Ways to Let Detained Youth Know They’re Not Forgotten This Holiday Season
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As the holidays approach, we often forget there are so many youth who are detained, in placement or simply away from their families.
Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/category/ideas-and-opinions/page/54/)
As the holidays approach, we often forget there are so many youth who are detained, in placement or simply away from their families.
“Tell me about a time you made a mistake.”
Every young person has been asked this question in a job interview. After all, what better way to assess someone’s work ethic, perseverance and self-reflection than hearing how they learn from failure or just life’s challenges?
It's not an easy task to keep disruptive kids in school because our inclination is to remove them like we do a tumor.
OK, this is a hard one for me to write for a number of reasons, chief among them being the fact that I must hold myself accountable, as well as be held by all who will read this.
Cultivating true partnership between law enforcement and community-based providers can support the evolution of these critical systems. We suggest having strong community allies embedded within systems to ensure that policy changes are discussed and implemented as a way to make and sustain systemic change.
We may not get the hoped-for commitment on juvenile justice reform from the federal government. Despite the best efforts of national advocacy groups, the era of large-scale national reform may well be at an end.
But that doesn’t have to mean a halt, or even a slowing of the wave of reform. There are now unprecedented Left-Right-and-Center coalitions at the state and local levels all around the country that agree on the fundamentals.
Concern about how the next administration will deal with criminal justice reform is well-justified. But possibly the most troubling clue to the policies of a Trump administration is contained in the attitudes of the president-elect to science.
We will continue to lift our voices when we see the narrative for our young black and brown men being framed from the lens of criminal behavior, and not from a place of healing, with little to no acknowledgement of the systemic racism and trauma that this population has been through. It is our duty as social workers to fight this fight.
They crave love, support and someone to look after them. More times than not, this does not exist for them. The same negative behaviors that existed before, including drug use to numb their feelings of insecurity, begin again.
I am not sure how many folks similarly situated in juvenile justice understand that how we treat kids in our schools is one of the most essential factors in reducing crime among juveniles, and later in reducing crime among the adult population.