Blog: Juvenile Justice Reform

Those working with "crossover youth" in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems should consider applying for the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform's Certificate Programs in Multi-System Integration. These week-long programs are designed to cover a variety of issues impacting crossover youth and multi-system reform to prepare leaders to undertake a wide-range of reforms in their community.
The programs are targeted at public and private sector leaders working in the juvenile justice, child welfare, judiciary, behavioral health, education and other systems that serve crossover youth. The programs utilize a multi-systems and multi-disciplinary approach in focusing on policies, programs and practices that improve outcomes for this population. Upon completion of the week-long program, participants apply the knowledge they gain via a Capstone Project—a reform agenda they implement in their organization/ community to make a positive impact on the lives of crossover youth. In order to enhance the possibility of implementing cross systems change after returning from the program, applicants from the same jurisdiction are encouraged to apply as “mini-teams.”
Certificate Program for Public Sector Leaders
July 6-13, 2012 (applications due by March 22, 2012)
October 10-17, 2012 (priority application deadline is March 22, 2012)
Certificate Program for Private Sector Leaders
November 7-14, 2012 (applications due by July 17, 2012)
This is a great opportunity to hone your skills, network with current and future leaders in the field and improve the operation of your organization.

Alaska Public Radio recently aired a segment on Alaska's juvenile justice system. In order to better understand the system and how it works, they interviewed Brian Petrilla, a teen-bankrobber-turned-adult-probation-officer and Rob Wood, the Deputy Director of the Alaska Division of Juvenile Justice. During the interview, Brian explains how and why he encountered the juvenile justice system and how he was able to turn his life around. Rob goes on to explain how the Division of Juvenile Justice is able to:

1. Hold youth accountable for their actions;
2. Promote the safety and restorization of victims and their communities; and
3. Equip young offenders and their families with the skills to help prevent future crime.  

Click here to listen.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• California activists calling for changes to state’s juvenile justice system
  Juvenile Justice Information Exchange:
  Last month, California’s Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice(CJCJ) released a policy brief recommending phased juvenile justice realignment beginning later this year.
• Judge Daley retires after helping transform juvenile court
  MyCentralJersey.com:
  New Brunswick Judge Roger Daley exited his courtroom for the last time in his 15-year tenure on the bench last week. He took off his black robe and took a seat behind an ample desk smothered with items including a “Thank You” from a grandmother of a teen, who appreciated his work to rehabilitate her grandson.
• Bill would raise high-school dropout age to 18
  The Arizona Republic:
  State Rep. Daniel Patterson, D-Tucson, has introduced a bill that would increase the age at which high-school students could legally drop out from 16 to 18.
• Should Orange County’s juvenile hearings be opened to news media?
  OC Register:
  Last week, the presiding judge of Los Angeles County's Juvenile Court ordered dependency proceedings there to be opened to the media, saying secrecy had allowed problems to fester, but is that the best way to protect children?
• Budget cuts would lead to closure of several juvenile justice facilities
  The Salt Lake Tribune:
  Budget cuts could lead to the closure of several juvenile justice centers across the state, making it harder for youth offenders to be treated in their own communities or earn back the money they need to pay restitution to their victims.
• Editorial: Well-deserved honors
  The Commercial Appeal:
  The efforts by the leadership team at Shelby County Juvenile Court to change the face of juvenile justice in Memphis and Shelby County continues to garner national recognition.
• MacArthur Foundation, OJJDP announce private-public partnership
  Philanthropy News Digest:
  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) have announced a private-public partnership that includes a $2 million commitment to support innovative reforms in treatment and services for youth involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Drug use among florida youth drops
  Miami Herald:
  The 2011 Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey showed less than 10 percent of students tried drugs other than marijuana within 30 days of the survey. Twelve percent of students reported using marijuana, a decline from 2010.

Since its founding, Reclaiming Futures has been dedicated to helping to build a balanced and restorative juvenile justice system that holds youth accountable, but breaks the cycle of crime and drugs by providing evidence-based substance abuse treatment to the kids who need it.
Along the way, we’ve connected with 29 communities across the country and received great feedback on the power of the Reclaiming Futures model and its ability to ensure that youth have access to treatment. Our model has 6 parts:

