Juvenile Justice Reform

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. 

 
Still Time to Register for Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) 2010 Conference

CJJ's Annual National Conference & Council of State Advisory Groups' (SAGs) Meeting, “Ensuring School Engagement and Success for Youth at Risk,” is just a month away! The conference will be held on April 10-13, in downtown Washington, D.C. Check out workshop descriptions on the draft conference agenda, and register today! (For offline registration, email Lauren Edwards or call her 202-467-0864, ext. 122.)
 
 
Conference Highlights

•  Keynote presentations by James Forman, Jr., Chair of the Maya Angelou Public Charter School Board of Directors, Washington, D.C., and George Khaldun, Chief Administra tive Officer, Harlem Children’s Zone, New York, New York.
• A federal perspectives panel with prominent representatives from the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

[The following column appeared in the February 2010 Campaign for Youth Justice e-newsletter, and is reprinted with permission. It has been edited slightly to incorporate hyperlinks into the text. - Ed.]
The Campaign for Youth Justice recently released a guide for families who want to do something to change the foolish and ineffective practice of trying our children as adults. Our new guide is entitled, "Families in Power: Family Guide to Networking, Coalition Building, Organizing and Campaign Building."  The guide provides basic information about how families and allies can begin to organize themselves and others to change  transfer practices and other overly punitive policies that negatively affect our children and our communities. 

Here is one highlight from this new guide:

The first step in creating powerful families and organizing others is developing a way to talk about your issue with a wide variety of audiences.  Many organizers refer to this as your "rap."  Your rap about the transfer of children into the adult correctional and court systems should be your 30-second commercial that is designed to open up dialogue with others.  It should include: a fact or two about youth transfer in order to educate people who may not know about transfer laws, why this is issue is important to you, and what you need from the person you are talking to.  Be sure you have your facts down and that they are accurate.  There are several fact sheets on the Campaign's website that can help you easily identify important facts.  The best fact sheet to use summarizes the findings of CFYJ's Jailing Juveniles report and speaks to the danger children face in jails every day in this country.   

Have a youth mentoring program that's been up and running for at least a year?
You might consider applying for new mentoring grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). To "reduce juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, truancy, and other problem and high-risk behaviors," OJJDP wants to

enhance the capacity and effectiveness of established mentoring programs by: (1) augmenting the involvement of and services for the mentoring participants' parents; (2) expanding structured activities and opportunities for the mentors and mentoring participant(s); and (3) increasing the availability of ongoing mentor training and support.

Programs can use the grant to accomplish one or more of those three things.  Awards will fall between $200,000 and $500,000 for 18 to 36 months. Application deadline is April 14, 2010.
Photo by Alaska Youth for Environmental Action.

Juvenile Justice System and Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment News

• At a recent symposium, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the indigent defense system was in "crisis." Now, the Department of Justice is launching "Access to Justice" to begin to work on solutions. (Hat tip to @piper.)
• The Attorney General also announced the creation of the Tribal Nations Leadership Council to advise him. Its formation "marks the first time a council composed of tribal leaders selected by tribal governments will advise Justice Department leadership on an ongoing basis."
• The number of juvenile offenders in residential placement dropped again this past year, according to a new fact sheet from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), "Juveniles in Residential Placement 1997-2008".
• The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) slammed Obama's justice budget: "more policing, prisons and punitive policies."

Every year, thousands of kids (disproportionately girls and youth of color) end up in the juvenile justice system not because they've committed a crime, but because they're runaways, skipping school, or are simply hard to control. While these "status offenders" and their families need services -- and it can be tempting to detain them in order to protect them -- it's important to minimze their contact with the juvenile justice system, as research has shown that contact with the juvenile justice system can increase their risk to  recidivate.
But despite the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which has a core requirement focused on discouraging detention of juvenile status offenders, status offenders are handled differently by each state, and sometimes quite aggressively. Now, the American Bar Association (ABA) has published Representing Juvenile Status Offenders, an excellent resource for attorneys who represent them. 

Thank you for this opportunity to share my story. My oldest son became involved in the juvenile justice system in April of 2009, and completed his six-month probation period in November 2009. It wasn’t the first public system he’d been involved in, but I think as a mother…it was the most heart-wrenching. Many a night I had sent prayers up for him, fearing one day he might become involved in the justice system. After all, when you got right down to it, I really had no control over my child’s actions or his decision-making in my absence.
His involvement caused a myriad of emotions within me and with the addition of another system seemingly holding the entire family hostage. I wanted to distance myself, teach him a lesson, give him tough love, send him to detention -- anything but bring him home. Overwhelmed with a pending divorce and the custody issues of a younger sibling, I didn’t need an additional challenge with yet another system.

In case you missed it, the National Reentry Resource Center hosted an excellent webinar on juvenile entry last month, featuring David M. Altschuler, Ph.D., principal research scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Shay Bilchik, founder and director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute.
The presentation, titled "Juvenile Reentry in Concept and Practice," defines juvenile reentry; lays out a conceptual framework for thinking about how youth should be reintegrated into the community; identifies the key risk and protective factors that services need to address; how to structure those services; and common obstacles to establishing adequate case management.
You can find a recording of the webinar and download the PowerPoint presentation at the National Reentry Resource Center's web page devoted to juveniles in the justice system.
 
Other Posts of Interest

• Dr. Altschuler on juvenile reentry
• Mr. Bilchik on addressing disproportionality in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems

Juvenile Justice Reform and Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment News

• Remember the Canadian study last year that followed youth for 20 years and found that youth who came into contact with the juvenile justice system were seven times more likely to commit crimes as adults? One reason for that was labeling. Now, here's more research that labeling kids as "juvenile delinquents" contributes to additional crime.  (Hat tip to @cjny.) Nevertheless, MD legislators are working hard to make sure that law enforcement and juvenile justice officials share information about kids with school administrators.
• The New York Times noted in an editorial that the Governor's budget for the coming year practically ignores the recommendations contained in the report of the Governor's task force on juvenile justice. In a separate editorial, the paper encouraged Congress to sponsor a proposed blue ribbon panel on the nation's criminal justice system.

Anyone following juvenile justice issues in New York state cannot help but be struck by how much attention the field has received in recent months. Even as the media—from The New York Times and New York Magazine (image at right) to National Public Radio—eagerly document the need for local reform, there seems to be a groundswell of people thinking about ways to treat children as children, at home in their communities rather than in locked facilities, without compromising public safety.
 
On the state level, for example, a statewide Governor’s Task Force, chaired by Jeremy Travis (and staffed by my colleagues at the Vera Institute of Justice), has issued a call for reform that the state’s top juvenile justice officer, Commissioner Gladys Carrión, is actively pursuing.  The task force report (seen at left), issued in December 2009, lays out a comprehensive roadmap for reducing juvenile corrections, reinvesting resources in community-based alternatives, eliminating racial inequities across the system, improving the supports and services provided to young people in state custody and upon release, and ensuring system accountability.