Resource Library
From the abstract: “South Dakota, like many other states, allows young children to be introduced to the criminal justice system at a very young age. Although South Dakota originally focused on managing children’s misbehavior, the law has evolved in a way that punishes kids for being kids. Despite recent reforms to handle juvenile delinquency in…
Florida routinely pushes Black children out of schools and into a legal system with well-documented harms. In recent years, the state has made significant investments in school law enforcement and self-proclaimed “tough love” youth legal system policies, purportedly in the name of public safety. However, these investments have yielded a system that disparately disciplines, arrests,…
The Sentencing Project released an updated snapshot of youth arrest and incarceration rates, revealing that youth arrest rates have declined 80% from 1996 and youth incarceration declined 75% between 2000 and 2022. Despite these shrinking rates, the juvenile legal system is still marked by significant racial and ethnic disparities. Black youth are 4.7 times more…
The evidence provided in this brief supports bold reforms for youth and emerging adults sentenced to extreme punishments.
The American Bar Association (ABA) passed a resolution urging all governmental authorities to enact laws and policies prohibiting police from utilizing deceptive practices during youth interrogations. Relying on adolescent development research and recognizing the inherent vulnerabilities of youth during police interrogations, the ABA outlines that “it is beyond dispute that interrogations of adolescents by law…
The answer, then, is not to simply reform the system of punishment, but to stop surveilling and punishing kids and instead invest in the things that set kids up for success, like education, family support, and access to healthcare. We need to start seeing children as children, not as criminals, and giving them the tools…
By understanding the conditions facing incarcerated youth, the responsibility of the justice system, and strategies designed to improve outcomes, stakeholders can make informed decisions. After arming readers with the historical timeline necessary to understand Texas’ complicated history with its juvenile justice system, LSJA’s Reimagining Reform report issues a challenge to stakeholders during a crucial time…
A decade after national protests catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and four years after a national racial reckoning triggered by Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd, lawmakers are wavering on their commitment to making the criminal legal system more just and effective. Many are…
The National Youth Justice Network released a report detailing legislative trends on youth rights from 2023. This report highlights key gains made by several states around juvenile court fines and fees, expungement, transfer, and youth interrogation among other issues, and flags several regressive legislative trends rooted in harmful narratives about young people. This overview of…
This brief describes how states currently treat two categories of young people: youth who commit status offenses—behaviors that are not categorized as crimes—and young children who do not have the developmental capacity to fully understand the crimes they are committing. Through a 50-state scan of policy and practice, we detail how states respond to these…
A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts shows that young people assigned to probation after their first offense are more likely to be rearrested in the future, particularly for technical violations, than their peers diverted away from probation. The study, based on data provided by the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) and analyzed by…
School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from the perspective that suspending disruptive students was necessary to protect their classmates, even if this caused harm to perceived offenders. Restorative practices (RP) – focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary justice – are designed to address undesirable behavior without imparting harm. This study looks at Chicago Public…
This one-page infographic illustrates statistics from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Juvenile Residential Facility Census
This one-page infographic from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention illustrates statistics on waiver from juvenile to criminal courts.
This report describes the process of developing or cultivating purpose and explains why purpose is one of the key aspects of healthy development in adolescence. Cultivating purpose is widely beneficial for adolescents, and it is particularly important for adolescents from traditionally underserved groups. Purpose is essentially a renewable resource that has the potential to benefit…
The focus of this paper is on the experience of Black adolescents who are growing up amidst evolving national beliefs about racism, ongoing political debate surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and a growing national awareness about the experience of being Black in America.
This research article explores the history of girls prosecuted as adults in courts across the United States. It explores the effects of childhood trauma and victimization on brain and physical development and the connection to involvement in the criminal legal system as children. The article describes the results of a survey of young women who…
Challenging the Status Quo: Mobilizing Youth Defense Teams to Uphold Youth Rights & Uproot Injustice
This Racial Justice Webinar was hosted by the Gault Center and Georgetown Law’s Juvenile Justice Clinic & Initiative on May 29, 2024. The webinar focused on a collective call to action for the youth defense community to transform the juvenile legal system by centering youth and their constitutional rights to freedom, liberty, and equality. This…
In this session of our 2023 Racial Justice Training Series, Prof. Kristin Henning, Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, and Mary Ann Scali, Executive Director of The Gault Center, will be joined by Dr. Linda Caldwell, Emeritus Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management at The…
In this webinar from May 17, 2023, the Gault Center kicked off the 70th year of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Nearly 70 years ago, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Specifically, the Court acknowledged that separating children…
A webinar from April 10, 2023 with Dr. Martin Irwin, MD, Clinical Professor at the NYU School of Medicine, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Multiple studies have concluded that children in the juvenile legal system or foster care, many of whom are victims of abuse and trauma, are prescribed psychiatric medication at a rate…
Webinar provided by the Gault Center on April 25, 2023. This training provided an historical overview on the racialized use of medicine, provider bias, and cultural mistrust, followed by a discussion on practical tools youth defenders can utilize to litigate against medication conditions and/or misdiagnoses of youth in the juvenile legal system. This training built…
School-based arrests have long made up a substantial number of cases in the juvenile legal system. This is particularly true for Black, Native/Indigenous, and Latino students; immigrant students, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and other historically marginalized students. Despite significant decreases in the rate of serious crimes and violence on school campuses over the past…