Blog

Isolated from their families, the holidays can be a particularly difficult time for the tens of thousands of children behind bars. But the holidays also offer us a unique opportunity to reach out and make meaningful connections with justice-involved youth. 
Looking for ways to connect? Our friends at the Campaign for Youth Justice have a Holiday Event Toolkit that includes ideas for holiday projects, letters and events for incarcerated youth.
Check it out and let us know if you have any ideas to add!
 
 

To celebrate 10 years, Reclaiming Futures Anchorage recently hosted a reception to honor those who have worked together, improving the lives of young people in the justice system for the past decade.
They also served a delicious cake (pictured at right), which helped improve attendance! It was clear from the events that there is interest in a statewide effort to provide more treatment, better treatment and support beyond treatment for communities working to help teens overcome drugs, alcohol and crime. 
Both Fairbanks and Matanuska-Susitna County were very well-represented, but the events were also attended by a wide variety of leaders from around the state, including:

• Judicial representatives
• Treatment providers
• Community members 
• Funders
• Public health employees
• Attorneys
• Young people and parents 
• Division of Juvenile Justice staff and leadership
• Other youth-serving agency representatives

The Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley published a report detailing a pilot program aimed at students of color and low-income families to shift from a zero-tolerance school discipline policy to a restorative justice policy. The report, “School-Based Restorative Justice as an Alternative to Zero-Tolerance Policies: Lessons from West Oakland,” [PDF download] draws evidence from Cole Middle School in West Oakland and finds that the restorative approach can help combat the school-to-prison pipeline and have a positive effect on disproportionate minority contact in the juvenile justice system.
The report’s executive summary has a great introduction to the major concepts included in the report (emphasis mine):

Restorative justice is an alternative to retributive zero-tolerance policies that mandate suspension or expulsion of students from school for a wide variety of misbehaviors including possession of alcohol or cigarettes, fighting, dress code violations, and cursing. Although zero-tolerance policies have resulted in substantial increases in student suspensions and expulsions for students of all races, African American and Hispanic/Latino youth are disproportionately impacted by a zero-tolerance approach.
Under zero tolerance, suspensions and expulsions can directly or indirectly result in referrals to the juvenile and adult criminal systems where African American and Hispanic/Latino youth are also disproportionately represented. This phenomenon, part of a process that criminalizes students, has been termed the school-to-prison pipeline.

As Shiloh Carter outlined in "Kid Courts Should Use Kid Friendly Language," it is no secret that when youth end up in court, they are often confused and uncertain about the purpose of the proceedings, and what's expected of them when they leave. Why? In spite of the fact that judges and other court professionals try hard to make sure youth know what’s expected of them, much of the language used in court goes right over their heads.
TeamChild®—a nonprofit law office based in Washington State—recognized this problem and developed interventions to help youth understand more of what goes on when they appear in court. With the support of Models for Change, a national juvenile justice reform initiative funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, we worked with the Washington State Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network (JIDAN), to create a tool—the judicial colloquies—to train judges and other court practitioners on the use of developmentally appropriate language in court proceedings.
We decided to focus our work on the court orders issued when youth are released prior to adjudication, and when they are put on probation. At these stages of the proceedings, a youth might face detention time if they violate their court orders.

Missing school matters, for obvious reasons. The first and most compelling, is that if kids don’t learn to show up, it will impact their ability to successfully shape the course of their lives, and showing up for life is a learned skill. Central Texas students (and this number shocked me!) miss 2.4 MILLION days of school each academic year, costing a loss of more than $34 million dollars annually for our schools. Children suffer academically when they aren’t in class. Chronic absence is an indicator for future drop out rates. Individual classrooms are affected by absence as students miss participation in key elements of their learning. So why do kids miss so much school?
According to Communications Director, Rick L’Amie of the E3 Alliance, when kids were asked why they missed so much school, 49% of them said, it’s boring. At MAP, we think there’s more to it than that. We work with at-risk and disenfranchised youth on a daily basis, and in our work we explore a lot of serious life circumstances and issues with these kids. What I find is that our kids (and I suspect many are like them) often find it difficult to articulate the challenges they face in their daily lives. A 10 year old who misses school because her older brother got in a fight with a neighbor’s kid across the street and the fight led to retaliation which resulted in her house getting burned down and the family having to flee the neighborhood in fear, is not going to verbalize the complexity of that situation. It’s easy to say, I’m bored. But what that kid is also saying is, nothing I’m learning here feels relevant to my life experience.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• [Video] Fresno Local Conservation Corps Re-Entry Program Highlighted by Local News (The Corps Network)
  Earlier this week several staff members from the Fresno Local Conservation Corps joined KSEE24 local news to talk about their re-entry program for formerly incarcerated youth.
• New Push to Help Juvenile Offenders (WCTV.TV)
  The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is pushing a proposed plan it says will help keep youthful offenders out of jail and revamp the juvenile justice system.
• Juvenile Justice: Mass. Formulating New Sentencing Policies (WBUR.org)
  In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles convicted of murder was unconstitutional. The court declared life without parole for juveniles was “cruel and unusual punishment,” thereby in violation of the 8th Amendment.
• Elementary-Schoolers' Arrests Alarm Justice Officials (Orlando Sentinel)
  Circuit Judge Alicia Latimore, one of three judges who handles juvenile-delinquency cases in Orange, was so concerned about the kids' arrests that she visited Cherokee's campus this fall. The arrests at Cherokee outnumber the arrests of students at Orange's 121 other public elementary schools combined.

