Recent news

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.  This disparity is a continuation of a long history of controlling and separating Black families 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.

John Lewis taught us that "Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take.” For youth justice advocates, what does acting for freedom look like right now?

On a daily basis the actions of the new administration threaten our identities and ideals and challenge our faith in the law. Though the administration has changed, our values have not. Our resolve to continue to fight for children who are overpoliced, surveilled, separated from their families, and incarcerated has not diminished.

The top show currently trending on Netflix is Adolescence, a British crime drama mini-series centered around 13-year-old Jamie who is arrested for the murder of a classmate. This program is truly like nothing I have ever seen. It starts with a shocking, cortisol-rush inducing scene of police breaking down the door to a home in an English town, ordering the family to get on the floor, and searching until they find Jamie, a slight boy in bed with a teddy bear. With guns aimed directly at him, they order him out of the house and place him under arrest to the horror and confusion of his parents and sister.

Today is the 20th anniversary of Roper v Simmons, a groundbreaking United States Supreme Court decision that ushered in a new framework for analyzing children’s rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. Roper banned the death penalty for youth who were convicted of murder before they turned 18.