The Michigan Juvenile Detention Association will continue to be a national leader in promoting and sustaining of exemplary juvenile detention, residential treatment, and community based services for youth and their families.
The Michigan Juvenile Detention Association is committed to the highest standard of professional ethics, overall excellence in the care and custody of youth, and the provision of services to their families.
The cost of imprisonment — including who benefits and who pays — is a major part of the national discussion around criminal justice policy. But prisons and jails are just one piece of the criminal justice system and the amount of media and policy attention that the various players get is not necessarily proportional to their influence.
A Juvenile Justice Summit at the Washington Post recently brought together experts in the field to discuss how federal and state efforts — including a movement to end solitary confinement for youth — can improve the justice system for young people. The Annie E. Casey Foundation was the presenting sponsor, and news site Mic co-presented the summit.
The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is requesting $5.2 million more in the upcoming state budget to to add 60 beds at its residential facilities. Some advocates say that money could be put to better use to help kids avoid residential facilities altogether.
Wisconsin is one of just a handful of states that has allowed its youngest prison inmates to be punished by placing them in solitary confinement for more than 10 days — a practice that is at the heart of a federal lawsuit filed this week.
And it’s in the minority nationally in not prohibiting punitive solitary confinement, which inmates at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls have faced as punishment for serious misbehavior since the facility opened in 1970, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Lowenstein Center for the Public Interest.
Legislation to protect young people from establishing criminal records for petty theft, alcohol usage, vandalism, and other misdemeanor offenses is moving forward.
The Florida Senate Committee on Criminal Justice has given its nod to a bill that would require a law enforcement officer to make one of two choices when encountering a young person who has committed a misdemeanor offense for the first time: Issue a civil citation instead of an arrest; or require that the young person participate in a diversion program such as a conflict resolution class, teen court or community service.
The United States, with 1.3 million child and adolescents arrests each year, incarcerates a far greater proportion of youth than any other developed country. Two new studies in the February 2017 Pediatrics (both published online Jan. 23) suggest far-reaching health consequences for individuals and society.
Four out of every 100 black youths are referred to court versus 1 out of every 100 white youths, Leiber found. Two black youths continued to be detained for every white youth, and black youths were far less likely than white youths to have their cases diverted and leniency.
Adolescents in the juvenile justice system are underserved and understudied even though they are disproportionately affected by myriad health risks and comorbidities.1 Less well understood is whether duration of incarceration is associated with poorer long-term health outcomes and whether risk behaviors persist into adulthood. This issue of Pediatrics provides 2 studies addressing these questions.
In Iceland, teenage smoking, drinking and drug use have been radically cut in the past 20 years. Emma Young finds out how they did it, and why other countries won’t follow suit.
TRENTON, N.J. (CN) – Juveniles should not be sentenced to life in prison without parole for non-homicide crimes, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled, and ordered resentencing of two men who committed their crimes when they were 17.
Ricky Zuber was sentenced to 110 years in prison for two gang rapes in which he participated in 1981. He was not eligible for parole for 55 years, and the sentence was affirmed on appeals.
Nearly nine out of 10 of the kids locked up in the juvenile jail in Middletown are black and Latino — a deeply ingrained racial disparity that advocates want to see broken this legislative session as officials follow the governor's order to close the sprawling jail compound by next year.
More Douglas County children are in the custody of the Kansas Department for Children and Families now than ever before, and officials are bracing for additional increases.
In addition, recently passed legislation may make matters even worse for the DCF.
LINCOLN — Nebraska’s economic woes shouldn’t stop lawmakers from taking steps to help abused and neglected or troubled children, a trio of state senators said Monday.
The three, who sit on the Nebraska Children’s Commission, unveiled a package of bills addressing child welfare and juvenile justice issues.
OKLAHOMA CITY -- There was often a festive atmosphere in Judge John M. Jacobsen’s courtroom on Friday mornings in the Oklahoma County Juvenile Justice Center.
Jacobsen was a juvenile court judge in Oklahoma County, and for most of the weeks his dockets dealt with young people who had been had been found to be deprived of the family support children need, but on Friday he presided over adoptions for some of those children.
A new documentary film Determined 2 Make It tells the stories of youth who have participated in Youth Arts Alliance! workshops and shows how art, music, photography and more can be powerful forms of self-expression for incarcerated youth.
Over the past several years, there has been a great deal of research detailing how fines and fees in the adult criminal-justice system drive already impoverished people into debt, increase rates of recidivism, and lead to the incarceration of people simply because they can’t pay their court bills. In March, 2016, lawyers within the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice wrote a scathing letter to their colleagues detailing how monetary punishments caused thousands of people to “face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community.” This past spring, the Vera Institute of Justice launched a new initiative that will examine how fines and fees lead to an “overreliance on local incarceration that exacts significant unnecessary costs on individuals.”
Florida law enforcement officers have the discretion to issue civil citations to minors caught committing misdemeanor crimes, but a newly filed bill would make them mandatory.
More than 100 years ago, Illinois became the first state to create a separate court for juveniles. Now, Illinois is once again changing the way it treats young offenders. Read the three part series here.
With the 2015-2016 Michigan Legislative Season coming to a close, there is a lot of good—and bad—news about what made it through to Gov. Snyder’s desk during the last few weeks of session.
“Youth prisons are failing our children in this state, but particularly our children of color,” explained Andrea McChristian from the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.
If you take a look inside New Jersey’s juvenile justice system you’ll see the racial disparities laid bare. Seventy-five percent of incarcerated kids are black. That gap among races is the third-highest in the country.