The Maine Statistical Analysis Center recently released their 2012 Maine Juvenile Justice Data Book, which presents data and findings of youth involved with the Maine juvenile justice system. The results are encouraging, with arrest rates for both violent and drug offences dropping along with average daily population of youth in detention. Detailed findings can be found below.
Key Findings from the Data Book (emphasis mine)

• From 2001 to 2010, the overall arrest rate of youth in Maine decreased by 26%, from 67 arrests per 1,000 youth to 50.
• Most arrests in Maine are of adults. The proportion of youth arrests to all arrests in Maine dropped from a high of 17% in 2001 to just 12% in 2010, or 1 in every 8.5 arrests. Since 2001, the number of arrests of youth has decreased by 35%, while arrests of adults increased by 2%.
• From 2001 to 2010, arrests of Maine youth for violent offenses decreased by 28%. Violent offenses comprised only 1.7% of all arrests of youth in 2010.
• Arrests of Maine youth for drug offenses decreased by 33% from 2001 to 2010. As a proportion of all arrests of youth in Maine, arrests for drug offenses remained relatively stable, at a rate of 8 to 9% per year.
• The average daily population of Maine youth in detention fell by 37.3% between 2006 and 2011.
• Minority youth in Androscoggin and Cumberland Counties were statistically significantly less likely to be diverted from the juvenile justice system for an offense than white youth between 2005 and 2010.
• Adjudicated youth who were placed in a Maine youth development center recidivated within one year of discharge from DJS supervision at a rate of 33%.

“My future is to have a happy family, have a career, be something in life, be a role model, and teach people the right thing.” These are the aspirations of one ninth grade foster youth at the Arise Academy Charter High School. Unfortunately, for too many youth in foster care, without the necessary guidance and support from committed and caring adults, dreams often fade into a harsh and bitter struggle for survival. Nationally, more than 20,000 youth age out of foster care annually and their surrogate parents—state child welfare systems—try to prepare youth with the essential knowledge, skills, supports and social networks to navigate the challenges of adulthood. But the state hasn’t proved to be a very nurturing parent and social workers can only do so much. Foster youth need adults in their lives, outside of the system, who will listen, share their time, care and experiences, and show and connect them to alternative pathways that heighten their chances to have productive and hopeful adult lives.
Study after study focuses on the dire life outcomes that foster youth tend to experience when they leave care. Facing chronic unemployment, low levels of academic achievement, poverty, homelessness, incarceration, and early pregnancy and parenting is enough to make you think these are throwaway youth—too difficult to help. A recent report reinforces the challenge by demonstrating that older youth in foster care are at greatest risk for disconnection—neither in school, vocational training nor the workforce. Without the network of friends, family and caring adults that most youth outside the system enjoy, how can the social skills needed to succeed be developed? Who can provide them with the emotional, psychological, financial, and other supports, necessary to sustain a connection with mainstream economic and educational opportunities? These are questions that I deal with daily at the Stoneleigh Foundation. But I also can’t accept that abused and neglected youth, who have experienced multiple traumatic experiences in their lives, need be subjected to a long life of struggle as an adult—menial jobs, teen parenting, unstable housing, cash assistance? It’s immoral, and these children deserve the most that our community has to offer them. Every day I wake up knowing that something must and can be done.

Earlier this week, CJCJ launched its California juvenile justice interactive map, displaying a plethora of data regarding local youth arrest and confinement practices by county. This is particularly pertinent given that California’s statewide trends are so extraordinary: Youth crime in California is at its lowest level since statewide statistics were first compiled in 1954.

The county-by-county data paint a more nuanced picture of juvenile justice in California. Among its 58 counties, the application of juvenile justice policy is radically varied, and with mixed results.

For example, San Francisco County has the highest youth arrest rate in the state, due primarily to the fact that San Francisco is the only county comprised wholly of a city. Most arrests involve youth of color from the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Despite high rates of violent crime, the county utilizes confinement infrequently, displaying very low levels of state youth correctional commitments and lower than average use of its local custodial facilities; 49% of beds in the county’s two juvenile justice facilities (juvenile hall + camp) were occupied in 2010. Driving this commitment to rehabilitate even the hardest-to-serve youth in the community is a wealth of nonprofit service providers and dedicated local government leadership.