Winter 2025 Resource Library Updates
The Gault Center has been regularly updating our Resource Library, where you will find up-to-date youth defense resources to enhance your practice and advocacy. Below are some notable publications from the past few months that may be of interest to youth defense advocates:
As always, please contact us if there are any resources you’d like us to add to our Resource Library.
We hope these resources strengthen your efforts to defend young people. As always, thank you for all you do to protect youth rights.
From the Gault Center:
Research Overview on Positive Youth Development
This resource highlights research demonstrating the critical importance of community-based alternatives that promote positive youth development and, in turn, public safety. Specifically, this resource outlines a sampling of studies establishing the importance of fresh air and free time; counseling; sports and extracurricular activities; and family, community, spiritual, or other mentorship activities for youth to thrive. This resource offers youth defense advocates with research to push back against harmful mechanisms of control within the juvenile legal system and simultaneously shape evidence-based alternatives that ensure both positive youth development and public safety.
From the Field:
Center Us: A Native Youth Survey Report
The Center for Native American Youth (CNAY) at the Aspen Institute released a report detailing survey results of nearly one thousand Native youth on their needs and priorities across issues that matter most to them. This survey was built and disseminated by Native youth leaders who worked in partnership with CNAY staff to practice and build capacity for Indigenous-led research and Indigenous research methodologies designed to preserve culture and identity. Through focus group conversations, the following priorities and needs for Native youth emerged: access to higher education, reclamation and preservation of culture, civic engagement in tribal and U.S. federal/state/local elections, and equitable access to resources in their communities. Native youth also discussed the impact of overpolicing on reservations, sharing that it is “hard to feel safe” when surrounded by tribal, state, local, and federal police forces. Instead, Native youth expressed their needs around culturally competent services, affordable education, and cultural resources and opportunities. This resource offers key insights on what Native youth prioritize as pressing issues and what they need to thrive to guide youth defenders in their advocacy of Native youth in juvenile court.
Delinquency Cases in Juvenile Court, 2021
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% of delinquency cases involved white youth, 35% Black youth, 17% Hispanic youth, 2% American Indian youth, and 1% Asian youth. In addition, over half (53%) of the delinquency cases involved youth under the age of 16 at the time of referral. This fact sheet also highlights the prevalence of detention (26% of all delinquency cases), waiver to criminal court (1% of all delinquency cases), and adjudications (48% of all petitioned cases) in 2021. Among the cases that resulted in an adjudication, notably 65% resulted in probation and 28% resulted in residential placement. This fact sheet is based on the National Center for Juvenile Justice’s annual report, Juvenile Court Statistics 2021, and provides youth defense advocates with baseline data to demonstrate the reach and impact of delinquency cases on youth across the country.
Memorandum in Opposition to Proceeding Without a Competency Hearing
This memo, filed by youth defenders from the Hamilton County, Ohio public defender office, demands evidentiary competence hearings based on state statutory grounds and constitutional doctrines of fundamental fairness, effective assistance of counsel, and separation of powers. Notably, this memo cites Standard 3.2 of the National Youth Defense System Standards on independence to highlight an inherent conflict of interest that arises when juvenile courts oversee a restoration process and also directly employ competence evaluators. The memo details that this scheme creates a perverse incentive for evaluators to find a youth competent as a way to connote their employer’s success in running the restoration program and argues that this power imbalance necessitates evidentiary competence hearings with effective youth defense representation to uphold the demands of due process. This memo offers youth defenders with compelling constitutional arguments to advocate for evidentiary competence hearings in juvenile court.
This study examined data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Social Development study, a national, longitudinal study involving 2,156 youth across the country, to assess the impact of race on school discipline. This study found that Black youth experience higher levels of exclusionary discipline and police contact, starting at a younger age, than white youth. In addition, once Black youth face detention and suspension, they are more likely to receive severe school discipline in the future over a shorter period of time, compared to white youth. Based on the racialization of school discipline, this study calls for alternative approaches that focus on evidence-based and relational responses to student misconduct. This study offers youth defense advocates with data on racial disparities to fight against school discipline practices and advance equitable policies that promote a healthy learning environment for all youth.
In Other News:
In December 2024, the Cincinnati Enquirer published an op-ed titled “Want to Stop Youth Violence? Asking Kids for Answers Would be a Good Start.” This article centers the reflections of students at the Hamilton County Juvenile Court Detention Center on youth violence. The students expressed, “we know we won’t be able to stop all of the violence, but asking us for answers would be a good start.” They also stated, “all kids deserve to be heard and given the chance to get our lives together with support that will actually help us do that.”
The students speak directly to parents, teachers, police, courts, local government officials, and other teenagers throughout the city expressing fear, hurt, frustration, and at times gratitude, and they detail what they need from each group to feel safe and thrive. They ask parents to create space for honest communication, teachers to show empathy, police to interact without judgment, courts to see the hope and potential of youth, government officials to create opportunities for youth to “do good in life and just be kids,” and other teenagers to embrace safer ways to deal with trauma.
The op-ed ends with this reflection from the students, “We need to live in the truth instead of blaming each other so we can really make a difference. We just want to be kids. We just want to be better.” This article displays the power of centering youth voice in conversations around public safety and offers a concrete example of ways to amplify youth voices around what they need to thrive to shape public policy and youth defense advocacy.