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.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Office of Justice Programs' (OJP) Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) today released the research-based Juvenile Drug Treatment Court Guidelines to support judges, professional court staff, and families in responding to the needs of youth with substance use disorders.
Macklemore is lending his voice to an effort to stop King County from building a new youth jail, and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray is distancing himself from a decision about a permit for the project.
CHICAGO - A new Northwestern Medicine study offers a bleak assessment in a rare look at the outcomes of delinquent youth five and 12 years after juvenile detention.
Central to poor outcomes for the youth post detention are stark and persistent racial, ethnic and gender disparities, according to the massive study that began in the mid-1990s.
A sometimes overlooked part of the justice system is the one which deals with defendants under the age of 18: juvenile justice. And though the United States has made great progress in how we treat errant teenagers, there are still problems, particularly with providing young defendants with adequate — or any — counsel. On the 50th anniversary of the case which enshrined a juvenile’s right to counsel, top Justice Department officials Karol Mason and Lisa Foster write about the work still to be done.
Too often, girls end up in Maryland's juvenile justice system not because they are a danger to society but because society is a danger to them. The are far more likely to have suffered physical, sexual or emotional abuse than boys who are committed to juvenile facilities, yet they tend to receive harsher punishments for lesser offenses — and get fewer chances for rehabilitation and education. When they act out in anger, fear or frustration at circumstances they did not create and cannot control, they are too often treated as criminals, not victims, a self-fulfilling prophecy that puts them at even greater risk.
The Utah Juvenile Justice Working Group submitted to state leaders a comprehensive set of data-driven policy recommendations designed to increase public safety, effectively hold juvenile offenders accountable, and focus juvenile justice system resources on youth who pose the greatest risk to public safety.
The group’s recommendations will be used as the foundation for statutory, budgetary, and administrative changes during the 2017 legislative session.
In Missouri, large institutions were replaced with small facilities, closer to offenders' homes. Teens live in pods of 10 with two counselors. They wear their own clothes, sleep in dorm-style rooms and address the staff by first names.
Mark Steward, retired Director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services and founder Missouri Youth Services Institute. (Photo: Missouri Youth Services Institute)
The doors are locked for the high-risk offenders, but no matter the setting, the focus is on therapy instead of controlling the youth, said Mark Steward, one of the architects of the Missouri system. They are reporting a much higher success rate than Wisconsin
The National Collaboration for Youth, which represents national youth serving organizations around the country such as YMCA’s, Girls and Boys Clubs, Generations United and my organization, Youth Advocate Programs, recently released the report, Beyond Bars: Keeping Young People Safe at Home and Out of Youth Prisons. The report promotes a new community-solutions oriented approach for justice-involved young people, and makes the case that systems and communities should close youth prisons and develop an array of strong community supports for young people in conflict with the law.
Juvenile defenders can challenge solitary confinement.
The 2012 Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama held that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles were unconstitutional.
The court’s 2016 decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana said the Miller decision was retroactive, meaning that everyone sentenced to life without parole as a juvenile is entitled to have their sentences reconsidered.
The next legal question for juvenile lifers that could potentially come from the United States Supreme Court is whether a jury or judge should be the one to consider and impose the new sentences.
“I hate the police” and other comments, profanity-filled, are shouted to Houston Police officers as they enter a classroom filled with teenagers. This is week one of the 11-week Teen and Police Service (TAPS) Academy. Mistrust is high as these adjudicated youth meet their TAPS officers for the first time.
Through a Texas Education Agency-approved curriculum that grants one high school credit to students upon completion, TAPS Academy officers and teens alike learn about conflict mediation, police interaction, drugs avoidance, bullying, safe driving, date violence reduction, bullying and other subjects to create mutual understanding and respect among each other.
After 16 months of negotiations, the St. Louis County Family Court and the federal Department of Justice struck a formal agreement Wednesday to correct alleged racial inequity in the court’s handling of juvenile delinquency cases.
The agreement also addresses conflicts of interest and failures to provide fair legal representation.
A vote in the Michigan House this afternoon will upend many of the strict, zero-tolerance policies in schools that many say are unfairly kicking kids out of school — sometimes for months at a time — for offenses that could be handled differently.
The House voted 107-1 today to provide the final legislative approval of a package of bills aimed at giving schools greater flexibility in meting out punishment to students — and ultimately cutting back on the number of kids expelled or suspended from Michigan schools.
The House vote came after the Senate voted 37-0 Tuesday night. The House originally approved the bipartisan, seven-bill package in June, but had to vote again today because of changes made to the legislation in the Senate.
RAPID CITY, S.D. ( KOTA TV ) The State of South Dakota is awarding funds to 25 counties for successfully diverting juvenile offenders from the criminal justice system.
The counties will share a total of $242,500 in funding under a fiscal incentive program as part of the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Initiative (Senate Bill 73) passed by the 2015 Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.
PORTLAND, Maine – The nation's juvenile detention centers are largely ill-equipped to handle transgender teens, leaving them vulnerable to bullying, sexual assault, depression and suicide, advocates say.
Young transgender people are too often sent to girls' or boys' lockups based on their anatomy, not their gender identity, and can end up suffering psychologically and getting picked on by other inmates or staff members, according to advocacy groups. Even when they are assigned to detention centers that correspond to their gender identity, they are often victimized.
More than 50,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year — the most ever.
The disastrous tally has been pushed to new heights by soaring abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers, a class of drugs known as opioids.
Heroin deaths rose 23 percent in one year, to 12,989, slightly higher than the number of gun homicides, according to government data released Thursday.
The Racial and Ethnic Disparities Initiative of the Alachua County Sheriff's Office is not only working, it is changing the lives of our citizens.
The R.E.D. initiative started back in 2012 long before it had a name. The School Resource Bureau changed its policies when our on-campus arrest numbers reached the hundreds and were way out of control. We stopped arresting for probation violations and petty misdemeanor crimes and started doing what we were supposed to do - educate our children.
The North Bend Police Department has adopted a new program to help juvenile offenders, one that also gives power back to the victims.
Chief Robert Kappelman first heard of "restorative justice" when he was still working for his old department in Wisconsin, where troubled youth had no place to go. The juvenile detention center had closed, so his department was forced to find an alternative method, and "rightly so, because locking kids up is not the best way to change future behavior and we know that," Kappelman said.
The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.
Local juvenile justice advocates opposed to incarceration of youth offenders attended a public meeting Wednesday to criticize Milwaukee County administrators who havE recommended building a state-financed 36-bed secure facility here as an alternative to the troubled Lincoln Hills boys prison in northern Wisconsin.
