Justice

A California bill includes foster youth in a recently enacted 12-month limit on juvenile probation.

A new study asks: What happens to kids with a parent or relative who’s been criminally charged — whether incarcerated or not? 

Long before we had child welfare or juvenile justice agencies as we know them today, the state was already punishing "crossover youth."

On this week’s episode we are joined by Wendy Smith, author of the new book “Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding About Child Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing.”

On this week’s podcast we talk to Anthony Pierro, executive director of Strategies for Youth (SFY), a national policy and training organization dedicated to improving interactions between law enforcement and youth.

On today’s episode we are joined by David Muhammad, founder and executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. We talked to Muhammad about “high risk, hard to reach youth,” which is a term he and fellow justice reformer Vinny Schiraldi have coined to describe the relatively small group of youth they believe should be the focus of the next phase of youth justice reform.

Under the newly signed Youth Charging Reform Act, youth under age 16 will not be automatically charged in adult court, except in the most serious cases.

Closing some of California's county-run youth incarceration facilities is the only way to eliminate the excess capacity and structural incentives that sustain confinement, writes Daniel Macallair.

The plight of the teens in the Scottsboro Boys case began nearly a century ago, but it still reverberates today.