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During this year’s YJAM (Youth Justice Action Month), I was drawn towards a re-read of Kristin Henning’s remarkable text: The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth.

Yesterday Juvenile Law Center partnered with Temple Law Review for its Annual Symposium. This year, in celebration of 50 years of Juvenile Law Center, the theme was “Youth Justice in a New Era: Reflections on State Constitutional Litigation, Abolition, and Movement Lawyering." This blog reflects on the role of movement lawyering in pursuit of family preservation. April Lee of Philly Voice for Change participated on the movement lawyering and abolition panel discussion.

This week, Juvenile Law Center and Temple Law Review are hosting a symposium reflecting on 50 years of children’s rights advocacy and how to use different strategies in the future. As we prepare for the symposium, I am sending an important message to law students – the future of the legal profession.

Juvenile Law Center has been a national leader advocating for the rights of young people in the justice system for 50 years. One of the ways in which Juvenile Law Center is unique, however, is in the role it has played shaping international law, policy and thinking on juvenile justice and in inspiring those who advocate for justice for children. This has happened in three principal ways.

Google “disparities in the juvenile system” and you’re likely to land on the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) website with the note: “No information is available for this page.” Earlier this year, the site provided robust data demonstrating that, despite years of reforms, the juvenile legal system reflects deep inequality. 

During the month of May, advocates turn their attention to those with experience in the foster care/family regulation system. What is the impact on youth mental health after surviving these systems? What approaches allow for trauma-informed collaboration to center youth mental health needs? Juvenile Law Center’s Youth Advocacy Program has developed two new tools to help advocacy organizations incorporate a trauma-informed lens into their advocacy efforts.

The child welfare system purports to protect children but it inflicts physical, emotional, and mental pain on families caught in its web.  In 2020, 215,000 children were removed from their homes and placed in foster care.  Twenty-five percent of those children were Black, yet Black children only account for approximately 14% of the youth population in the United States. 

Over and over again, the juvenile legal, criminal legal, and family regulation/child welfare systems pull children out of school and then deny them a quality education. Since its founding in 1975, Juvenile Law Center has fought against these harmful practices.

During this Second Chance Month, even as new threats to our rights and freedoms emerge almost daily and the fear of losing hard-earned legal protections from discrimination has become all too real for far too many of us, it is worth taking a moment to consider our system impacted community members for whom discrimination, both public and private, has long been, and continues to be, the norm.