Eloise Gómez Reyes

Late last week, a bipartisan group of House legislators introduced a bill that would supply $2 billion to states for help in preventing youth or family homelessness during the coronavirus pandemic.

Classic experiments in the 1970’s demonstrated that it’s not so much adverse events that result in deleterious consequences, but rather a lack of perceived control over those events. Subjects in these experiments who learned that they could not influence their challenging situations eventually gave up trying.

Leaders of the California Assembly and Senate presented detailed plans this week on how the state should shut down its aging and outmoded youth prison system – a revised approach to the youngest and most serious offenders that keeps them out of adult prisons and provides increased oversight of county-run detention facilities and programs.

The House Ways and Means Committee dropped a bipartisan bill today that would prevent youth from aging out of foster care during the coronavirus pandemic and provide additional federal cash to state child welfare agencies.

Less than a week after joining dozens of other prosecutors, corrections officials and probation chiefs in signing an open letter calling for the closure of all youth prisons, one California district attorney took her first official step toward doing just that in her own county.

A federal grant will allow for the completion of a major study on the effect of long-term professional mentoring on at-risk youth. 

Every single one of the 5- and 6-year-old kids in the study faced multiple daunting obstacles before they met their “friends” – the full-time professional mentors supplied by the nonprofit Friends of the Children – who have helped them navigate life’s inevitable challenges for at least the next 12 years.

Tehra Coles, Zainab Akbar, Emma Ketteringham, Lauren Shapiro

As thousands of Black people and their allies are protesting the systemic racism and police brutality that have been part of the fabric of this society for centuries, some white Americans appear ready to discuss the damage that oppression has done to Black and brown people.