We are pleased to announce the launch of our juvenile justice page, where policymakers, practitioners, researchers, advocates, and the media can visit to obtain data and analysis on juvenile justice matters. The juvenile justice system is undergoing important reforms, including diverting more youth from secure confinement, adopting evidence-based programming, and recording information about youth in the system with greater accuracy than in earlier periods. Still, with nearly 100,000 youth in detention on any given day, and nearly 2,000 young people sentenced to juvenile life without parole sentences, an urgent need for a more rational approach to juvenile delinquency remains.
Our juvenile justice page contains information and analysis on a broad range of issues, including:
Juvenile life sentences;
Overrepresentation of youth of color;
Transfer of juveniles to the adult system; and
Youth reentry.
As with our other topical web pages, the juvenile justice page contains information under advocacy, publications, and news. In addition to the resources on the juvenile justice page, our Web site also contains a 50-state map of data on all aspects of the criminal and juvenile justice systems.
Our thanks to Joseph Rodriguez whose photo illustrates the new Web page.
A new report says Ohio's efforts to stop gang violence in its youth prisons are ineffective and that three facilities remain unacceptably dangerous places for youth.
The report released late Wednesday says the state Department of Youth Service has tried to deal with the problem but has a misguided belief that the gang violence isn't an issue.
Youth Prisons spokeswoman Kim Parsell told The Associated Press the state is changing how it approaches the gang problem. Read more...
Alemayehu G. MariamETHIOPIA'S YOUTH AT RISK
In discussing Ethiopia's youth here, I am not employing the standard quantitative age category of 15-24 years. In the context of the African economic realities, a broader swathe of the under 30 age group is warranted.
Article 36 of the Ethiopian Constitution enumerates a whole set of guarantees to ensure the health, education and welfare of the country's children and youth. But the statistics on Ethiopia's children in general is shocking. Though the population under the age of 18 is estimated to be 41 million, or just over half of the country's population, UNICEF estimates that malnutrition is responsible for more than half of all deaths among children under age five.[2] Ethiopia has an estimated 5 million orphans - approximately 15 per cent of all children. Some 800,000 children are estimated to be orphaned as a result of AIDS. These children are highly vulnerable to all forms of exploitation including child labour and sexual, and receive little educational services, social support or supervision. Urban youth unemployment is estimated at 70 per cent. According to a Population Council report 'the vast majority of Ethiopian adolescents, 85 per cent, live in rural areas. Levels of education are very low, especially for girls and for rural youth. A substantial proportion of adolescents do not live with their parents, especially in urban areas, where 33 percent of Ethiopian girls aged 10-14 live with neither parent. Some regions have extremely high rates of early marriage. For example, 46 percent of girls in the Amhara region were married by age 15'.[3] There are also about 2.5 million children with disabilities receiving very little government assistance. Frustrated and in despair of their future, many urban youths drop out of school and engage in a fatalistic pattern of risky behaviours including drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse, crime and delinquency and sexual activity that exposes them to a risk of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases including HIV. There is a serious problem of child trafficking, and highly publicised instances of adoption fraud and abuse cases have been documented in the international media in the past year. Read more...
public safe. More effective ways to deal with juvenile offenders exist, and now is the time for Congress to take action, but we need your help. 
Forty-five minutes into "The Karate Kid," I looked around the theater, wondering if anyone else was marveling.
My 8-year-old son Satchel's eyes were glued to the screen. The story of unlikely friendship and triumph hit familiar notes, but I was seeing something new. Jaden Smith was playing a black boy in three dimensions: vulnerable, contemplative and in possession of a wholly formed interior world. Read more...
Teen dating violence is a type of intimate physical, emotional, or sexual violence between people who are in a close relationship. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has determined it a public health problem that leads to poor performance in school, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, depression, and even suicide.
According to the CDC, 72 percent of 8th and 9th graders reportedly “date” and 1 in 4 adolescents report verbal, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse from a dating partner each year. About 10 percent of students nationwide said they were physically hurt by a boyfriend or girlfriend in the past 12 months. Read more…
As adults wrestle with rising foreclosure rates and disappearing jobs, child-development experts are reporting that children may end up shouldering some of the most severe, long-lasting consequences of the recession of 2008, according to the Foundation for Child Development (FCD). Read more...
The pair will play at Philadelphia’s Mann Center for the Performing Arts on July 27 in show that will feature Franklin’s music and classical composers. Read more…
Chura gives us a glimpse into the world of young people, mostly youth of color, and illustrates that despite Wade having a mother with AIDS, Khalil having no family to speak of, or Anna being a tough drug dealer, the kids behind the labels were vibrant and full of humor and passion. He also introduces us to the "no-non-sense" Officer O'Shay who covertly shows the youth sensitivity despite his outward display of callousness, and Ms. Wharton, a spunky hall monitor who didn't get along with anyone except the animals she volunteered to care for at a local shelter. Through his writing, Chura demonstrates that the keepers and the kept have more in common than they realize. He imparts his greatest lesson to his readers, "…I learned during my ten years in county lockup, a lesson as deep and livid as the wounds many of my students carried away with them, as enduring of the stresses of CO's (correctional officers') shoulders, that we are all children of disappointment." Click here
All women who are trying to get pregnant should learn that the adverse reproductive effects of alcohol range from infertility and increased risk for spontaneous abortion to impaired fetal growth and development. Alcohol abuse and alcoholism are also provably associated with hypothalmic-pituitary-ovarian dysfunction resulting in amenorrhea (absence of menses), anovulation (lack of ovulation), luteal phase defect (abnormal development of the endometrial lining) and hyperprolactinemia. Drinking alcohol puts you and your baby at risk for a miscarriage, pre-term birth, stillbirth, and other serious effects. Read more...
