Blog: Juvenile Justice Reform

Maybe you're still wondering, like me, how we got from rotary phones to "social media." Or maybe you're wondering if tools like Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds, and the like are relevant for juvenile justice or alcohol and drug treatment for teens.
 
Well, you're in luck: the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, in partnership with Reclaiming Futures, invites you to attend a free Webinar on the ever-growing world of social media. The event will be held from 3 to 4 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, June 2, 2009.

Reclaiming Futures isn't mentioned by name, but its spirit is nicely evoked in this short piece on the juvenile drug court in Dayton, Ohio - one of the original 10 Reclaiming Futures sites. Congratulations, Dayton!
UPDATE: There's also a great 28-photo essay covering the kids' drug court graduation ceremony, and the speech of NBA star Daequan Cook, who came to speak to the graduates. 

In addition to hosting Marian Wright Edelman at our Leadership Institute in New Orleans last week, we were also honored to have Mr. Shay Bilchik (seen at left with Laura Nissen, National Director of Reclaiming Futures) as our guest. Mr. Bilchik is founder and director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University. (The CJJR recently put out recommendations on improving services to youth transitioning out of the juvenile justice and/or child welfare systems.)
Mr. Bilchik spoke entertainingly and cogently on where he thinks the juvenile justice system needs to go to be successful. The full text of his remarks should be available in the next few weeks; in the mean time, rough notes on his speech are below. (I'm grateful to Reclaiming Futures staffer Mimmy Patterson for her extensive notes, which I've supplemented here and there. My apologies to Mr. Bilchik if we've mangled his presentation.) 

• Biggest news of the week: according to The New York Times, the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up the question of whether it's appropriate to sentence juveniles to life without parole, given its 2005 decision that execution for crimes committed as a juvenile is inappropriate given what we now know about their developing brains.

Check out these recipes from a juvenile probation camp in L.A. County, Camp Gonzalez. For the past five years, 50 teens have been in the cooking class; last week, some of this year's students catered a successful event for the L.A. Commission for Children and Families. It would be nice to see more of this kind of vocational education for youth in the justice system -- it's practical, and should give the teens useful skills. 
However, this editorial in The Huffington Post makes it clear that not everyone's happy with L.A.'s juvenile justice system -- or should be. The columnist argues for adopting the "Missouri Model" to lower the recidvism rate by switching from warehousing kids to addressing their underlying issues. It's cheaper, and backed by research: give me another helping of that.

Thanks to the National Juvenile Justice Network, I'm able to share a "Parents' Bill of Rights" put out in February 2009 by the Texas Youth Commission (TYC), for parents of incarcerated children.

In part because of research that indicates that the human brain doesn't fully mature until about age 25, we now know that youth who are "connected by 25" -- have sufficient education, employment skills, and a positive social network -- are likely to be successful in life. But youth without such preparation are likely to struggle, at great cost to themselves and to society.

• Mississippi Security Police, the private company that runs the juvenile detention center for the Missisippi county sued earlier this week by the Southern Poverty Law Center, held a press conference yesterday vigorously denying all allegations. The lawsuit charges that youth offenders were physically and emotionally abused and kept in verminous, unsanitary living conditions without access to mental health care. Here's video of the press tour of the juvenile detention facility and details of the company's responses to the suit. (It should be noted that the county is the defendant in the lawsuit; the private company is not named.)
• The St. Petersburg Times has thorough coverage of decades-old horrors and abuses at the Florida School for Boys that came to light late last year, when former students at the reform school, now in their 60s, found each other on the internet and went public with their accusations. UPDATE: In its weekly roundup, Youth Today reported that an investigation is "going nowhere," according to the former Florida state employee who pushed for an investigation into the scandal and the school's 32 unmarked graves.

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?