1. Initial screening: As soon as possible after being referred to the juvenile justice system, youth should be screened for substance abuse problems using a reputable screening tool.
2. Initial assessment: If substance abuse is indicated, refer for service coordination.
3. Service coordination: Intervention plans should be designed and coordinated by community teams that are family-driven, span agency boundaries and draw upon community-based resources.
4. Initiation: Service initiation is a critical moment in intervention.
5. Engagement: Youth and families must be effectively engaged in services.
6. Transition: Community coordination teams should specify how much of each service plan must be completed, after which agency-based services will be gradually withdrawn, as appropriate.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Obama announces intent to nominate new deputy director for ONDCP
  Join Together:
  President Obama this past week announced his intent to nominate Michael P. Botticelli as Deputy Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy.
• Kanawha to institute juvenile drug court
  Charleston Daily Mail:
  West Virginia’s Kanawha County aims to curb drug abuse soon after it starts by instituting a juvenile drug court program.
• Five questions with Mike Dansereau, formerly with the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice
  Ledger Enquirer:
  In this interview, Mike Dansereau explains the differences between the adult and juvenile courts and what he would like to change in the juvenile system.
• Iowa County sets aside $600k for juvenile justice system
  The Daily Iowan:
  Johnson County officials said they're worried minority youth are running into legal issues at a higher rate than their white peers. The county has set aside $600,000 for the Juvenile Justice and Youth Development Program and is now accepting applications for projects to use that money.
• Richmond making fixes to juvenile detention center
  Richmond Times-Dispatch:
  Richmond officials say the city's juvenile detention center will be repaired and its staff fully retrained by April to fix the problems that led the state to put the troubled facility on probation for the second time in three years.
• OP-ED:The true cost of high school dropouts
  New York Times:
  When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime.
• Opinion: Police need better access to juvenile records
  Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:
  Rep. John Richards and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett make a case for allowing police officers to access juvenile probation information when they encounter young suspects on the street.
• The price of prisons: What incarceration costs taxpayers
  Vera Institute of Justice:
  The full report provides the taxpayer cost of incarcerating a sentenced adult offender to state prison in 40 states, presents the methodology, and concludes with recommendations about steps policy makers can take to safely rein in these costs.
• Department of Juvenile Justice representatives address YDC upheaval
  The Augusta Chronicle:
  A representative from the Department of Juvenile Justice was in Augusta for the District Five Quarterly Breakfast meeting Saturday to speak about the changes and upheaval at the Augusta Youth Development Campus.
• Youth Fair aims to keep kids out of trouble
  NWF Daily News:
  Local juvenile assistance organizations gathered at the mail to share information with teens and concerned parents on a variety of local programs at the Okaloosa County Juvenile Justice Council’s Youth Fair.
• Editorial: Ensuring teen offenders can’t be rehabilitated
  Washington Post:
  The Washington Post Editorial Board takes a stance against two juvenile justice reform proposals championed by Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• The prescription drug epidemic: a federal judge’s perspective
  Join Together:
  Pills are the new drug of choice for kids. A recent survey revealed that young people 12 and older are abusing prescription drugs at greater rates than cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, and methamphetamine combined. Only marijuana abuse is more common. And, most troubling, every day approximately 7,000 young people abuse a prescription narcotic for the first time.

Arizona’s Legislature recently passed a law charging prison visitors a onetime $25 fee as a way to help close the state’s $1.6 billion budget deficit. Middle Ground Prison Reform, a prison advocacy group, challenged the law in court as a discriminatory tax, but a county judge upheld its constitutionality.
Fees like that, slapped on prisoners and their families, couldn’t be more counterintuitive. But then again, so many of our criminal justice policies are just that. Since it is mostly the poor, the desperately poor who fill U.S. prisons, the $25 fee is one more economic hardship offenders’ families have to struggle with. It becomes another bill they have to scramble to pay — that is if they can.
These kinds of charges (and Arizona isn’t the only jurisdiction trying to shift the cost of incarceration to the poor) have even graver consequences. When a family can’t pay the fee, their contact with their loved one is limited, essentially cutting an offender off from the only supports he or she has in the outside world.
Psychologists have long known how central it is for an individual to have nurturing people in his or her life in order to develop emotionally, psychologically and socially. This need for a supportive network is even more essential when we talk about the young people who are locked away from family and loved ones in our nation’s prisons and detention centers.
As anyone who has worked with kids in the penal system knows on a gut level, it is crucial to have families and other supportive community members involved in young offenders’ lives as they serve their time. Now, that commonsense intuition has been given empirical strength by studies done by such juvenile justice groups as the Vera Institute of Justice which have demonstrated that maintaining young people’s connection to families is a major factor in helping kids stay out of jail once they are released.
But it’s easy to question whether these families are really such a positive influence. After all, if they were doing such a great job what are their kids doing in jail?

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Federal ruling: Youth sex offenders must report for 25 years
  San Francisco Chronicle:
  Juveniles convicted of serious sex crimes in federal court can be required to register as sex offenders for at least 25 years, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

• DOJ, MacArthur Foundation provide $2 million for juvenile justice reform
  OJJDP and the MacArthur Foundation each will provide a total of $1 million over two years to four organizations who will in turn offer states and local governments training and technical assistance to improve mental health services for youth, reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system and better coordinate treatment and services for youth involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

• Juvenile violence in Baltimore continues to decline
  Baltimore Sun:
  Violence against juveniles has declined significantly in Baltimore in recent years as juvenile arrests have dropped and student graduations increased — a trend that the city schools chief said stills lags behind perceptions of the city's young people.

• Police to get access to juvenile probation records
  Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: 
  Milwaukee police officers will now be able to quickly find out if a juvenile they are stopping is on probation under a new agreement between the city and Milwaukee County.

