In 2000, I was 14 years old, in Los Angeles' Skid Row. You wouldn't believe such a Third World slum existed within history's richest country; oh, but it did. It does. A section of one of the world's most glamorous cities set aside to hide thousands of homeless people, to hide America's unwillingness to deal with poverty, mental health, drug addiction and homelessness. It’s all swept under the rug, or under the shadow of downtown's skyscrapers from the top of the world, down to a grimy, violent underworld, where you had to fight just to eat and humanity was perverted into its most animalistic tendencies.
Juvenile justice reforms, including the growing use of youth diversion programs that offer alternatives to youth arrest and incarceration, have helped contribute to a substantial decrease in the number of young people who are involved in the justice system in recent years. Despite this overall decrease, such reforms have also corresponded with a troubling increase in the juvenile justice system’s inequitable burden on youth of color and Black youth in particular.
Often differing from one another in their theoretical framework, structure and implementation, the constellation of justice reform strategies referred to as youth diversion vary widely in their ability to improve outcomes for participating youth or meaningfully reduce justice system involvement. When implemented well, with a clear theory of change grounded in youth development, collaborative design and oversight and data-driven protections against widening the net of justice system involvement, youth diversion can be an important tool for equity, justice and overall public health. When implemented poorly, however, youth diversion efforts are in danger of unintentionally deepening inequity. Before turning to strategies and tools that help promote equity in youth diversion, let’s consider two hypothetical youth diversion programs: Program A, designed with equity in mind as an explicit priority that therefore develops a social-ecological and social justice framework, and Program B, designed based on a solely individual-level theory of change.
In Program B, well-meaning program staff may make decisions based on assumptions that their program is beneficial for any young person and may change or grow reactively — setting eligibility guidelines, program requirements or reporting requirements based only on what particular partners are comfortable with at the time, for example, or expanding geographically only where requested.
Leaders across the United States agonize over recent mass shootings as Americans fear more to come. Perhaps we can learn from youth in two mega-cities...
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.
Aswad Thomas was a recent college graduate headed to the European basketball leagues in 2009 when he was shot in the back in Hartford, Conn., eight times. He was temporarily paralyzed with one bullet an inch away from his spine, had two collapsed lungs and extensive internal bleeding.
It’s lunchtime on a recent Wednesday at Venice High School. Twenty or so students are sitting at their desks with full plates of food looking up at the teacher. No one is looking at their phones. They listen attentively to the man up front, who is giving them a writing prompt.
When the Los Angeles March for Our Lives crowd stepped off on March 24, students at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism were there to cover it.
Doniesha Thomas is in her bedroom, crouching on the floor and peering into a pet carrier that appears empty. “He’s in there, all the way back,” she said, reaching in to find the kitten she rescued from a nearby vacant lot the day before, though she says she dislikes cats.
You can only find the entrance to the RightWay Foundation if you’re really looking for it. Hidden deep within the parking structure for a South Central Los Angeles...
All children make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes get them in trouble with the law. It happens in all kinds of families and in all kind of neighborhoods.
