Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/noah-echols/page/3/)
The country's troubled juvenile-justice system got a wakeup call in Pennsylvania. For more than four years, two senior juvenile-court judges took kickbacks of $2.6 million in exchange for packing thousands of kids off to privately owned detention centers. And this month a state board admitted it never investigated complaints made against the judges.
Children’s Rights, Inc. a national advocacy group, filed a motion in federal court this month in an effort to force the State to turn over documents related to diversion, safety resources and temporary guardianships of children in Fulton and DeKalb counties. The group is concerned that DFCS is artificially suppressing the number of investigations and the number of children in foster care, leaving abused and neglected children in danger. Read more from Beth Locker’s blog at Voices for Georgia’s Children
Here's several useful tools and resources on best practices in juvenile justice, mental health, substance abuse treatment, and juvenile brain research:
Recently, I visited a community where approximately 30-40 adolescents and their caregivers had shown up just to tell me what they thought of an adolescent substance abuse treatment program funded by the agency I represent, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT). They’d been invited, true, but I was still nervous, since folks tend to show up for town hall meetings and the like only when they have something to complain about.
Four kids, four crimes. Two were treated as juveniles, two were sent to adult court. Read their stories, then you decide. The PBS series Frontline looks at the adult vs. child debate, and talks to judges and lawyers. They examine the scale of teen crime. And they ask what makes a 6-year old nearly beat a baby to death.
The Freechild Project believes that the United States is suffering an epidemic of injustice that relies on the steady increase in the numbers of young people of color and low income young people in prison. This epidemic is perpetuated by systemic racism, and facilitated by the prison-industrial complex. A growing community of young activists are working to change this formula.
In a secret hearing three years ago, a Beaver County judge terminated the custody rights of a 19-year-old Allegheny County woman so that her baby could be adopted by a pharmacist and his wife, a lawyer who had shared a law office with the judge's wife.
A number of recent surveys have shown that there are profound racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, that African-American and Hispanic youth are more likely to be tried as adults. They are more likely to receive longer sentences, they're more likely to be in locked facilities, and on and on and on, even when charged with the same offense as whites. Do you think that that's true?
Juveniles are generally treated differently in the criminal justice system, but sometimes they are treated as adults.