Tagged With "criminal justice reform"
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Top Trends in State Criminal Justice Reform, 2019 [sentencingproject.org]
From The Sentencing Project, January 2020 The United States is a world leader in incarceration and keeps nearly 7 million persons under criminal justice supervision. More than 2.2 million are in prison or jail, while 4.6 million are monitored in the community on probation or parole. More punitive sentencing laws and policies, not increases in crime rates, have produced this high rate of incarceration. Ending mass incarceration will require changing sentencing policies and practices, scaling...
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Trauma-informed Care: It Takes More Than a Clipboard and a Questionnaire
California is about to launch an ambitious campaign to train tens of thousands of Medi-Cal providers to screen children and adults up to age 65 for trauma, starting on January 1, 2020. It is well-established that the early identification of trauma and providing the appropriate treatment are critical tools for reducing long-term health care costs for both children and adults. Research has shown that individuals who experienced a high number of traumatic childhood events are likely to die...
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Trends in Juvenile Justice State Legislation 2011-2015, ModelsForChange.net
In the past five years, juvenile justice reform legislation in the United States has grown at a remarkable pace. The recent shift in juvenile justice policy marks a clear departure from laws enacted 20 years ago. To read the rest of the article, click...
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Tributes honor the life of Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore
This is a recent photo of an image projected on a building of a younger Rep. Cummings taken on a street in his native Baltimore. From an unknown source, projected images and messages appear on the side of a building near my house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC. When the news alert came across my cell phone on Thursday morning that Elijah Cummings had died, I felt overwhelming sadness for the loss of a powerful, eloquent, and soulful human who understood trauma in his...
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Two studies shed light on state legislators’ views on ACEs science and trauma policy
New and returning lawmakers take the oath of office on day one of Washington state's 2017 legislative session. — Jeanie Lindsay/Northwest News Network As advocates prepare to see how ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) science, trauma, and resilience play out in the 2020 state legislative sessions — many beginning in January — they are undoubtedly asking: “What does a legislator want?" It may be a stretch to play on Freud’s question: “What does a women want?", but the query captures how...
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Unprecedented childhood trauma hearing in U.S. Congress on July 11 to feature data from new state fact sheets on ACEs prevalence, impacts
A hearing of unprecedented scope and depth (this link will take you to a list of witnesses and all of their statements plus an overview memo on the hearing from committee staff) on ACEs science and childhood trauma — " Identifying, Preventing, and Treating Childhood Trauma: A Pervasive Public Health Issue that Needs Greater Federal Attention " — will be held today in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. You can watch the live stream at 10:00 am ET through this link . Nine witnesses...
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Vivian Watts: Justice system reforms will help protect children [pilotonline.com]
By Vivian Watts, The Virginian-Pilot, May 6, 2020 In my career as the former executive director of Fairfax CASA, as well as my work as the former secretary of Transportation and Public Safety and in the Virginia House of Delegates, I have fought to protect vulnerable children from abuse and exploitation knowing that our failure to do so has catastrophic consequences. For more than 20 years clinicians and social scientists have studied the impact that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and...
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OK Trauma-Informed Care Task Force to launch
(l to r) Joe Dorman, CEO, OK Institute for Child Advocacy, OK State Rep. Mark Lepak _______________________________________________________________ Joe Dorman, CEO of Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (OICA) , and former Oklahoma state representative and challenger to Republican Governor Mary Fallin in 2014, conveyed surprise and satisfaction when he told me that Fallin gave him the pen she used to sign a bill to create a Task Force on Trauma-Informed Care ( SB 1517 ) in April. This...
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Personal stories from witnesses, U.S. representatives provided an emotional wallop to House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on childhood trauma
Room erupts in applause for the grandmother of witness William Kellibrew during July 11 House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing. The power of personal stories from witnesses and committee members fueled the July 11 hearing on childhood trauma in the House Oversight and Reform Committee* throughout the nearly four hours of often emotional and searing testimony and member questions and statements (Click here for 3:47 hour video). The hearing was organized into a two panels—testimony from...
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State ACE survey reports
The following are links to state reports on Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) ACEs module data. Also included at the end of the list are links to the CDC 5-state study and a 10-state plus the District of Columbia study on ACEs...
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State Trends Show Fewer Young People Tried As Adults, New Report Says [jjie.org]
WASHINGTON — The number of young people locked into adult jails and prisons has plummeted nearly two-thirds since 2009 and the number automatically sent to adult courts for criminal trials has fallen by nearly half from 2007 to 2014, a new report says. The numbers of youth tried as adults will likely fall even further by 2020, when four states — Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina and New York — fully implement reform laws passed over the last few years, said the new report from the...
