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Monique Marrow first started working on creating a trauma-responsive system in a juvenile justice setting when she worked as deputy director of treatment and rehabilitation services for the Ohio Department of Youth Services in 2005. Back then, her approach to talking about trauma in the justice system was met with some pushback. “Here comes Dr. Marrow, with her hug-a-thug speech,” she remembers some skeptical staff members saying. [For more of this story, written by Jeremy Loudenback, go to ...

George Washington (not the famous one) first ended up in a New York homeless shelter in the mid-1980s, after he came home from prison for robbery and crack cocaine hit the streets. Since then, he’s passed between girlfriends’ houses, hotels, shelters all over the city, rooming houses, family members’ couches, rehab facilities, and a cell on Rikers Island. [For more of this story, written by Christie Thompson, go to ...

Susun Kim, Esq. talks about community partnerships and the power of collaboration.

Juvenile justice reform cannot happen without child welfare as an engaged partner. Research has demonstrated that as many as two-thirds of youth involved in the juvenile justice system have a maltreatment background. If we know that children involved in the child welfare system are at greater risk of truancy, behavior disorders, mental health disorders and delinquency, shouldn’t we address those issues in their early years and work towards prevention and building resiliency rather than...

Great article below by Sarah Schuster. Would you add anything to this list? . Cis, Parenting with ACEs Group Being a parent is hard. Being a parent with a health challenge can be extra hard. Being a parent with a highly stigmatized health challenge… it can leave a momma with mental illness feeling like no one understands what she’s going through. That’s why, just in time for Mother’s Day, we wanted to ask moms in our mental health community to share one thing they wish others understood...

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp at lectern—(l to r) Kana Enomoto, Zach Kaminsky, Judge Dan Michael, Dr. Joe Wright, and Wendy Ellis ____________________________________ The first congressional briefing on trauma held during the 115 th Congress and the new administration was held May 11 before a rapt audience of Hill staff amidst a swirl of controversy around the firing of FBI Director Comey and the speculation that the fallout will derail progress on the domestic policy agenda. The themes addressed in...

In 2015, a 26-year-old teacher in the Cops ‘n Kids Youth Center died suddenly in a motorcycle accident, and Robbin Sotelo Redd reached for the phone. Redd, executive director of Cops ‘n Kids, a non-profit managed by the Tarpon Springs Housing Authority (TSHA), called Dr. Robert Moore, a psychologist, former steering committee member and ongoing training provider for Peace4Tarpon . Over the next two weeks, Moore spent hours with Cops ‘n Kids’ staff, parents and children. “He was there for me,...

The case is a half-century old this week, a landmark decision that merged jurisprudence, common sense and fortunate timing to reshape juvenile justice and give children many of the same due process rights long held by adults charged with crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued on May 15, 1967, In re Gault ,found for the first time that juvenile court cases are adversarial criminal proceedings. That gave youthful offenders the right to a defense lawyer, formal rules of criminal procedure...

A S A NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE NURSE, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people’s babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband Larry recalled recently — “the happiest and most alive I’d ever seen her.” When Lauren was 13, her own mother had died of a massive heart attack. Lauren had lived with her older brother for a while, then with a neighbor in Hazlet, New Jersey, who was like a surrogate mom,...

The story of Cleveland, as with many other Rust Belt cities, is a story of falling from grace. How is “grace” measured? Population rankings, mostly. Cleveland was America’s 5th biggest city in 1920, beneath only New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. By 1950 it was 7th. By 1980, 20th. Then down to 45th by 2010. And so on. So, Cleveland shrinks . Shrinking cities are not what successful cities “look” like. They look funny. Cleveland has a “man boobs” problem. Let me explain. In 2006...

I met Jane in 2013 at a women’s prison in Washington state. She was 6, and while other girls her age may have been camping in the woods with their Girl Scout troops, Jane was camping overnight at the prison where her mother was incarcerated. On the day we met, Jane was participating in Girls Scouts Beyond Bars, a program begun in Baltimore in 1992 as a pilot project between the Girl Scouts and the Institute of Justice. The idea was for girls to have formal visits with their incarcerated...

Democratic and Republican officials alike took up the banner of criminal-justice reform over the past five years, hoping to reduce the nation’s unprecedented prison population and scale back the harshest punishments of the tough-on-crime era. Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a major step toward rolling back their efforts. In a memo released Friday, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to seek the strongest possible charges and sentences against defendants they...