Rikers Island

Last week, a 19-year-old with nowhere to stay in a city being ravaged by coronavirus made a desperate phone call to Trinity Place, a 10-bed shelter for LGBTQ youth on the Upper West Side. 

Stephanie Gendell, a key strategist behind recent legislative victories for child welfare advocates in New York, has joined the ranks of government. Gendell, who was previously the associate executive director for policy and advocacy at the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York (CCC), started last week at the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the city agency responsible for juvenile justice, foster care and other support services for struggling families.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is facing a major challenge to his overhaul of the city’s juvenile justice system. As he prepares to move dozens of teen inmates out of the infamous adult prison on Rikers Island, he’s rushing to recruit hundreds of new juvenile counselors to address understaffing while fighting a lawsuit from the corrections officers asked to temporarily fill in.

Trayvon Martin, Kalief Browder and Mike Brown have three things in common: parents who fiercely loved them, siblings who cared for them deeply and dreams that were never realized. They are also young black men whose tragic deaths started a national conversation about our broken justice system.

The Vera Institute of Justice, using a $2.2 million matching grant from the Justice Department, is working with five state corrections departments on reducing the use of solitary confinement of prisoners, a strategy that is disproportionately employed on young wards.

“We’re going to end solitary confinement of juveniles, period, end of story,” said Marc Schindler, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, with a wry laugh. He was discussing with Youth Services Insider the new Stop Solitary for Kids campaign, led by JPI and three other groups: Center for Children’s Law and Policy (CCLP); Georgetown University’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR); and the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (CJCA).