Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/foster-care/)
Implemented in June, HB 1905 establishes a five-year budget of over $5 million to reduce homelessness among those aforementioned groups. Washington’s Office of Homeless Youth will be responsible for much of that budget, administering $1.6 million in flexible funding that lets people who are allotted those dollars determine how to spend them on transportation, telephone or other everyday expenses.
Everyone deserves access to justice. Eight years ago, I took a chance that the community would show up to support legal services – and justice – for vulnerable kids and young adults.
I’ll never forget the first client who walked through our doors or any of the clients I’ve represented. As I step down from leading Arizona Legal Women and Youth Services (ALWAYS) and turn the reins over to a brilliant successor, I can’t help but reflect on all that I’ve learned, felt, and hoped during my time running a legal aid center. At ALWAYS, we serve human trafficking survivors and children and young adults affected by homelessness, abuse, and the foster care system. With the exception of trafficking survivors, everyone we serve is 24 years old or younger.
Defendants who are 18 years old and younger will have the same access to legal counsel as adults in Washington, starting next January. That new law trails another juvenile justice reform, which took effect on July 25, aimed at trimming the number of youth in foster care who wind up in juvenile detention. The latter aims to expand the number of community-based endeavors offering trauma-informed rehabilitative care that is culturally competent and focused on racial equity among youth in the justice system. Currently those less restrictive, community placements are available to 25% of juveniles in the state, according to legislators who drafted the measure. The initiative expanding juveniles’ access to lawyers mandates that juveniles can phone, videoconference or talk in person with a lawyer before waiving any constitutional rights, if a law enforcement officer, among other things:
Questions a youth after advising that person of rights granted under the landmark Miranda ruling.
I imagined things from the standpoint of invincibility in my youth. Growing up in the ghetto encouraged me to embrace a “survival of the fittest” mentality without ever having read Darwin. As a child I understood the ghetto as an opposing force that kept my mother on her knees in prayer — sweating, struggling and protecting. She sacrificed all her wants, dreams and half her needs to protect my sister and me from ever feeling poor as children. With no father around, I was the man of the house.
The #SayHerName movement that was launched in 2014 by the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies has gained immense momentum amid a number of nationally recognized murders of Black women at the hands of police. A goal of the campaign is to bring to light the oft overlooked stories of Black women and girls who have needlessly and unjustifiably perished in their encounters with law enforcement.
#SayHerName is an important, overdue and necessary movement. It is a vigil for Black women and girls who have fatal interactions with the legal system and is crucial to honoring those lost and to educating society on the all too common, yet underacknowledged, realities of being a Black female in America. While we recognize the importance of #SayHerName, we want to shed light on a population of Black girls who are entangled in America’s custodial systems and seemingly missing in plain sight. These girls are placed under the control of institutions that were avowedly designed to protect and/or rehabilitate young people but that often do just the opposite and, in turn, create a new population of victims.
These systems have the capacity to inflict irreparable physical and psychological harm, which in some instances has led to the untimely deaths of Black girls.
We described in the previous column how the approach is four-tiered, beginning with collaboration. Collaboration is a term that has been bantered about and unfortunately, in some circles, gotten a black eye. The truth is that there is a best practice to collaboration that many don’t follow, and so it fails. Not because the concept is bad; it’s the user who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Inevitable. That’s how winding up in prison felt for a group of former foster youth — now adults who are imprisoned at Monroe Correctional Complex in Washington state.
When we hear the words restorative justice, there is often a connection with the criminal justice system. But what if we brought “restorative” to child welfare and a civil legal system?
Nearly 25% of our population are teens and young adults in the most important developmental sprint of their lives. But rather than helping young people realize their great potential to become successful adults who contribute to our country’s future, too often we’re unwittingly cutting their progress off just before the finish line.
Recently a trial judge in Washington state’s King County Superior Court discussed his three years presiding in juvenile court. Roger Rogoff described this time a...