Recent news

May is National Foster Care Month, and the theme this year is "Supporting Youth in Transition." All month long, we'll be spotlighting important issues for older youth in foster care and providing concrete steps you can take to support them.

In recent years, states have passed harsh public registration laws that punish children while doing little to protect public safety. Many of these laws have been enacted in response to a federal law, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), which targets adult sex offenders, but also includes children. Juvenile Law Center has long argued that these laws are misguided. A new, comprehensive report supports our view.

The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) announced today that Juvenile Law Center has been named the Best "Law" Website in the 17th Annual Webby Awards!

Juvenile Law Center, along with colleagues at Open Society Policy Center, PA Academic and Career/Technical Training Alliance (PACTT), Racial Justice Initiative, and Robert F. Kennedy Juvenile Justice Collaborative, has issued federal policy recommendations to the Departments of Education, Justice, and Labor on improving the quality of and access to education for young people in correctional facilities and upon reentry to the community. 

At this year's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) Intersite Conference, held in Atlanta on April 16-18, Juvenile Law Center received the "Gloria J. Jenkins Award for Outstanding Contributions to Juvenile Justice Reform by a Community Organization." 

The award recognized our system reform efforts, particularly our amicus curiae briefs to the United States Supreme Court in cases that have significantly benefited juveniles, including Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, J.D.B. v. North Carolina, and Miller v. Alabama, as well as our ongoing litigation and advocacy work related to the Luzerne County "kids-for-cash" scandal.

Juvenile Law Center's website has been nominated for a Webby People's Voice Award in the Law category, and we need your help!

Please take a minute to vote for us now: http://pv.webbyawards.com/nominees/web/general-website/law

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Bill Ecenbarger’s new book, “Kids for Cash,” details the scandal of the same name that occurred from 2003-2008 in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where ex-judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from two private, for-profit juvenile facilities in exchange for sending hundreds of children to those facilities (as well as other out-of-home placements) for often-minor offenses. Many of the children appeared in court without counsel.

In a review of “Kids for Cash” in The New York Times this week, writer Abbe Smith calls the book “a harrowing tale, lucidly told by a journalist with a good eye for detail” and counts Juvenile Law Center attorneys among the “heroes … who represented two of the detained children and petitioned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to stop the widespread waiver of counsel.”

On March 26, 2013, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Batts held that Qu’eed Batts, who received a mandatory life without parole sentence for a crime he committed when he was 14, was entitled to a resentencing hearing. At that resentencing, Mr. Batts can receive a sentence of life, leaving the trial court the discretion to set the minimum term that Mr. Batts must serve. 

This past September, Sharon Wiggins told Philadelphia Daily News reporter Dana Filippo about her dreams:

"I want to know how it feels to sit with my sister and have a cup of coffee…  to walk down the street… to sit in the car and hear the rain just beat down."

Unfortunately, Sharon will never get that chance. She died of heart failure in prison on March 24^th at the age of 62.

Tonight, on "Rock Center with Brian Williams," Ted Koppel will report on the solitary confinement of kids in adult prisons and jails—an all-too-common practice that Juvenile Law Center strongly opposes.