What's on our radar this week
Each week, Juvenile Law Center gathers the latest studies, reports, and headlines from around the country. Here's what we've been reading:
- In a recent report, Future Interrupted: The Collateral Damage Caused by Proliferation of Juvenile Records, Juvenile Law Center urges that children are allowed to grow up unfettered by criminal mistakes made as juveniles. An informative infographic helps explain how juvenile records are created and what information they include.
- The Central Florida Commission on Homelessness is launching a task force to focus specifically on the region's homeless youth. This population, usually referred to as "unaccompanied youth," has notoriously been difficult to count and identify direct-service opportunities.
- Ohio has joined a number of other states in banning the shackling of youth in court.
- Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced key policies related to the newly enacted Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that will specifically target homeless youth.
- 300 teenagers from Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana, will travel to Baton Rouge to ask state legislators to support the Raise the Age Act to raise the official age of adulthood for criminal infractions from 17 to 18. Louisiana is one of just 9 states that keep all 17 year-olds out of the juvenile justice system, even for minor infractions.
- Recently, the mayor of Nashville released the Youth Violence Summit Report. The report lays out six goals aimed at reducing the rise in the city's number of violent crimes involving youth.
- On Friday, a bill aimed at managing Alaska's foster care system passed unanimously in the state's House of Representatives. The bill supports foster youth as they transition to adulthood by requiring the state child welfare agency to continue to look for a permanent family guardian for the youth until age 21 (previously, this stopped at age 18).
- In Washington, a new bill addressing the increasing population of homeless public school students was signed into law. The bill will create grant programs to add liaisons for the homeless in schools.
- A new bill in California will, if passed, ban the use of solitary confinement for longer than 4 hours for juveniles.