A sampling of pictures from this year's Summit are included below. Top left: youth from Detroit joined this year's Summit to learn and share with other young people from across the country. Top right: ELC Chair Aaron Toleafoa (left) and ELC member Chris Ford present to Summit attendees. Bottom left: Members of Iowa's Youth Council joined for this year's Summit. Bottom right: ELC members and CJJ staff pause after the Summit to celebrate their time together.

There's still time to register for CJJ's 2022 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Conference. This event will take place Nov. 1-2 in Louisville, Kentucky at the Omni Louisville. This year's theme will be "Removing the Blindfold: Investing in Young People, Communities and Healing."

To view a draft agenda click here.

To register, click here. To make your hotel reservations, click here.

Henning is the co-founder of a number of initiatives to combat racial injustice in the juvenile legal system, including the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program and a Racial Justice Toolkit for youth defenders. She is also the recipient of many awards, including the 2021 Leadership Prize from the Juvenile Law Center. Henning has written numerous articles and other publications advocating for reform in the juvenile legal system. Her book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, was just released in September 2021 and has already received rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post.

To learn more, click here.

CJJ is looking for bloggers for CJJ Today to author stories and posts about juvenile justice. We're particularly interested in stories from State Advisory Group members or staff, CJJ individual or youth members, and CJJ organizational members, about issues at the state or local level, interesting programs or approaches, and perspectives about the course of juvenile justice reform at the local or state level. We also welcome blog posts from other juvenile justice system stakeholders. Blog posts can be between 400-750 words in length. Click here to see our other guidelines for blogs.  

If interested, please email info@juvjustice.org for more details.

In June, Hawai’i’s Youth Correctional Facility (HYCF) reported zero incarcerated girls, an accomplishment that Hawai’i has been actively working towards for over 20 years. Hawai’i was able to maintain this milestone for nearly two and half months, making local and national headlines for their leadership on ending girls incarceration. 

Historically, many of the girls incarcerated in Hawai’i were detained for low level offenses, like running away from home. Hannah Green, program manager for the Vera Institute said, “It’s about how can systems collaborate and work together to position interventions earlier, and to make sure that we’re responding with healing and support instead of punishment.”

It is time to end the unjust practices behind girls' incarceration. There are at least 41,000 girls’ detentions and thousands more long-term commitments each year, typically in correctional facilities that mirror adult prisons designed for punishment and isolation. The young people who are put in these harmful settings are already some of the most marginalized youth in our country: they are disproportionately poor, LGBQ/TGNC, and Black, Native American, and Latinx youth who have experienced multiple forms of chronic generational adversity, usually from a young age—including housing instability or homelessness, child welfare involvement, sexual abuse, commercial sexual exploitation, parental incarceration, historical trauma, discrimination, and many others. National research has consistently shown that girls and gender-expansive youth experience unique pathways into the youth legal system and have unique and distinct needs from diversionary programs. Despite these differences, girls and gender-expansive youth are most often left out of research, policy analysis, and programmatic investments, leaving systems unable to adequately respond to their needs. They end up arrested and pushed into the legal system because they are criminalized for their responses to trauma or the steps they take to protect themselves. Once in the system, girls and gender expansive youth are unjustly incarcerated for reasons that contradict best practice: to discipline noncriminal violations (like running away), protect the young person’s own safety, or provide access to services that all children have a right to receive in their own community.

This webinar will discuss the drivers of girls' incarceration, how community-based supports can disrupt those drivers, and how local communities can and are working to end the criminalization and incarceration of girls and gender expansive youth of color.

Presenters:

To register for this webinar click here. 

The 2018 reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act recognized the importance of helping young people seal and expunge their juvenile records and helping them access mental health services when needed. Critical gun safety legislation passed by Congress in June to help keep communities safe could have an unintended impact on youth court and mental health records that are otherwise confidential. Join us for a conversation about key questions and issues for states to consider as they implement gun safety legislation at the state level.

To register for this webinar click here. 

Length of Stay Academy 

Presenters: 

To register for this webinar click here. 

The National Institute of Justice has released two research reports on investigating the effectiveness of school resource officers (SROs)

The Sentencing Project released new report, "Diversion: A Hidden Key to Combating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice." 

OJJDP and the National Institute of Justice have released Trends in Youth Arrests for Violent Crimes in September. This publication showed that youth arrests for violent crime continue to decrease.