Juvenile Justice

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.

The families of children in Riverside County juvenile detention went to court Monday seeking reimbursement of millions of dollars in fees their lawyers say were illegally charged. 

The Western Center on Law & Poverty and the National Center for Youth Law, representing the locked-up youths’ families, filed an amended complaint in their existing lawsuit against the county, charging that although Riverside stopped collecting the administrative fees in April, that was not sufficient.

Ohio made a strong move Wednesday toward becoming the 24th state to ban sentences of life without parole for crimes committed when the defendant was a juvenile.

The handful or two of people already serving such sentences in Ohio, and a number of others serving de facto life sentences, could be eligible for parole if the bill is passed by the Ohio House and signed into law.

As the number of youth locked up in Los Angeles County’s detention facilities plunged to a historic low during the pandemic, costs have soared, renewing calls to strip funding from the Probation Department and shutter increasingly expensive juvenile halls and camps.

‘Velmanette builds the wagons, puts them on the road, and then everybody else jumps on them’

There’s a poorly lit, windowless courtroom in lower Manhattan that rarely attracts an audience.

The National Center for Youth Law is bringing in a longtime fighter for child, youth and community justice as the Oakland, California-based organization’s second in command.

Shakti Belway, a graduate of Stanford University’s law school like the center’s director, Jesse Hahnel, brings with her deep experience in community law, litigation, direct representation, policy development, legislative reform and strategic mobilization.

In the past two decades, there has been an increasing interest in the linkages between schools and carceral settings, or what has been termed, the “school to prison pipeline.” Much writing and activism around this topic has focused on severing those linkages in the K-12 context, often overlooking the other end of the pipeline (prison).