Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/jdai/)
Though it’s been 12 years since I visited, an image from a juvenile confinement facility in Alabama remains vivid in my mind’s eye: a simple wall, visible from a glass control room, separating two identical wings of small concrete cells.
Almost all youth who interact with the juvenile justice system have contact with juvenile probation staff.
When the Annie E. Casey Foundation launched the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) in the tough-on-crime era of the early 1990s, politicians were labeling teenage offenders “superpredators” and states were passing laws making it easier to prosecute kids as adults. Rates of juvenile detention were skyrocketing.
On paper, Meghan Harrah and Albino Garcia had a shared goal: to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system.
On a cloudy September afternoon in Santa Cruz, California, I am standing in the probation complex parking lot talking on the phone with Chief Probation Officer Fernando Giraldo.
In Arkansas, juvenile justice reform has long proved elusive. While most neighboring states have reduced their youth incarceration rates by double digits since the 1990s, Arkansas’ confinement per capita confinement numbers remain stubbornly high.
Arkansas has long trailed most of the rest of the nation in reducing juvenile incarceration.
Over the past decade, two counties in Northwest Arkansas have drastically reduced their juvenile incarceration rate.
We live in a world of best practices. Some call themselves evidence-based best practices (EBP), some are simply promising practices based on evidence from somewhere, and a few are practices grounded in evidence-based research (EBR).
“The 2017 JDAI National Intersite conference was so inspirational!” “It was awesome to be in the company of so many reform champions,” “The conversations...