By Kirstie Brewer, British Broadcasting Corporation, September 5, 2021 LaTonya woke up in the night to the sound of thuds and yells. Her mother's boyfriend had been growing increasingly abusive and unstable, and now he was dragging their bed out of the apartment and into the passageway outside. LaTonya crept out of bed and saw the boyfriend shouting and jabbing his finger at her mother's temple. "I thought I could protect my mom," she says. She picked up an aerosol can and hit him with it.

By Elizabeth Amon, The Imprint, August 9, 2021 What unites the group of imprisoned men seeking change isn’t addiction recovery, making amends or anger management. Instead, it’s a shared childhood experience: foster care. “State-Raised” is the name of the group they’ve formed with the goal of disrupting the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Washington legislation passed this spring is designed to help that mission, the group’s founder Arthur Longworth said on a recent call from the Monroe...

By JJIE Staff, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, August 18, 2021 Following its July 2017 resolution urging a shift in how juvenile probationers are supervised, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges recently issued its blueprint for how judges and probation officers help make that happen. Based, in part, on results of that organization’s 2020 survey of family court judges across the country, “The Role of the Judge in Transforming Juvenile Probation: A Toolkit for...

By The Annie E. Casey Foundation, July 26, 2021 A short video produced by the Annie E. Casey Foundation identifies eight principles that every juvenile justice system should embrace right now to transform care for youth in custody. These principles are designed to help all young people realize their potential — regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood or personal history. The video introduces ways that jurisdictions can immediately and meaningfully elevate the standard of...

By Jeremy Loudenback, The Imprint, July 22, 2021 Once the nation’s most vast youth prison system, California’s Division of Juvenile Justice stopped admissions this month — with the state’s highest level offenders headed for starkly different settings. Instead of a cell block monitored by guards, Los Angeles County young people will soon be moved to detention camps, where formerly incarcerated men will mentor them alongside local probation officers. El Dorado, Fresno and Sonoma counties are...

By Anna Deen, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, July 16, 2021 Since being released from New York City’s Rikers Island jail — where he’d been sentenced to four months for not being where his parole officer expected him to be on a certain day and time — Dakem Roberts has been living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter. It was his latest incarceration since, in the late 1970s, when he was 16, he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. He’d been arrested for his involvement in a robbery...

By Malik Pickett, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, June 27, 2021 Glen Mills, Wordsworth, Devereaux, and most recently the Delaware County Juvenile Justice Center are all highly publicized scandals involving the abuse of children inside Pennsylvania juvenile facilities. Abuses such as these precipitated Gov. Tom Wolf’s creation of the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force which studied the Commonwealth’s juvenile justice system for 16 months to create recommendations for reform. Last week, the...

By Emma Knight | June 1, 2021, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Supporters of the juvenile justice status quo wrongly claim that community-based organizations are not yet strong enough to serve all youth who may otherwise cycle through juvenile courts, detention centers and on and off parole rosters. Ideally, opponents to reform say, youth would be served by nonprofits close to home, but that cannot happen until enough suitable nonprofits are available. This line of thinking ignores...

New Jersey plans to spend a staggering $445,504 per incarcerated youth in 2022 to house them in facilities that are almost 80% empty. The time is now for New Jersey to close its youth prisons and invest in community-based alternatives. The current system, with its focus wholly on punishment rather than rehabilitation, the current system leaves whole communities — as well as the families of both victims and offenders — with unresolved trauma that continues to reverberate long after the...

“We assume goodness behind everyone’s actions…We continually chip away demonstrating relentlessness in our pursuit of positive change.” ~ Gregg Croteau, Executive Director, United Teen Equality Center, Inc., Lowell, Massachusetts Mission: The United Teen Equality Center, Inc., (UTEC) works with some of the State’s disconnected youth – those inside jails and prisons, and those recently released. While the services offered and delivered are extensive, stunningly effective, and in some cases...

The California Violence Intervention & Prevention Program hosted the San Diego Cal-VIP Event 4.29.21 . Please click HERE to view the Facebook Live event.

When a young person enters the de-escalation room in the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility , they’ll find dimmed lights, bottles of lavender, orange and other essential oils, an audio menu featuring the rush of ocean waves and other calming sounds, along with squeeze balls, TheraPutty, jigsaw puzzles, and an exercise ball to bounce on. Sometimes, with a teen’s permission, “We’ll put a weighted blanket on them, just to give them that hug that feels good, since we can’t give them...