Recent news

Something as intimate—and potentially invasive—as creating policies that dictate which familial connections are protected and upheld requires a recognition that we all have family. Whether

Juvenile Law Center and many of our partner agencies from the Delivery of Legal Services Committee have been actively involved in a variety of long-term

I am humbled to have received the Leadership Prize from Juvenile Law Center. Juvenile Law Center is one of the oldest and most effective organizations I know of that advocates on behalf of kids. There have been insurmountable issues before them which they have routinely overcome and there have been 1000’s of kids who have better lives because of their work.

We embark on this Kinship Month at a time of reckoning. Both the COVID crisis and the cries for racial justice have forced us to confront the failings of the child welfare system and have led to calls from our highest offices to reimagine the system as one with a mission of keeping kids safe with their families instead of safe from their families.

A Seminole County jail deputy was fired last month after his supervisors found he repeatedly did not complete mandatory checks on detained juveniles — as required by state law — and then lied about it, according to an internal investigation.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new rule which removes protections for transgender and gender non-conforming people, deeply impacting young people in and leaving foster care.

As a society, we owe a special commitment to youth in custody. Incarceration of any kind causes very real trauma and doing so at a time when young people are growing and learning only compounds the trauma. Our juvenile justice system must seek not to punish, but to support these children’s social, emotional and educational development.

WASHINGTON, DC — Today, Representative Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA), Vice Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, helped lead the bipartisan passage of the Justice for Juveniles Act out of the House Judiciary Committee.

September is National Kinship Care Month. This blog series highlights the great importance of valuing and supporting family and kin to ensure a child welfare system that minimizes the trauma that children face if they come into contact with the system and promotes equity for families and well-being for children.

The major findings from the data are: (1) training varies among juvenile court judges and Juvenile Probation Officers (JPOs), but many JPOs report not receiving implicit bias training, (2) racial disparities exist both in the rates of those who receive probation and the length of probation.