Grant Offers Juvenile Court Drug Training Program

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The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, The U.S. Department of Justice, and the Office of Justice Programs offers the 2011 Best Practices for Juvenile Courts Training Grant. The objective is for  juvenile drug courts to better serve kids who are involved in substance abuse, co-occurring substance abuse, and mental health trauma. This will be accomplished by using the Sixteen Strategies of Effective Juvenile Drug Courts as a framework to help build competency, performance and the capacity of the juvenile drug courts nationwide.  The Deadline for this is June 6, 2011 @ 11: 59 EST.

Benjamin Chambers on Some Surprising Findings About Youth Attitudes Toward Crime

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Do delinquent teens see criminal activity as something positive? Many adults assume that they do. However, research by Rachel Swaner and Elise White, published in 2010 by the Center for Court Innovation, suggests that for some youth at least, their attitudes and values are not anti-social at all. Though the youth outcomes in their study were not terribly positive, it underscores the need to provide youth with opportunities to do positive activities that reinforce their positive values. The study, titled, "Drifting Between Worlds: Delinquency and Positive Engagement among Red Hook Youth,"  involved a small sample of 44 youth in a housing project in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Part One: Darkness Visible

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Just joining us? This is part one of a five part series. See the whole series. When Suzanne and John Boyer left their upper-middle class home for work on the morning of May 20, 2008, their 15-year-old son, Kyle, had a stomachache and was still in bed. It wasn’t too bad, he told them.

States Reconsider Laws That Force Kids Into the Adult Justice System

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A new study by the Campaign for Youth Justice reports that states across the country are reversing legislation that is pushing 250,000 kids a year into the adult justice system. Following a spike in juvenile crime in the 1980’s and 1990’s, many states began lowering the age that children could be prosecuted as an adult.  According to the study, incarcerating youth in adult prisons, “puts them at higher risk of abuse, injury, and death while they are in the system, and makes it more likely that they will reoffend once they get out.”

Fifteen states have already completed the changes necessary to put fewer kids in adult prisons and nine more have legislation in the works.  Georgia (along with Colorado, Texas and Washington) has updated its mandatory minimum sentencing laws for juveniles. However, Georgia is still holding on to a law that automatically transfers children aged 13 and older who commit one of the “seven deadly sins” to adult court.  Offenses include murder, rape, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, aggravated sexual battery,  voluntary manslaughter and armed robbery with a firearm.

Benjamin Chambers: What Works with Serious Juvenile Offenders – Pathways to Desistance Study

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Does the juvenile justice system really work? Reading comments from readers on news stories about youth in trouble, you'd think the juvenile justice sysem was a system designed to mollycoddle dangerous kids, turning them into super-predators. Nothing could be further from the truth. Among other reasons, we know this because of "Pathways to Desistance," a research study led by Edward P. Mulvey, Director of the Law and Psychiatry Program at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. (Dr. Mulvey and Carol Schubert contributed a post to us on their findings in April 2010.)

The "Pathways to Desistance" research study is a unique study of what works in the juvenile justice system.

Probation Domination

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Probation was the most serious verdict in one-third of teen crime in the U.S. In 2007, 1.7 million delinquency cases were handled by courts with juvenile jurisdiction. This has increased 34% over the past three decades. Nearly 60% of the cases were ordered by the court while the remainder agreed to some form of voluntary probation. This is according to a report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Cracking the Unpleasant Dealing in Walnut Grove

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National Public Radio has done a series on the nation’s largest juvenile justice detention facility in the small town of Walnut Grove, Miss. The story was triggered, in part, by a civil rights lawsuit brought by the Montgomery, Ala.,-based Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.  The suit against the private operator of the facility, GEO Group, claims that inmates are held in inhuman conditions, that sex takes place between female guards and male inmates and that inmate-on- inmate violence is rampant. In mid-2010 the Louisiana-based GEO Group was awarded a contract by the Georgia Department of Corrections to operate a 1,500 adult correctional detention in Milledgeville.

Eric Holder on Juvenile Justice

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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said this week the Department of Justice would put a priority on improving the nation’s juvenile justice system. In a speech to the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference, Holder said the Department would place an emphasis on forming community partnerships and using evidence-based research in dealing with the issue. The attorney general also told the conference that it was time to answer some difficult questions concerning crime and race and the treatment of children. “Why,” Holder asked, “is it that, although African-American youth make up 16 percent of the overall youth population, they make up more than half of the juvenile population arrested for committing a violent crime? Why is it that abused and neglected children are 11 times more likely than their non-abused and non-neglected peers to be arrested for criminal behavior?

DJJ Closes Griffin facility

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Georgia’s budget troubles surfaced today when the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) announced the closing of one of its youth detention centers, while its top official acknowledge that another shuttering would be announced in the coming days. The DJJ said the Griffin Regional Youth Detention Center (RYDC), a 30-bed facility south west of Atlanta, would be closed due to the department’s budget shortfall of $5.4 million. DJJ Commissioner Amy Howell later told the JJIE another facility would also be closed, but declined to say which one. "We will be announcing the closure of another facility in the coming days," said Howell. The DJJ runs 22 RYDC’s in the state, including the one in Griffin.  Last year, the DJJ said up to four facilities, Griffin, Blakely, Claxton and Gwinnett, could be closed.