Juvenile Justice

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. 

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.

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.