2013 National Youth Violence Prevention Week Underway

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This week, the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) is celebrating National Youth Violence Prevention Week, which seeks to raise awareness of methods that may deter juveniles from engaging in violent activities. The weeklong observance is an initiative of the National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE). Each day this week, the SAVE Youth Advisory Board will highlight a specific youth violence prevention technique, which runs the gamut from promoting tolerance and respect in communities to conflict management strategies. Sponsors for this year’s event include the American School Counselor Association, theAssociation for Conflict Resolution, Youth Service America and the National Association of Youth Courts. On the official SAVE website, the organization lists numerous National Youth Violence Prevention week awareness activities, as well as strategies for building community coalitions.

Grassroots Push Central to Juvenile Sentencing Reforms

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since last summer, state legislatures around the country have been scrambling to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting states from sentencing children to mandatory life terms in prison without the chance of parole. Significant grassroots pressure remains necessary to ensure state legislators don’t try to create wiggle room around the court’s ruling in Miller v. Alabama, said youth justice advocates at a recent panel discussion organized by the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. Members of the panel argued that sentencing reforms should take into account the cognitive and developmental differences between adolescents and adults. Among the legal complexities unleashed upon states by Miller v. Alabama last June are the questions of whether the ruling applies retroactively to sentences already handed down, and whether, regardless of mandates, life terms without parole or other long-term sentences that effectively ensure death in prison are ever acceptable for juveniles, panelists said. Twenty-nine states currently have laws that directly contradict the Miller decision, said Daniel Gutman, a state strategist for The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, which lobbies for the abolishment of life sentences without parole for all juveniles. “When we’re talking about legislative reform in response to the Miller decision, it’s a very difficult process and there’s lots of different statutes at work,” Gutman said.

Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center Receives $750,000 Grant from MacArthur Foundation

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Update: The Children and Family Justice Center (CFJC), part of the Northwestern University School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic in Chicago, is one of several organizations that has received a 2013 MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Institutions. The MacArthur Foundation awarded the CFJC $750,000 as part of an annual recognition of Foundation grantees, which are designed to ensure their sustainability as institutions helping “address some of the world’s most challenging problems.”

CFJC staff, faculty and students represent children in conflict with the law, seeking to provide “access to justice” for underrepresented young people via individual advocacy and systemic reform efforts. Founded in 1992, the CFJC trains more than 20 law students annually. Julie Biehl, director of the CFJC, said that the grant will help her organization move to the “next level.”

“I think this award bestowed upon our organization is an honor,” she said. “I’m so proud of and excited for my staff and the team here.”

Biehl, also a sitting member of the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission’s Executive and Communication Committees, said that the organization will likely use the funding to create its first ever endowment program.

Author of Report Recaps Connecticut’s Long Road to Juvenile Justice Reform

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UPDATED: Large-scale abuses in Connecticut’s juvenile justice system drove a push for reform that rallied advocates and spurred politicians into action; according to the author of an exhaustive report on the history of the juvenile justice system detailing the strides the state has made over the last decade. “Connecticut had a terrible system 20 years ago,” said author Richard Mendel. “They’ve made a ton of changes around a ton of different areas … producing impressive improvements on a wide range of indicators.”

In 1993, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit about the neglect, excessive punishment and unconstitutional practices in the system. The case was named after Emily J., a 13-year-old girl with a homeless mother and absent father. Skipping school landed her in a detention center, where she spent months.

DC Reforms Offer Some Kids New Beginning

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This month, our sister publication Youth Today features a  piece on D.C.'s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) by Kaukab Jhumra Smith. Youth Today, is dedicated to providing quality journalism on issues of interest to those involved in the youth services industry. This, of course, includes stories in the arena of juvenile justice such as Kaukab's story. But this month’s issue also includes stories on what youth-oriented organizations should do to prepare for natural disasters, how to head off abusive relationships between teens, book reviews, opinion pieces, an explainer on the art of statistics and a photo spread on the impact of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on the youth-oriented organizations and young people. Youth Today prints six time a year.

Growing Up to Be Stickup Kids

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NEW YORK --By the early 1990s, the crack era that devoured New York City in the 1980s was on the decline and crime rates were similarly falling. But Randol Contreras saw something different on the streets in the South Bronx neighborhood where he grew up. His drug dealer friends, no longer making the same money selling crack, were turning to robbing drug dealers for an increasingly dwindling share of the market. One vice traded for another, more violent one. His book "Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence and the American Dream," published by the University of California Press last month, chronicles the downfall of the drug trade and the young Dominican men from his childhood neighborhood that tried to make an often dangerous living in it.

Long-Time Reformer to Head Federal Juvenile Justice Office: Report

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Robert Listenbee Jr., a long-time champion of reforms in the juvenile justice system, including limiting the detention and incarceration of juveniles, is likely to be the next permanent administrator of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, according to a report in the Chronicle of Social Change. The federal office on juvenile justice has not had a permanent chief since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the first time in the office’s nearly four-decade history that the seat has lain vacant for so long. Melodee Hanes became acting administrator of the office in January 2012, after Jeff Slowikowski fulfilled that role for the first three years of the Obama administration. A recent rule change by Congress eliminated the need for the administrator to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and so an appointment by the White House is all that Listenbee would need to officially take over. Listenbee is the head of the Juvenile Unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a member of the federal advisory council on juvenile justice, and a co-chair of a national blue-ribbon taskforce that recently found that two out of three American children are exposed to trauma from violence during their childhood.

Georgia Governor: $5 Million for New Juvenile Diversions

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Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is asking the state legislature to spend $5 million dollars to set up community diversion programs for low-risk youth offenders, on the model of other states. The appropriation would “create an incentive funding program” to encourage communities to treat appropriate youth at home, Deal told lawmakers at his annual State of the State address on Jan. 17. “We would emphasize community-based, non-confinement correctional methods for low-risk offenders as an alternative to regional and state youth centers,” Deal said, options like substance abuse treatment and family counseling. He emphasized the chance to save money, saying every secure bed in a Youth Detention Center, a facility for longer-term sentences, costs $91,000 annually.

Illinois Governor’s Plan to Close Juvenile Prisons Nears Completion

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CHICAGO -- Every morning in southern Illinois, 38 full-time prison guards board a state bus and ride 46 miles to the Illinois Youth Center and correctional facility at Murphysboro. The facility was built in 1997 with a capacity for 156 young people. But when the guards arrive for work every day, no inmates are waiting for them. Concurrent with a steady decline in youth incarceration, Murphysboro hasn’t seen an inmate in months. But a heavily disputed proposal by Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn to close Murphysboro and the under-populated juvenile facility at Joliet, consolidating their inmates with those in other facilities across the state, is nearing its final stages.