Trauma-informed hubs: Teen standing in ladder next to kitchen back door with back to camera folding tool and doing repairs to ceiling above refrigerator

Trauma-informed ‘hubs’ reduce Chicago youth incarceration

A 65% reduction in youth incarceration between 2005 and 2021 and the closing of two youth prisons during that time are among the great strides of Redeploy Illinois, an innovative Cook County program allowing communities to tailor state-funded juvenile treatment services to meet their particular characteristics and needs.

Juvenile solitary: Close-up of legs and hands-in-lap of black person wearing over-sized navy pants sitting on edge of built-in cement bench with metal toilet in background.

Hundreds of seclusions were “voluntary.” Some kids don’t see it that way.

To hear the state of Tennessee tell it, Knoxville’s Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center has shown “significant and consistent improvement.” It no longer illegally locks kids up alone in cells, as an investigation by ProPublica and WPLN exposed last month.
But a closer look at the facility’s most recent inspection by the state Department of Children’s Services tells a different story. Instead of secluding children against their will, the facility claims that kids are voluntarily agreeing to be locked up alone.

Active shooter drill: Line of several teens with hands up behind heads stand in side building hallway protected by armed police

95% of public schools conduct active shooter drills. Are students safer?

Lockdown drills aimed at preparing students to protect themselves from school shooters do more to stir kids’ anxiety than their sense of protection, argues Dr. Annie Andrews, a South Carolina mother, pediatrician and firearm injury researcher. “Our children do not benefit from participating in these drills,” said former congressional candidate Andrews, also co-founder of  Their Future. Our Vote. “Children deserve to feel safe in their schools.”

Among those countering that viewpoint is Alex Piquero, a University of Miami criminologist and former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. “We are, unfortunately, living in a world where we just have to plan for school shootings and hope that they never happen,” said Piquero, a former editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.