Recent news

Marque Richardson announced as board member.

Donnell Drinks woke up one morning to banging on his door in the projects of North Philadelphia. It was the late 1980s, and Mr. Drinks, who was 15 and the oldest of three boys, had nodded off after taking his youngest brother to school.

For nearly seven years I have worked in communications on the issues of youth, juvenile justice, and the legal system. In that time, I have had the distinct pleasure of getting to know individual young people who have been ensnared in the system, and heard their stories. Far too often, when media covers these youth and their stories, they focus only on the shocking, the salacious, the violent – an angle which likely not coincidentally drives clicks, traffic and revenue to their sites.

Advocacy organizations celebrate the bill, part of a package of juvenile justice bills from Representative Tony Cárdenas (D-CA) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ)

The city is calling on the court to intervene after overcrowding has become a problem at the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Service Center in West Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s juvenile jail has been in crisis for months, and now for the second time, a Commonwealth Court judge has ordered the state to take custody of children to try to alleviate the facility’s dangerously overcrowded conditions.

The décor inside the Bernalillo County Youth Services Center (YSC) is more in line with the children’s wing of your local library than a jail built for kids. The walls and furniture are painted in bright colors and classrooms line a hallway just a short walk from a common room filled with therapeutic rocking chairs.

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A Commonwealth Court judge’s order for the state to take custody of some of the young offenders who have been sentenced to its facilities may help relieve overcrowding at Philadelphia’s Juvenile Justice Services Center. However, that order doesn’t address another issue: The many extra months those young people have spent in Philadelphia before their sentence even starts do not count toward their sentence.

A Commonwealth Court judge has ordered Pennsylvania officials to take custody of 26 young people living at Philadelphia’s juvenile jail to alleviate what the city has described as dangerously overcrowded conditions — but one youth advocacy group called the judge’s instructions a “disappointment” that will only “stop the bleeding” temporarily.