crossover youth

I spent more than seven years as a trial court judge in San Francisco addressing the needs of children and families. I was tasked with formulating a plan to address the harm before me.

In March, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion that promised to tackle one of the most pressing issues the county’s child welfare and juvenile justice systems face: how to change the tragically life-altering effects of being caught up in both.

We know that, statistically speaking, kids who spend time in Los Angeles County’s foster care system — or any foster care system, for that matter — have worse outcomes when they reach adulthood than youth who’ve never wound up in the child dependency system at all.

A Los Angeles law school has been awarded $1 million to advocate for the needs of Los Angeles County “crossover youth,” youngsters caught up in both the foster care and juvenile justice systems.

Yesterday, Senators Gary Peters (D-Michigan) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced legislation to address the needs of the nation’s most at-risk youth. The Child Outcomes Need New Efficient Community Teams (CONNECT) Act seeks to improve outcomes for youth in contact with both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

The solution to curbing juvenile arrests and improving permanency for abused and neglected children? Better collaboration between the systems that serve many of the the nation’s most at-risk youth, witnesses told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.

This week, the California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership released a summary of their recent research and analysis efforts, entitled “Crossover Youth: A Shared Responsibility.” The first two sections of the report begin with two statistics on California youth: first, “there were 496,972 reports of [child] neglect and abuse in 2014, with 81,391 substantiated,” and second, “there were 101,531 young people referred to juvenile probation in 2014.”

California’s Senate Bill 12, which would expand benefits and support for transition-age foster youth who have also been involved with probation, was sidelined in late August. The bill was cosponsored by Senator Jim Beall (D) and the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center, and would ensure that foster youth who end up in the justice system when they become adults have access to the same transition assistance that their peers do.

An effort to extend financial support to California’s probation-involved foster youth cleared another legislative hurdle yesterday when Senate Bill 12 was unanimously approved by an Assembly committee. In one of its final pushes, the Assembly Judiciary Committee passed the bill in a 10-0 vote.