Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/utah/)
Along with New Jersey and California, Utah is among a growing number of states that are implementing postsecondary programming for incarcerated youth. Utah’s Higher Education for Incarcerated Youth program even goes beyond what’s offered to incarcerated adults in Utah: Most adults in Utah prisons do not have access to free college-level courses.
In 1990, in California’s 15 largest cities, 373 youths (in a population ages 10 to 17 of 850,000) were arrested for homicide. In 2015, in those same cities (now with 1.1...
After the loss of key federal funding and the end of a stopgap measure, state lawmakers in Utah are cutting the budgets of agencies providing crucial services to juvenile services. After a federal decision to suspend funding of non-medical expenditures associated with residential care was made two years ago, Utah legislators provided its state agencies - such as Juvenile Justice Services (JJS) and Division of Child and Family Services (DFCS) - with emergency stopgap funds. This legislative session, however, stopgap funding for juvenile services programs ceased, with state legislators issuing an additional $3.2 million in budget cuts. The impact of the federal decision on Utah was severe, costing the state an estimated $27 million in Medicaid funding. In the process, Utah’s JJS ended up losing an estimated $9 million per year, with the state DFCS agency losing an estimated $18 million annually.
On March 10, President Obama turned up the spotlight on school bullying. For a couple of years, a handful of high-profile tragedies — often having to do with the rising problem of students picking on other students via social media — had brought unprecedented attention to the issue. Now, the White House was holding its first ever “Conference on Bullying Prevention.” And the president and the First Lady welcomed an audience of parents, educators, advocates and government officials by expressing how seriously they took the issue -- both as leaders and as parents. “We’ve got to make sure our young people know that if they’re in trouble, there are caring adults who can help and young adults that can help,that even if they’re having a tough time, they’re going to get through it, and there’s a whole world full of possibility waiting for them,” Obama said. “We also have to make sure we’re doing everything we can so that no child is in that position in the first place.”
Here’s the irony: At the same time that educators, parents and politicians decry bullying and other school violence, the Obama administration has presided over the elimination of all funding for the chief federal program designed to prevent school violence — a program that had been the backbone for anti-school-violence efforts across the country.