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Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence, and Trauma (issuelab.org)
We make the case that the conditions that foster violence and the conditions that perpetuate poverty are interconnected and reinforce each other; we further show the traumatic effects of violence -- and how trauma drives both poverty and violence. We then examine how violence has been used to enforce systems of racial oppression and how communities of color are disparately impacted by violence today. The conditions that perpetuate poverty and the conditions that foster violence often...
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Education, inspiration, and action—Maryland lawmakers take deeper dive into ACEs science and how it informs policy
While members of the Maryland General Assembly did not dominate the Dec. 13th “MGA ACEs Roundtable” in numbers, they commanded the room and enlivened a focus on how ACEs science can inform current and future policies considered by elected officials.
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Eleven state profiles feature ACEs-science data, initiatives
One of the resources shared with participants in the Sept. 13-14 convening of First Spouses in Milwaukee to address trauma was a series of state information sheets that featured data on ACEs prevalence and ACEs/trauma-informed/resilience-building initiatives. These one-pagers provided a succinct summary of state highlights on trauma that in some instances were well known to the First Spouses but for others, provided new information. In partnership with state trauma leaders, ACEs Connection...
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Gov. Wolf: Office of Advocacy and Reform Announces Plan to Build a Trauma-Informed Pennsylvania [phila.gov]
The Office of Advocacy and Reform (OAR), established by Governor Tom Wolf’s 2019 executive order to protect Pennsylvania’s vulnerable populations, today announced the launch of a volunteer think tank comprised of 25 experts representing a diversity of fields and backgrounds who will develop a plan to make Pennsylvania a trauma-informed state. “The people of Pennsylvania are compassionate, thoughtful and resilient. We take care of each other, and that drive to protect our families and our...
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Hearing in U.S. House Education and Labor Early Childhood Subcommittee addresses intersection of trauma and education
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris (l) and Karina Chicote, Churchill Fellow from western Australia meet after congressional hearing After watching the hearing on a monitor in the overflow room, Karina Chicote, a Churchill Fellow from western Australia, and I hustled to the hearing room in hopes of speaking to the lead witness, Nadine Burke Harris, MD, the first Surgeon General of the State of California. She was deep in conversation with others, including a young woman who wanted to tell her how...
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"How to talk policy and influence people": a special series of Law and Justice
"No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference" is the title of Greta Thunberg's book, which is a compilation of her speeches on the need for urgent action to tackle climate change. One of those speeches is entitled "Together We Are Making a Difference". I had planned to organise an event on the topic of “How to talk policy and influence people” kindly supported by the Cork Education and Training Board in Ireland on the 2nd of April 2020. Unfortunately, the event had to be cancelled due to the...
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Julián Castro: Partner with tribes 'for a fairer and more prosperous future' (Indian Country Today)
Presidential candidate and former Obama Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro released a comprehensive platform on Indigenous issues, the first detailed plan from a 2020 campaign. Castro will follow up on that announcement with a meet-and-greet on Meskwaki Settlement in Iowa Friday where he will discuss his blueprint for Indigenous communities and vision for the future of our nation. “For generations, Indigenous communities have been treated as second-class citizens rather...
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Lawmaker Pushing Mental Health Reform: It's 'More Needed Than Ever' [khn.org]
By Samantha Young, Kaiser Health News, April 28, 2020 During the first week of school closures in San Jose, state Sen. Jim Beall’s office received more than a dozen phone calls from distressed parents and caregivers. The problem: They couldn’t get free lunches because school district rules required children be present to receive a meal. A grandmother caring for at least seven children couldn’t fit them all in her car. One parent had a sick child who needed to stay at home, and another was...
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Mandatory Minimums Harm Children [thehill.com]
By Nila Bala and James Dold, The Hill, August 27, 2019 Over the last three decades, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, thousands of children have been warehoused in prisons with adults. We have usually ignored the cages these children are in because they were convicted of crimes in the adult criminal justice system. But we cannot ignore the fact that regardless of what they have done, they are still our children. Congress has a chance to enact reforms that assist...
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California Ends Practice of Billing Parents for Kids in Detention [themarshallproject.org]
Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed into law on Wednesday a sweeping package of criminal justice reform bills including a ban on the practice of billing parents for their children’s incarceration, which had been prevalent statewide for decades and was the subject of a Marshall Project investigation earlier this year. The new law — introduced by two Democratic state senators from the Los Angeles area, Holly Mitchell and Ricardo Lara, and approved by the legislature on Sept. 6 — prohibits...
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What does 'defund the police' mean? The rallying cry sweeping the US – explained [TheGuardian.com]
Orlando Police line up in front of the OPD headquarters on South Street as protesters arrive to demonstrate in Orlando, Florida. Photograph: Joe Burbank/AP Sam Levin in Los Angeles The call to “defund the police” has become a rallying cry at protests across America this week, and some lawmakers appear to be listening. Activists who have long fought to cut law enforcement budgets say they are seeing an unprecedented wave of support for their ideas, with some elected officials for the first...