• Paying a price, long after the crime
  New York Times:
  In 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.

• Local Boys & Girls Clubs receive $600k to help juvenile offenders
  Ventura County Star:
  The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Oxnard and Port Hueneme aims to reduce repeat crimes among juvenile offenders in Ventura County by merging two pilot projects into a new program. The nonprofit received $609,232 from the Department of Justice to create RAMP, a Reentry Aftercare Mentoring Program, which will provide mentoring to incarcerated teens in the group’s Juvenile Justice Facility program so they are prepared to reenter the community and avoid committing further crimes.

• Kansas juvenile inmates lack vocational training
  The Topeka Capital-Journal:
  A joint legislative committee recommended expansion of vocational training for juveniles in state custody and action to prevent mixing violent and nonviolent offenders in community residential facilities.

• Black males need school to stay out of jail
  Hartford Courant:
  A few years ago, the national dropout rate for African American males was 70 percent. Today, the high school graduation rate for black boys is about 50 percent. Stan Simpson says, "It is no urban legend that many for-profit prison systems base their population projections on third- and fourth-grade reading scores."

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Bath salts linked to child abuse
  Midland Daily News: 
  The latest Kids Count in Michigan report shows a strong link between the number of child abuse and neglect cases and poverty, and a local judge points to another local factor not uncovered in the study -- the designer drug called bath salts.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• New juvenile court guidelines to help struggling students
  The San Fernando Valley Sun:
  Los Angeles' Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash has issued new guidelines to eliminate fines and unnecessary court time for students who were late to school and for other minor offenses. The court will also direct students who miss school to seek out school- and community-based resources that are shown to improve academic achievement and get struggling students back on track.
• Report: Move mentally ill youth from state lockups CantonRep.com:
  The state should transfer mentally ill juvenile inmates to psychiatric facilities as soon as possible and find money for their treatment, according to a new report on the status of Ohio’s youth prison system.
• Pennsylvania court amending waivers for juveniles
  The Times Leader:
  New statewide rules regarding legal representation of juveniles in court were sparked by the judicial scandals that first rocked Luzerne County three years ago.
• Despite weak economy, crime in Los Angeles County still declines
  LA Times:
  There have been dire warnings that crime would rise since the economy began stalling several years ago. But in Southern California, crime continues its long decline despite the weak economy. Indeed, 2011 brought new worries about a "double dip recession," yet streets in many parts of the region were the safest they've been in decades.
• New California bill goes after parents of truant teens
  Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:
  California Assembly Bill 177, which took effect on January 1st, expands the number of reasons for which parents or guardians can be ordered to take anti-gang parenting classes if their child is convicted of a crime.
• Board of Juvenile Justice retains ban on discrimination based on youths’ sexual orientation
  Washington Post:
  Virginia’s Board of Juvenile Justice again has retained a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation at its residential centers.
• Richmond Juvenile Detention Center has been placed on state probation
  Richmond Times-Dispatch:
  For the second time in three years, the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center has been placed on state probation because of ongoing safety concerns.
• New Illinois laws include shifts in juvenile sentencing process
  A new state law requires that Illinois judges sentencing minors to state juvenile prison ensure that incarceration is the least restrictive option and that efforts to find alternatives to secure confinement were unsuccessful.
• Alabama’s Lauderdale County shutting down detention center
  Weeks after the Justice Department announced its investigation into Lauderdale County's juvenile justice system, county officials are moving to shut down the youth detention facility a grand jury described as unfit to house dogs.
• After jail, youth with disabilities need special support to stay out
  When young people with disabilities end up in the juvenile justice system, they're less likely to return to youth prisons after their sentence is up if they have jobs or go to school quickly after being released, a new paper says.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Pennsylvania Senator calls for closing of loopholes in law on synthetic drugs
  Join Together:
  U.S. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to close loopholes in a synthetic drug law that allows makers of the drugs to slightly alter their ingredients to avoid federal and state bans.

I’m so very proud of the new Miss America, Laura Kaeppeler. First, because she is from my hometown of Kenosha, Wis., and second, because she’s used her own experience to help a lot of hurting kids. If you don’t know Ms. Kaeppeler’s story, it begins when her father, Jeff, was arrested when she was a 14-year-old high-schooler. He went to trial and was sent to serve 18 months in federal prison for mail fraud when she was at Carthage College studying music.
This impacted Laura’s life, much like the other estimated 10 million children who will experience having a parent imprisoned. She started a mentoring nonprofit called Circles of Support to assist children living with a parent behind bars.
According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 3 percent of Americans live either behind bars, under parole supervision or on probation. This means that more than 7.2 million adults in 2009 lived under the shadow of a court sentence. An additional 86,927 juveniles were living in juvenile correctional facilities.
That’s a LOT of kids being impacted. And since most people who are serving time in a prison have a sentence from 3-15 years, it can take a huge chunk out of a childhood spent with a parent. How do we help children with such massive holes in their lives to keep them from following their parents into the juvenile justice or prison systems?