Data Collection and Analysis
From the executive summary: “This report offers recommendations for researchers, policymakers, diversion programs, and community organizations focused on diverting Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people from criminal punishment systems. Our recommendations are based on an assessment of diversion programs through a Black feminist lens, which starts from the standpoint of the women and…
From the introduction: “For decades media scholars have noted that local news coverage is often sensationalized and framed in ways that heighten public fears of youthful offending. And this tendency has continued since the outset of the pandemic. This coverage has likely contributed to a shift in public opinion toward tough-sounding policies that conflict with…
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the National Institute of Justice released a fact sheet highlighting key delinquency caseload trends from 2021. There were 437,300 delinquency cases in the United States, down by 39% from 2020, contributing to an overall decline in delinquency cases since its peak in 1997. In 2021, 44%…
This one-page infographic from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention illustrates trends in delinquency cases in 2022.
DOJ Letter To Kentucky Governor Regarding Detention Facility Investigation May 15, 2024
The National Institute of Justice issued five key findings from research and data on youth and delinquency. The findings include: 1) risk-taking behaviors are a normal part of adolescent development; 2) risky behaviors increase through adolescence and then decline over time as youth mature; 3) few youth are arrested for any crime, and even fewer…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
From the executive summary: “YEAH (Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout) is a community-based organization working to empower, advocate for, and meet the needs of young people ages 15 to 24 based in West and Southwest Philadelphia. Kendra Van de Water and James Aye co-founded YEAH in 2018 to address the stark lack of safe, culturally…
The COVID-19 pandemic, declared a public health emergency in the United States on March 13, 2020, had an impact on the policies, procedures, and data collection activities of juvenile courts relating to the referrals and processing of youth. Mitigation efforts such as stay-at-home orders and school closures impacted the volume and types of law-violating behavior…
This position paper reviews the research on disparities in justice system outcomes based on whether a person is represented by a public defender or by court-appointed private counsel finding that court-appointed counsel achieve less favorable outcomes due largely to differences in compensation and resources available to them. The paper also reviews the literature on the…
From the introduction: “The goal of the Kansas juvenile legal system is ‘to promote public safety, hold juvenile offenders accountable for their behavior and improve their ability to live more productively and responsibly in their community.’ Evidence shows that juvenile fees and fines do the opposite. This report outlines the ways in which fees and…