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Cory Booker on the Future of Police Reform [newyorker.com]
By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, June 5, 2020 Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, who ended his Presidential campaign in January, began his political career by serving on Newark’s city council. Booker, a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School and a former Rhodes Scholar, became known for staging a hunger strike to draw attention to drug dealing and drug-related violence in Newark, and went on to serve as the city’s mayor, from 2006 to 2013. Booker, who promised an ambitious...
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U.S. Southeast trauma leaders share successes, challenges in making changes
Leaders in ACEs/trauma/resilience movements from 10 states in the Southeast U.S. met for a networking call on May 21, 2020, to learn about flexible funding opportunities for states under the CARES Act, ways to get involved in advocacy, and how to share their successes and challenges in building statewide coalitions. The meeting of leaders was organized by ACEs Connection and the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) in response to COVID-19 and the growing interest in...
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Congress urged to address trauma in the 4th COVID bill
Now that the July 4 th congressional recess has ended, negotiations around the fourth major COVID relief bill are underway between the Congress and the Administration. How the chasm between Congress and the White House will be bridged is a path uncertain, with massive differences between the House and Senate complicating the work. As the pandemic rages across the U.S., there is now at least a consensus that action is needed. But no agreement exists on a payroll tax cut, unemployment...
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Wolf Administration Releases ‘Trauma-Informed PA’ Plan with Recommendations and Steps for the Commonwealth and Providers to Become Trauma-Informed [PA Governor Tom Wolf Press Release]
July 27, 2020 As a companion to Governor Tom Wolf’s multi-agency effort and anti-stigma initiative, Reach Out PA: Your Mental Health Matters, the Office of Advocacy and Reform (OAR) is releasing the “Trauma-Informed PA” plan to guide the commonwealth and service providers statewide on what it means to be trauma-informed and healing-centered in PA. This plan is the result of four months of work from OAR and the Trauma-Informed PA Think Tank, formed in February. The think tank was made up of...
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Standing on the shoulders of giants: Trauma-Informed Pennsylvania builds on a foundation of early leadership and many community initiatives
Governor Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania When Governor Tom Wolf’s office announced the release of “Trauma-Informed PA: A Plan to Make Pennsylvania a Trauma-Informed, Healing-Centered State” on July 27, it was a significant milestone in the state becoming trauma-informed but only one of many over the long and storied history of addressing childhood adversity in the state. In 2005, Dr. Sandra Bloom and her Philadelphia colleagues began their pioneering work on the Sanctuary model (see Sanctuary...
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Does VP Candidate Kamala Harris know about ACEs? You bet!
Nadine Burke Harris, California’s Surgeon General, has a lot in common with the vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris—Jamaican heritage, surname, home state—and a commitment to addressing ACEs and toxic stress. As reported in the New Yorker article by Paul Tough, “The Poverty Clinic,” Dr. Harris told Kamala Harris, then San Francisco district attorney, about ACEs in 2008 and in response, she offered to help. District Attorney Harris then introduced her to professor of child and...
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CTIPP invites everyone to participate in calls on pressing national issues, starting this Wednesday on climate
The monthly Zoom virtual gathering sponsored by national organization “ Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) ” will complete this year’s series by tackling some of the most pressing issues this country is facing. With a focus the role of trauma-informed approaches to help manage solutions to these challenges, the CTIPP-CAN (Community Advocacy Network) meetings for the remainder of the year will address climate this Wednesday followed by policing in October, peer...
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Governor Signs Bill to Close State's Troubled & Systemically Racist Youth Prisons With an Ambitious Plan to Reimagine CA's Youth Justice System [witnessla.com]
By Celest Fremon, Witness LA, October 2, 2020 At approximately 4:42 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, September 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 823 , a budget trailer bill that will lead to the closure of the state’s troubled and violent youth prison system. Yet the bill is far more than that. It is also is designed as an historic reform measure intended to fundamentally transform the way that the state and its 58 counties approach youth justice. Furthermore, the bill includes the creation of...
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Children and families need resources to address trauma at its roots [statnews.com]
By Ayanna Pressley and Carolyn B. Maloney, STAT, October 21, 2020 Like many nations across the globe, the U.S. continues to combat the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration’s deficient response has elevated the emotional, physical, and economic harm suffered by families in America. As we move through this moment of collective trauma, we must adopt focused, evidence-based approaches to make our country whole again and ensure that these approaches prioritize a...
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How to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety that Works for Everyone (nytimes.com)
A group of police chiefs, activists and policymakers gathered to debate how to reform law enforcement in America in a time of unrest and upheaval. The topic of police reform became a matter of popular debate, with one phrase in particular inflaming passions. As part of the DealBook D.C. Policy Project, The New York Times convened activists, academics, law enforcement officials and politicians to discuss public safety, racism and the different things people mean when they say “defund the...
