Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/community-based-alternatives/)
For more than a decade, juvenile justice reformers have used developments in adolescent brain science and psychology to make their case for a system that emphasizes rehabilitation and second chances for young offenders.
Experts estimate that only 15 to 20 percent of youth offenders end up in court in New Zealand. For the remainder of the cases, which are often petty, opportunistic crime, police have the flexibility to make decisions based on the context and details of the case, with a focus both on diverting young people from entering the court system and involving their families and communities in the rehabilitative process.
In the Resnick Education Wing 10 floors above the main stages of historic Carnegie Hall, a teenage girl named Breanni stood nervously in front of the crowd.
Adolphus Graves, the chief probation officer of Fulton County Juvenile Court in Atlanta, was driven to transform his juvenile justice system by the mistakes he made as a young probation officer.
“I was a little wayward and misguided as a probation officer,” he said. “Knowing my times as a probation officer, and how many things I did horribly, or how many children that I irresponsibly, or sometimes just ignorantly, subjected to detention because I had no other tools. ... The recurring theme consistently has been the lack of knowledge, of understanding what’s going on, the depth of what’s going on in a child’s life.”
“We want to know what does a world look like where 10-year-olds aren’t being arrested,” said the woman who trained Bronx young people to survey their peers and write a report about how juveniles are treated when they're arrested.
Combined with revolutionary advances in brain science and adolescent development research, the Chicago Crime Lab studies help to clarify the dimensions of a new and more targeted approach for combating delinquency and improving outcomes for high-risk youth generally. If only our nation’s juvenile justice systems took proper notice.
On Monday, Kansas became the latest state to overhaul its juvenile justice system, with a set of reforms projected to reduce the number of juveniles in custody by more than half and save tens of millions of dollars.
Leandra Phommavongsay began his speech to the dozen or so teenagers gathered in the back of a Clayton County courtroom by recounting his recent travels.
Locking young people up is bad public policy even at more reasonable rates given that detention has consistently been shown to be ineffective at reducing delinquency.
Lead4Life, Inc.’s purpose is to create a culture of love and support. We are addressing the school-to-prison pipeline in a very nontraditional manner but one that is extremely effective and provides a meaningful experience for most participants.