[UPDATED] Shooting of Unarmed Black Teen Raises Questions of Police Conduct in Orlando Suburb

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UPDATE: A grand jury will hear evidence next month in the shooting, The New York Times Reported Tuesday. UPDATE: On Monday, March 19, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice opened an investigation into Martin's death, MSNBC reported. Questions of police conduct in a small Florida town have arisen following the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white neighborhood watch captain. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old junior, was staying at the home of his father’s girlfriend in a gated community in Sanford, an Orlando suburb. According to an ABC News investigation, Martin was returning from the store with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea when he was confronted by George Zimmerman, 28.

Former Georgia DJJ Officer Arrested for Alleged Sexual Assault of 14-Year-Old in Custody

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A former Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) corrections officer was arrested Wednesday for alleged sex crimes that occurred while she was a staff member at the Regional Youth Detention Center (RYDC) in Gainesville. Ardith Brown faces charges of felony child molestation and sexual assault against persons in custody. Brown was removed from duty at the RYDC and suspended in January after other corrections officers alerted a DJJ Safety and Security Team to evidence of officer misconduct during an unannounced inspection. She was terminated February 2 following a DJJ internal investigation into allegations Brown had an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old RYDC resident in DJJ custody. The Gainesville RYDC was the first DJJ secure facility to receive a surprise facility inspection after Commissioner L. Gale Buckner began a system-wide security sweep crackdown following a homicide at the Augusta YDC campus last November.

Child Advocacy Groups Criticize Proposed Reform Measures in Nebraska

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This legislative session, Nebraska lawmakers are expected to sign a child welfare reform package that would ease caseloads for the state’s social workers as well as end privatized services in almost all of the state’s counties. However, in an Associated Press story this week the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform said that the reform measures fall short. The advocacy group says they do not address the fact that Nebraska places children in foster care services at a rate double that of the national average, in addition to maintaining the nation’s highest proportion of children in foster care homes. Richard Wexler, executive director of the coalition, told the AP that Nebraska’s child welfare system promotes a “take-the-child-and-run mentality,” which ultimately creates less safe environments for the state’s children. “Not only does Nebraska’s obscene rate of removal do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken,” he said, “it also overloads caseworkers so they have even less time to find children in real danger.”

A recent National Coalition for Child Protection Reform report notes that in 2010, approximately 8 out of 1,000 children were placed in foster care within the state.

Congolese Warlord Convicted of Using Child Soldiers by International Criminal Court

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After 10 years, the international war crimes court at The Hague issued its first ruling Wednesday, convicting a Congolese warlord of deploying child soldiers during the Democratic Republic of Congo's long bloody conflict. The International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, 51, with three counts of war crimes. Now he faces the possibility of life in prison. "The chamber concludes that the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is guilty of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of 15 years," ICC Presiding Judge Adrian Fulford said as he read the judgment issued by the three-judge panel, Reuters reports. Lubanga "was essential to a common plan to conscript and enlist girls and boys below the age of 15.”

Lubanga may appeal the conviction within 30 days.

UPDATED: Guards at Rome, Georgia RYDC Cleared of Inciting Violence But Questions Remain

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State officials in Georgia say they have cleared three guards of accusations that they incited violence among girls held at a Rome juvenile detention facility. One of the guards was fired, though, for failing to prevent the Dec. 7 attack at the heart of the allegations, and the other two disciplined for unrelated policy violations. Witness statements in the Department of Juvenile Justice's case file, obtained by JJIE, told investigators that guards had offered them food as bribes to fight other juveniles. A male detainee made similar uncorroborated allegations, the file shows, and the girl accused in the Dec. 7 attack told an investigator that one of the guards told her she wouldn't get in trouble for it.

SAMHSA, MacArthur Foundation to Promote Diversion Programs for Youth With Mental Health Issues

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The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have teamed up for a new $1 million project to divert youth with behavioral health conditions away from the juvenile justice system and into community-based programs and services. According to SAMHSA, 60-70 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system have a mental disorder and more than 60 percent suffer from a substance abuse disorder. Many of these youth, SAMHSA says, wind up in the juvenile justice system rather than receiving treatment for their underlying disorders. Up to eight states will be selected competitively to participate in the new collaborative initiative. If selected, states would receive support to develop and initiate policies and programs to divert youth away from the juvenile justice system early.

Report Names 5 Essential Principles for Georgia’s Juvenile Justice System

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A new issue analysis by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation takes a close look at the state’s juvenile justice system and indentifies five essential principles for policy-makers to “increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the system.”

The report, written by Jeanette Moll and Kelly McCutchen, says 50,000 youths are in Georgia’s juvenile justice system every year, either awaiting adjudication or serving their sentences. Those youth, the authors write, “represent the future workforce and citizens of Georgia.”

The five essential principles focus simultaneously on rehabilitation and cost cutting, including placing low-level offenders into the least restrictive placements such as non-secure facilities and home-based community programming that is between 35 and 70 percent less expensive than secure detention. According to the report, these options also keep low-level offenders away from youth who pose a real danger to society. The report also calls for a comprehensive analysis of each youth in the system as well as systematic responses that focus on the offender’s family. Another cost-cutting measure that the report says may deter future crime is to avoid formal processing for first-time and low-level offenders.

Of Organ Donors and Social Media

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No one really questions how effective social media can be these days. Just look back across the wreckage of any number of despotic regimes in the Arab World or the 70 million plus views of a YouTube posting that may help lead to the downfall of a particularly brutal madman in central Africa and the Invisible Children at his mercy. Nor do you have to look afar for the good it can do, and in rapid fashion. For the several hundred friends and acquaintances of 19-year-old Richard Bland, a scheduled visit by a gang of four young men from the now-cancelled MTV series The Buried Life was used to jazz up a little interest in the importance of organ donations and specifically young Richard’s need for a kidney. The idea to engineer the mash up of social media and the visit by the Buried Life crew to Kennesaw State University north of Atlanta, sprang to life in the minds of some fraternity boys on a recent evening.

Which Bills Survived Crossover Day in the Georgia Assembly?

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A proposed overhaul of Georgia's juvenile code remains alive at the State Capitol, but bills addressing school attendance and over-medicating foster children died this week as the Legislature completed its 30th day. Or, if not legally dead, the bills are on life-support. The General Assembly designates Day 30 of each year's session as "Crossover Day," the deadline by which the state House or Senate must pass a bill and send it over to the other chamber. Bills that don't make it are dead, but can be revived by tacking the language onto another measure that remains under consideration. The Senate's version of the juvenile-code rewrite -- a mammoth, five-year, 243-page reorganization and update of laws dealing with delinquent, unruly and neglected children -- died Wednesday without a vote by the full chamber.

Experts Speak About Addiction Recovery for Young Adults

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At the National Collegiate Recovery Conference Wednesday at Kennesaw State University, Michael Fishman, Director of the Young Adult Program at Talbott Recovery Campus in Atlanta, neatly summed up everything he had learned in 22 years of treating addiction in young adults. The recurring theme of his keynote address: It’s complicated. “Most young adults are generally poly-substance abusers,” he said. They aren’t just using marijuana; they’re also drinking, Fishman says. It’s not just opioids, it’s opioids and anti-depressants or any other combination.