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We are Overdue for a Revolution in Child Welfare [imprintnews.org]
By Jessica Pryce and Amelia Franck Meyer, The Imprint, January 4, 2021 Although child welfare reform has been a topic of conversation for many years, what is often meant by “reform” is evolutionary or incremental change, which are efforts to make the current system better, but not fundamentally different. But many systems leaders who operate significantly improved versions of the current system agree that it still falls short of meeting the needs of families. The Biden administration...
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14 Policy Priorities to Heal the Nation: A Moral and Economic Agenda for the First 100 Days (actionnetwork.org)
As people of moral conscience we must come together and support a policy agenda that centers the needs of poor and low-income people. We know that in order to heal this nation we must lift up moral policy solutions that will benefit everybody. This is a reconstruction and restoration agenda that, when implemented, can repair and transform the lives of people of every race, ethnicity, age, sexual and gender orientation, who have been suffering unjustly, for far too long. On behalf of the 140...
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What’s in the Biden-Harris $1.9 trillion stimulus package to strengthen families, especially if reforms are made permanent
If you are finding it hard to keep track of all the Executive Orders, presidential directives, and release of plans by the Biden-Harris Administration and you’re interested in the key elements that hold promise for strengthening families and improving the lives of children, you might find the succinct 19-page document on the American Rescue Plan (the $1.9 trillion relief plan) valuable in an ever more complicated policy and political landscape. The recommendations in this document (also...
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April 2021 CTIPP CAN Call Follow Up
Thank you to everyone who was able to join this month's CTIPP CAN call, and a special thank you to Dan Jurman, Dave Ellis, Commissioner Christine Beyer, and Angela Medrano Sanchez for their wonderful and informative presentations about the work in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We learned about strategies that have proven effective for launching statewide trauma-informed initiatives. If you were unable to join, would like to watch again, or want to share with others, you can find the call...
Member
Justin Jenkins
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Learn how to secure federal funding for your community. A Better Normal with CTIPP, Dave Ellis, Dan Jurman
The nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act has several buckets of funding that can be used to promote trauma-informed and healing-centered projects. PACEs Connection communities can apply for this funding, according to leaders of the Campaign for Trauma-informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP), the National Trauma Campaign, and PACEs Connection. The “Better Normal” webinar on Friday, May 14 at 3 p.m. EST; Noon PST, Dan Press, Jesse Kohler and Marlo Nash of CTIPP will begin by describing...
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American Rescue Plan provides funding for issues laid bare by pandemic, structural & racial inequities, plus trauma-informed projects
There may have been attendees with more questions than answers following a recent webinar on federal funding coming as the result of the American Rescue Plan Act. But much was made clear in the webinar sponsored by PACEs Connection and the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP). For star ters, said Marlo Nash, “ The pandemic is continuing to impact physical, mental, social, and economic health, and pretty much every public system and the people who are in those systems. It...
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Major Child Welfare Bills Pass in New York, Texas, Oregon [fosteringmediaconnections.org]
The early summer has seen a slew of high-impact state legislation on child welfare and youth justice. Last week, New York lawmakers moved several landmark bills while punting a few to next year’s legislative session. Among the biggest moves: The state will now give parents whose rights have been terminated a path to court-ordered contact with their children, even those who have been adopted from foster care. Children below the age of 12 can no longer be arrested and processed in New York’s...
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New York Votes to Raise the Minimum Age of Arrest From Seven to 12, Reform Awaits Cuomo's Signature [imprintnews.org]
By Michael Fitzgerald, The Imprint, June 11, 2021 Upending laws on the books since at least 1909, the New York Legislature passed a historic justice reform this week that bars the arrest and prosecution of children who are 11 years old and as young as 7. More than a hundred young children are arrested and prosecuted in New York each year, overwhelmingly Black and Latino children who face off with law enforcement in their earliest years of life. If signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D),...
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Advocates rally around bipartisan RISE from Trauma Act that includes $600 million annually for community coalitions
As Congress heads toward the August recess, President Biden’s major domestic priorities are included in the framework announced on July 14 along with Democratic congressional leaders. Biden and party leaders agreed on a top-level number of $3.5 trillion for major programs including an extension of the child tax credit, universal pre-K, two years of free community college, child care support, climate provisions, expansion of the Affordable Care Act, and more. The path to enactment is far from...
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What’s in the Build Back Better bill to address ACEs and adverse community environments
PHOTO OF AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEMBER 3, 2021 RULES COMMITTEE PRINT 117–18 TEXT OF H.R. 5376, BUILD BACK BETTER ACT [Showing the text of H.R. 5376, as reported by the Committee on the Budget, with modifications.] With President Biden signing the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ( bridges, roads, internet access, etc.) November 15, it’s a good time to focus on the substance—not the legislative sausage-making—of the Build Back Better bill. The House of Representatives could...