Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/foster-care/)
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…
Matthew “Fire” Mishefski’s experience with homelessness is the last of three stories on LGBTQ homeless youth as reported by the JJIE’s New York City Bureau. He uses the pronouns he/him.
Over the past two decades, I have had the extraordinary experience of working with youth involved in the juvenile justice system and the child welfare system. I am thrilled to bear witness as Los Angeles County finally moves toward using diversion programs to keep kids out of juvenile justice and in school and at home where they belong.
At the age of 16, A.S. had just made his high school football team when his life was upended. His mother was moving overseas, and he would have to go live with his remarried father and four step-siblings in another part of town.
Christina Young remembers the day the cops came for her at school.
She was fifteen years old — a sophomore at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business in lower Manhattan. She and four of her friends were sitting together at a table in the school’s large and chaotic cafeteria.
Relly Brown was so destitute in 2016 they could not even get a room in the abandoned house on the corner of Fountain Avenue and Cherokee Avenue in Los Angeles. They had to settle for the porch.
By the age of 17, David Vanwetter had been in and out of detention perhaps a dozen times.
Washington state is vowing to keep young people like Vanwetter — often with complicated and troubled lives — from becoming homeless after they exit the jailhouse door. The state Legislature has ambitiously pledged to stop releasing youth from “publicly funded systems of care” — juvenile detention, foster care and mental health and drug treatment — into homelessness by the end of 2020. And that doesn’t mean putting them in a cab to a homeless shelter: Youth must have “safe and stable housing,” the law says.
The fight against youth homelessness drags on and on. It is not that the fighters are no match for a seemingly intractable issue that has haunted the nation for decades.
When Patrick McCarthy first had lunch with Lisa Hamilton more than a decade ago, he remembers thinking, “She really sounds like a Casey person.”