Last summer, we wrote about the Riverside County Youth Accountability Team Program (YAT) and how it treated teens, never convicted of crimes, as criminals. The program was designed to scare kids, mostly black and Latinos, straight. However, all the initiative did was contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. Kids whose only infractions were a failure to…
Continue reading ›In 2017, the Santa Barbara County Probation Department began an internal investigation and data mining project. The goal was to determine if there could be policy and practice reforms that might benefit at-risk youths and keep them out of the juvenile justice system, The Santa Maria Sun reports. A comparison of county data revealed that…
Continue reading ›In 1996, the California Division of Juvenile Justice, the state’s youth correctional system, housed over 10,000 children and young adults (ages 12 to 25), according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Today, we see a very different picture of juvenile justice in the Golden State. Thanks to several criminal justice reforms and the…
Continue reading ›Published research tells us that the brains of young people are not fully developed. Meaning, partially, youths are at risk of making life-changing decisions without fully grasping what can result. Many criminal and juvenile justice advocates claim that the current method of handling teenagers who break the law is woefully inappropriate. Moreover, many voters in…
Continue reading ›While the U.S. Supreme Court deems access to social media platforms protected by the First Amendment, that doesn’t mean that some people can’t be restricted. A California state appeals court ruled that a “narrowly tailored” limit on social media use for a juvenile on probation was legal, NextGov reports. When reviewing the case in question,…
Continue reading ›The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Northern California, San Diego, and the National Center for Youth Law are suing over the unfair practices used by the Riverside County Youth Accountability Team Program (YAT). According to the ACLU, YAT was created in 2001 to target at-risk youths for intervention. On the surface, such a…
Continue reading ›At first glance, Campus Kilpatrick in idyllic Malibu, CA, may not be what you might expect, a juvenile detention facility. That is because the center is following a somewhat different outline for the rehabilitation of youngsters with past troubles. Those sent to Kilpatrick are subject to a 16-week rehabilitation program focusing less on punishment and…
Continue reading ›As the saying goes, ‘crime doesn’t pay;’ however, and as far as the state is concerned, criminals do. Everyone knows that in many cases if a person is caught, charged, and convicted of a crime, they are facing jail time. If the offender is a minor, they are remanded to a juvenile justice facility for…
Continue reading ›Young people are not the best at thinking things through thoroughly before they act, and as a result, they sometimes learn valuable lessons. Even when minors understand the difference between “right” and “wrong,” they can still make unfortunate errors in judgment that can cost them significantly. While some offenses committed by minors are severe and…
Continue reading ›Kids who get in trouble with the law, more times than not, lack parental supervision. Without direction, adolescents often fall in with the wrong crowd. From there, anything is possible, from drug use to committing petty crimes. Such teenagers, at one point or another, get arrested by local authorities, and may have to serve time,…
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