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.
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.
Most juvenile justice practitioners are aware of the value of research and evidence-based practices, but few resources exist to help them apply research-informed practices in ways that respect the identities and developmental needs of youth. These and other findings are highlighted in this brief, which documents themes from interviews with key juvenile justice stakeholders. Interview findings reveal the most pressing research and practice gaps in the field, the barriers practitioners face in accessing and implementing research, and the audiences that could benefit most from research translation tools and products.
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.
