Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/illinois-department-of-children-and-family-services/)
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services wrongfully incarcerated hundreds of children in juvenile detention after a court ordered them to be released to their guardian, according to a class action lawsuit filed Thursday by Cook County's public guardian.
Ambitious and certain to draw criticism, President Barack Obama’s plan to rid the nation of the most powerful weapons on the market and attempt to arrest mass and everyday shootings was expected by Congress Wednesday, marking a sharp turn in a decades-long fight to curb America’s gun violence. As the debate was playing out in Washington, several local and national leaders gathered at the University of Chicago Tuesday evening to discuss guns and policy, with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose city holds the dubious “murder capital” title, among the group and pushing sweeping gun control legislation that cracks down on assault weapons. Also on the panel was Democratic political consultant David Axelrod, who this week said that the National Rifle Association’s recent assertion that Congress would not enact the sort of change that Obama and others were pressing, was off base. In fact, he said, real legislation will squeeze through the legislative process and signal real change in the nation’s laws and gun dialogue. Also in attendance was the head of the University of Chicago CrimeLab, who noted that while the United States has managed to improve its count of more common crime – property theft, etc.
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.
By Eric Ferkenhoff and Maryam Jameel
Only hours before a Sunday deadline, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn inked a $33.7 billion budget Saturday, balancing the books but angering some education and child welfare experts and confounding political observers who said the Democrat may well have done more harm than good to the state’s neediest residents. Quinn, facing a $43.8 billion budget deficit – reportedly the nation’s worst — before the new fiscal year 2013 kicked in, took a budget that the General Assembly handed him on Friday, and cut it by $57 million. In doing so, Quinn said ”our priority should always be the safety and well-being of our children,” and promised to return some of the Illinois’ legislature’s planned $50 million in cuts to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS, the agency that handles most abuse and neglect cases and shelters the most at-risk. But critics said just the opposite could happen as Quinn, while saying he was protecting children and their education, cut $200 million in education funding and $85 million in child-welfare funding. Kent Redfield, an Illinois political expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said that while the cuts bring immediate savings, they could deepen problems, leading to bigger spending down the road.