“Everyone talks about the school-to-prison pipeline,” said Loyola Law School professor Sean Kennedy. “But doing this work you see that there’s a group-home-to-prison.
Kennedy is the Director of Loyola’s respected Center for Juvenile Law and Policy (CJLP), which was founded in 2004 to “tackle the injustices of the Los Angeles County juvenile court system” by providing pro bono advocacy for youth who find themselves caught up in that system.
Thanks to a highly competitive $1 million grant from the Everychild Foundation, CJLP has the funds to jump start the program for its first three years.
This year’s winning project, submitted by CJLP, is to be called the Everychild Integrated Education & Legal Advocacy Project (EIELAP), and, according to its proposal to Everychild, aims to “help stop the school-to-prison pipeline for crossover youth…” To do so, CJLP’s new program will provide a legal team for their young clients that includes a juvenile-justice lawyer, an education lawyer, and a social worker.
Among the program’s goals is to train 36 law students to assist at least 300 Los Angeles youth over the course of three years, while also providing the team of lawyer/experts to guide the law students as they represent their young clients and, in so doing, provide a replicable model for the state, and arguably the nation.
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