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.
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YouTube is using virtual and augmented reality to advocate for prison reform.
The Google-owned video-sharing platform partnered with Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY)—a nonprofit that works to end extreme sentencing for youth in America—to launch Project Witness, which uses technology to show the realities of child incarceration.
“Suspension and expulsion is one of the most critical issues facing public education today,” says Dr. Alan Coulter, a Louisiana-based psychologist. “Any hour, any minute lost from instruction is a lost piece of potential for that student.”
In Dallas, two programs aim to shift the conversation around juvenile justice — one by bringing young people into the kitchen, and the other by using art to address trauma
Black girls are disproportionately punished more often in schools. Monique Morris says schools should be a place for healing rather than punishment to help black girls reach their full potential.
In the #MeToo era, punch lines about sexual assaults in jail remain acceptable. But to Rodney Roussell, they’re a painful reminder of the nine years he spent in prison, where he was raped and sold into sexual slavery.
Schools across the country are moving away from an era of zero-tolerance policies and shifting toward methods that involve restorative justice, encouraging students to resolve their differences by talking to each other rather than resorting to violence. In New York City, five schools that have implemented this system are already seeing results. NewsHour Weekend's Megan Thompson reports.
For Ahkeem began as an exploration of St. Louis’ Innovative Concept Academy, whose website states that it is “the only school in America overseen by a court system dedicated to the education and rehabilitation of delinquent teens.” Founded in 2009 by St. Louis Circuit Judge Jimmie M. Edwards, the school provides a second chance to students vulnerable to the school-to-prison pipeline, providing structure and a sympathetic staff to hopefully guide them to graduation.
Actor Michael K. Williams grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. in a neighborhood plagued with crime and excess incarceration, but it wasn’t until he watched Ava DuVernay’s “13th” documentary that he recognized a need for juvenile justice reform.
As recently as 2005, the state of Virginia had eight centers like Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Facility, housing more than 1,300 delinquent youth. But by 2017, after a series of reforms, that number had shrunk to one.
In 2005 the United States became the last country to end the death penalty for offenders under 18 years old. Adolescent neuroscience research played a huge part in changing this policy. However, there are still approximately 2,500 prison inmates in the United States serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed before they were 18.
America incarcerates more juveniles than any country in the world.
In 2015, black children were five times more likely than white children to be incarcerated. So while 86 of 100,000 white children in the United States were behind bars, 433 of 100,000 black children found themselves locked up. To understand how we got here, let’s first examine the evolution of the juvenile justice system.
In partnership with WNYC, The Root presents Caught. Check out the #CaughtPodcast, and see the first of our three-part video series above.
A new short film from national advocacy campaign Youth First Initiative delves into the origin of youth prisons and how that history relates to today’s juvenile justice system, which disproportionately targets Black and Latinx children.
This site features painful stories of America's history of racial injustice. In order to heal the deep wounds of our present, we must face the truth of our past.
Juvenile defenders can challenge solitary confinement.
The documentary They Call Us Monsters explores the juvenile justice system and the young men who become entangled in it.
Directed by Ben Lear, the son of Norman Lear, the doc has been acquired by Maston Films and The Orchard for release, and will open in theaters in January 2017.
Albany County Jail in upstate New York houses over a thousand men and women. Inmates can be held here for over a year before their fate is sealed. For many, jail is a time in which they must confront the devastating consequences of their past in order to escape a living hell.
Over 5 million kids in the United States currently have or have had a parent in prison. That works out to about one in 14 American children—a majority of whom are under age 10. Broken down by state, children with incarcerated parents can represent 3 to 13 percent of the population, according to “A Shared Sentence,” a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The unusually intense stress that these children face has been well documented and studied. That’s mostly due to researchers’ emphasis on the parent-child relationship when analyzing incarcerated populations—and how little support is available for those left-behind children who are forced to stand by as their primary role models, caregivers, and providers are put behind bars.
But incarceration also affects a separate number of children who have been isolated from another profound relationship: They are the children with siblings in jail or prison—and much less is known about them. It isn’t even clear how many of them there are.
How would incarcerated youth transform Virginia's juvenile justice system? How would they train Richmond's entire police force?
From seattletimes.com: "After the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and a deadly attack on Dallas police, we asked viewers of our Under Our Skin video project to submit their reflections on race, policing and equality."
Slavery technically ended over 150 years ago. But Ava DuVernay wants you to take another look at the amendment that abolished it.
Her documentary “13th” is a powerful look at how the modern-day prison labor system links to slavery. The film, which premieres on Netflix and in select theaters Friday, offers a timely and emotional message framed by the upcoming election and the Black Lives Matter movement.
