Profiles of Risk for Profiles of Risk for Self-injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Among System-Impacted Girls of Color

Categories: ,

Racial Justice Expert Report by Kristin Henning

Categories: , ,

Still Cruel and Unusual: Extreme Sentences for Youth and Emerging Adults

Categories: , , ,

The evidence provided in this brief supports bold reforms for youth and emerging adults sentenced to extreme punishments.

Policing and Punishing Childhood

Categories: , , ,

The answer, then, is not to simply reform the system of punishment, but to stop surveilling and punishing kids and instead invest in the things that set kids up for success, like education, family support, and access to healthcare. We need to start seeing children as children, not as criminals, and giving them the tools…

Developmental Links Between Ethnic and Racial Discrimination and Sleep

Categories: ,

A robust literature is developing around how the stress of discrimination is implicated in individual- and group-level sleep disturbances, and how these disturbances contribute to the development of population-level sleep disparities over time. Although discrimination can be based on many individual and intersecting biases, like gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and education, in this article, we…

Trauma-Focused Justice: Recognizing Systemic Trauma 

Categories: ,

This article situates trauma within the Supreme Court’s mitigation framework for adolescents. The framework is based on the developmental research recognized by the Supreme Court in three landmark cases—Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and Miller v. Alabama.

2023 Youth Policy Advances

Categories: ,

The National Youth Justice Network released a report detailing legislative trends on youth rights from 2023. This report highlights key gains made by several states around juvenile court fines and fees, expungement, transfer, and youth interrogation among other issues, and flags several regressive legislative trends rooted in harmful narratives about young people. This overview of…

Cultivating Purpose in Adolescence

Categories: ,

This report describes the process of developing or cultivating purpose and explains why purpose is one of the key aspects of healthy development in adolescence. Cultivating purpose is widely beneficial for adolescents, and it is particularly important for adolescents from traditionally underserved groups. Purpose is essentially a renewable resource that has the potential to benefit…

The Intersection of Adolescent Brain Development and Anti-Black Racism

Categories: ,

The focus of this paper is on the experience of Black adolescents who are growing up amidst evolving national beliefs about racism, ongoing political debate surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and a growing national awareness about the experience of being Black in America.

Research Overview on Positive Youth Development

Categories: , ,

Studies consistently confirm that incarcerating young people causes great harm, including increased victimization, recidivism, school drop-out, and long-term physical and mental health issues. Fortunately, research also identifies what young people need for positive, healthy development. Alternatives to incarceration, such as release schedules, should be crafted to ensure each young person has time for and access…

Advocating for Play, Recreation & Leisure as Essential to Adolescent Development & Youth Defense

Categories: , ,

In this session of our 2023 Racial Justice Training Series, Prof. Kristin Henning, Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, and Mary Ann Scali, Executive Director of The Gault Center, will be joined by Dr. Linda Caldwell, Emeritus Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management at The…

Overuse of Psychiatric Medication in the Juvenile Legal & Child Welfare Systems

Categories: , ,

A webinar from April 10, 2023 with Dr. Martin Irwin, MD, Clinical Professor at the NYU School of Medicine, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Multiple studies have concluded that children in the juvenile legal system or foster care, many of whom are victims of abuse and trauma, are prescribed psychiatric medication at a rate…

Protecting Youth Wellbeing: The Intersection of Systemic Racism & Overmedication in Juvenile Court

Categories: , ,

Webinar provided by the Gault Center on April 25, 2023. This training provided an historical overview on the racialized use of medicine, provider bias, and cultural mistrust, followed by a discussion on practical tools youth defenders can utilize to litigate against medication conditions and/or misdiagnoses of youth in the juvenile legal system. This training built…

FASD & Youth: What Defenders Need to Know

Categories: , ,

On March 24, 2021, NJDC and the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center hosted a webinar titled FASD & Youth: What Defenders Need to Know. This video includes information about FASD provided by Dr. Larry Burd. Portions of the webinar addressing defense strategies have been edited out of this public version. Description of the webinar: Approximately five…

A National Institutes of Health Approach for Advancing Research to Improve Youth Mental Health and Reduce Disparities

Categories: ,

The work described herein articulates a way forward for the NIH to continue to improve youth mental health and to reduce YMHD through supporting rigorous, impactful research. However, the urgency of the youth mental health crisis and YMHD is so pressing that many NIH ICOs have already begun this important work, particularly through supporting research.…

Strengthening Indigenous Communities to Eliminate Disparities in the Criminal Justice System Infographic 2024

Categories: ,

This infographic details statistics on the overrepresentation of Native and Indigenous communities in the criminal legal system, noting in particular that the incarceration rate of American Indian/Alaska Native communities increased 60 percent from 1990 to 2020. It cautions that current data collection practices on Native and Indigenous communities are often incomplete and inaccurate due to…

Overturning Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey: An Assault to Reproductive and Racial Justice and the Mental Health of Youth

Categories: ,

Why Youth Incarceration Fails: An Updated Review of the Evidence

Categories: ,

Centering Youth Voice in Juvenile Justice Reform: A Brief Summary Report of Youth Experiences

Categories: ,

No Child Left Confined: Challenging the Digital Convict Lease

Categories: ,

This article is a transcript of a lecture given by Professor Chaz P. Arnett at a Symposium hosted by the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law’s Journal of Health Care Law & Policy. Professor Arnett discusses juvenile courts’ increased reliance on electronic monitoring, which he classifies as “e-carceration,” or the “the digital…

Engaging Black 2SLGBTQIA+ Youth in Advocacy

Categories: ,

Futures in the Balance: Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Categories: , ,

Key Points: Testing limits is normal adolescent behavior. Young people act out, make mistakes, and push boundaries largely because the parts of their brains that regulate these behaviors are still being formed. Diverting youth from the legal system by keeping them in school can result in better life outcomes for young people. The legal system…

Futures in the Balance: Reforms that Keep Youth in School

Categories: , ,

Referring young people to the legal system can negatively impact their life outcomes as it excludes them from school, disconnecting them from learning and engaging in prosocial activities. There may be times when schools need to seek assistance from law enforcement, but for the vast majority of situations, a variety of levers exist outside of…

The Ohio Model: A Report on the Transformational Reform of the Ohio Department of Youth Services, 2007-2015

Categories: ,

The Trajectory of a Traumatized Youth: A Three System Perspective

Categories: ,