California: Young men sit srpind table with built-in chairs in large ron and stairs leading ro balcony above with doors to several rooms.

California: Is this how you want your kids to be treated?

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“How would you want your kids, if they were in these facilities, to be treated?” 

That question was raised by formerly incarcerated youth and current juvenile justice advocate James Martinez at a meeting of California’s Board of State and Community Corrections. The BSCC is a state agency tasked with overseeing jails and county-level juvenile facilities in California. In early November 2022, the board’s Executive Steering Committee, met to begin rewriting critically important rules governing juvenile camps, ranches and halls.

study says schooling for incarcerated youth is inferior: boy in juvenile detention holds book behind back as he walks in line with other detainees

Study: Schooling for incarcerated youth is fragmented, inferior

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Most of the 50 states have clearly designated which agencies are in charge of hiring teachers for incarcerated juveniles, creating teaching curriculum and other education services. But how and by whom that instruction gets delivered varies substantially from state to state and locale to locale, resulting in a fragmented system that generally provides inferior instruction, according to a recent report from Bellwether Education Partners.

prisoners want more college prison programs: young black prisoner in orange garb looking at something

Opinion: Education-minded prisoners thirst for more college prison programs 

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For a chance to earn a college degree while he’s incarcerated, Quantae has traded the matching color scheme and single-person cells of Lee’s young adult unit for concrete-gray quarters the size of a small bathroom that he now shares with another man at Ridgeland Correctional Institution. There he’s been able to enroll at Clafin University, the only college in our state currently using federal Pell Grants for prison education. He had to leave behind the supportive community he’d been a part of at Lee.

tag: 2 hands holding steel bars, blurred green tree, sky, road and car outside

An Open Letter to the Young and Incarcerated in the Time of COVID-19

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Children in juvenile hall have food security and shelter, unlike many of us. COVID-19 has stolen these basics from countless among us, including families of kids in custody. Worry is constant. Routines are disrupted. Our elders are likely isolated from loved ones.