Justice

Two years ago this month, New York City moved all 16- and 17-year-olds off the Rikers Island prison complex, for good.

New York City has a tortured history educating its youth caught up in the criminal justice system. Until last the decade, city judges sent young people with delinquency cases hours away from home to isolated, barbed-wired youth prisons, where subpar schooling left them far behind their former classmates.

Last week, after a thorough search for the best youth arrest diversion program in the country, the Annie E. Casey Foundation selected the Los Angeles-based Centinela Youth Services and its Everychild Restorative Justice Center as its model for promoting restorative justice-based juvenile diversion nationwide. The

A novel new research projection suggests crime rates will decrease in the coming years if demographic and economic trends hold steady — even if people are imprisoned at lower rates. 

Movement on another round of coronavirus-related relief has picked up again, and it does look good for at least some sizable child welfare provisions to make the final package. 

“We’re feeling hopeful about some child welfare provisions making into the final package,” said Aubrey Edwards-Luce, senior director of child welfare and juvenile justice for First Focus on Children.

As Youth Services Insider mentioned back in July, nobody has done more to track the presence of coronavirus in juvenile settings than The Sentencing Project’s Josh Rovner. His updates on Twitter have slowed from daily to periodic, but he is still combing media coverage, government updates and more to provide a national context that the federal government thus far has not added, at least publicly.

The common image of a probation department is a bland government building where a stern man sits with a clipboard, tapping his watch, waiting for an accused person to show up and explain if they’ve complied with a stay-out-of-trouble plan.

As advocates for community-based alternatives to incarceration and policing, we’re pleased to see how Santa Clara County and some other jurisdictions are acting with surprising speed and resolve to reduce the populations in their juvenile justice facilities, especially for girls and gender expansive youth of color.