Recent news

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.

Fifty years ago today, a homeless 51-year-old with an eighth-grade education, a pencil, and a pad of paper sparked one of the most significant advances in the rights of indigent criminal defendants in United States legal history. In Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unanimously that criminal defendants facing significant jail time had a right to court-appointed counsel if they could not afford to retain counsel on their own. But how much has really changed?

Juvenile Law Center submitted a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on the human rights implications of imprisoning children in adult facilities in the United States. The IACHR, a regional body that ensures compliance with regional standards and international corpus juris (or "body of law"), will hold a hearing on this issue on March 11.

Our letter argues that children should not be incarcerated in adult facilities for the following reasons.

Juvenile Law Center, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and in collaboration with Open Society Foundations, Pennsylvania Academic and Career/Technical Training Alliance, Racial Justice Initiative, and Robert F. Kennedy Juvenile Justice Collaborative, is convening regional meetings in cities including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta to discuss the quality of education for youth in facilities. Leaders in education and juvenile justice from each region will strive to identify promising and effective strategies for improving the quality of education for youth in the juvenile justice system.

On January 28-29, Juvenile Law Center hosted "Trauma and Resilience: A New Look at Legal Advocacy for Youth in the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Systems." More than 35 national experts from the legal, mental health, and public health fields gathered to discuss the effects of trauma—particularly stemming from violence, both on a personal level and within economically disadvantaged communities—on youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Juvenile Law Center's new mobile site—at www.jlc.org on your mobile browser—provides faster access to our most-visited sections.

Photo via scot2342 on flickr

Congress has just sent a bill to the President that will make it easier for foster youth to be educated. While congressional partisanship on the fiscal cliff has dominated the headlines for the past few weeks, a bill to help foster children avoid falling off another kind of cliff has garnered unanimous bipartisan support and now awaits the President’s signature.