editorials have appeared in state papers in recent weeks -- like the one published by Bart Lubow of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative -- in favor of such a change.

Today is National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). It's intended to raise "awareness of effective programs for children's mental health needs; demonstrate how children's mental health initiatives promote positive youth development, recovery, and resilience; and show how children with mental health needs thrive in their communities." 
This year's theme -- "Thriving in the Community" -- is appropriate for anyone working with kids in the justice system, since it emphasizes "how high school youth who receive the services they need are more likely to have positive outcomes, such as better grades, and less likely to have negative outcomes, such as involvement with the juvenile and criminal justice systems."
Check out the SAMHSA site for more info - there's a short report on how systems of care help teens stay in school and are better-behaved, and there's also a Family Guide to Systems of Care for Children With Mental Health Needs.

The Reclaiming Futures initiative was honored to host Marian Wright Edelman (seen on the right in the photo at right, with Laura Nissen, National Director of Reclaiming Futures). Mrs. Edelman is founder and president of the Childrens' Defense Fund (CDF) and is a renowned advocate for America's disadvantaged children. 
A couple of highlights from her inspiring speech (quotes may not be word-for-word):

Back in February, I mentioned the ACLU's description of a juvenile detention center in Wyoming as "a lawsuit waiting to happen," and a class-action lawsuit against the detention center in New Orleans, where youth are often locked in their cells for 20+ hours a day, and rats and mold are present.
Now, Harrison County, Mississippi, has been sued because of conditions in its privately-run juvenile detention center. Allegations include staff abusing youth emotionally and physically, and squalid, overcrowded living conditions, including insect infestations, "widespread" scabies and staph infections, 23-hour-a-day lockdowns, and no access to mental health care.
We'll see what happens -- a representative of the firm that runs the Harrison County detention center denied there were major issues -- but the overall trend is not encouraging. Why do we think we can -- or should -- treat children this way? 

I’m excited because we’ve hired Mark Fulop, M.A., M.P.H. (pictured at left), to serve as the Partnership and Development Director for Reclaiming Futures. As you’ll see from the interview below, Mark’s got an interesting background and an intriguing take on our mission. (And be sure you check out his insightful way of looking at sustainability.) –Benjamin  
BC: What made you want to join the Reclaiming Futures team?
 
Mark: It’s a project that focuses on the strengths of young people and concurrently does not let the community off the hook for their responsibility for their kids. It says, “Your work isn’t done until every young person entering the juvenile justice system with a substance use issue is met with opportunity and not obstacles.”
 
And that's inspiring because it means Reclaiming Futures takes up the human rights challenge of youth--the way we as a nation
disempower youth by labeling them as “at-risk” or “troubled." That disempowerment can be seen in dropout rates, substance abuse rates and incarceration rates. When I realized Reclaiming Futures' deeper vision and ethos was to tackle this issue, I didn’t hesitate to join the team. 

Imagine: what if New York's Twin Towers had been filled with teens 15-19 years old? And what if they fell not once, but every year?

That horrific scenario -- minus the World Trade Center -- may be happening already.

Okay, my headline's an exaggeration. But here's a few news items that make me wonder how we got to a place where teen-aged behavior is dealt with so punitively: 

• Students in Alabama will be punished for possessing "Smarties" candy because middle-schoolers have figured out they can crush them to a powder, then use it to make themselves look like they're smoking. They're not being taken to court, but the reaction seems overblown. 

In what's probably the largest-scale longitudinal study of its kind to date, researchers have assessed how well detained teens were functioning up to three years later. 
The results, in press at the Journal of Adolescent Health, were based on assessments of "1,653 youth arrested and detained between 1995 and 1998 at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (CCJTDC) in Chicago, Illinois." Researchers used the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS).
What did they learn?