Description
Over the summer, OJJDP hosted a series of listening sessions and town halls with stakeholders, national partners, and youth. The sessions provided OJJDP an opportunity to learn about practitioners' challenges and successes, as well as the lived experience of youth with the juvenile justice system. Feedback from these events will inform OJJDP's approach in advancing the Office's three priorities:
- Treating children as children.
- Serving young people at home with their families, in their communities.
- Opening up opportunities for youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
Feedback from the discussions will help OJJDP:
- Improve its services to more effectively meet the needs of justice-involved youth.
- Identify gaps and barriers youth face in accessing resources in their communities.
- Create opportunities for youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
- Refine its vision of racial equity and fairness in juvenile justice.
- Center youth and families impacted by the juvenile justice system.
Listening Session Key Takeaways and Notes
Key Takeaways
- Treat children relative to their developmental capabilities, while incorporating trauma-informed care and culturally competent language and programming.
- Remove the perception that system-involved children are not part of our community or are inherently different from other children in our community.
- There is a lack of funding for trauma-informed, culturally competent alternatives to juvenile detention.
- Limited funding prevents programs from hiring appropriately trained staff and providing support to retain qualified staff.
- The current system does not incorporate the experiences of youth and families impacted by the justice system.
- Find alternatives to incarceration by using evidence-based programs and research.
- There is a need for high-quality reentry support for system-involved children.
- Shift the system response to prevention strategies and away from reliance on lengthy prison sentences.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Incorporate a multisystem approach that includes the family and improves collaboration between child welfare agencies, mental health treatment providers, and juvenile justice agencies.
- Increase focus on family needs and barriers, such as housing instability, food insecurity, and lack of transportation.
- Increase funding for and advocacy of innovative community-based, holistic, culturally competent programs that include wraparound services.
- Increase technical assistance to help community-based organizations access federal and state grants and secure state funding.
- Provide community-based programs evaluation funding and support.
- Elevate the voices of those impacted and community-based organizations.
- Synthesize and summarize data in an easy-to-understand format that addresses misconceptions about violent crime trends and youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
- Expanded the use of pre-arrest diversion and deflection programs.
- In rural areas where access to technology can be limited, there is a need for services and programs located in the community.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Building an integrated continuum of care is a heavy lift.
- Increase holistic cross-collaboration between systems, remove silos, and provide wraparound stabilization support that includes the family.
- There is a need to hold all youth-serving agencies accountable when they fail to provide the appropriate services to youth and families in their care.
- There is a need for a sequential model of the juvenile justice system that identifies appropriate community-based interventions at each step and focuses on preventing children from further system involvement.
- To meet the needs of families, fund innovative strategies that provide skill-building and relationship-building programs for youth.
- Increase funding for smaller organizations and include funds for research and evaluation services and administrative costs.
- Provide technical support for strategic planning to create shared goals across the systems that serve youth and families.
- Incorporate credible messengers to provide information about the justice system to youth and families in a way that is accessible and understandable.
- Increase cross-system information and data sharing.
- Expand research and evaluation to include intermediate outcomes that focus on progress, not just success verse failure.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- The justice system “adultifies” or views children of color as older and more mature than white children, resulting in harsher punishments.
- Increase funding for community-based programs for capacity building and staffing to reduce waitlists.
- Provide training about youth development and community-based alternatives to judges and prosecutors.
- Increase funding for community- and youth-led research with a focus on system-involved youth and utilize alternatives to academic journals (e.g., photo novellas, videos, and art projects).
- Use behavioral health coordinating council models to provide appropriate interventions or services prior to justice system involvement.
- Increase and improve education and employment services for youth reentering the community.
- Provide funding and support for post-disposition council and advocacy to help youth have their record expunged.
- Increase funding for programs that use healing modalities and peer mentors.
- Community programs are unable to access accurate data from state agencies to help inform resources needed. Often, agencies do not collect data regarding sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, and Tribe affiliation.
- Increase funding for supportive resources and services for youth and families such as housing, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, and training programs.
- Support legislative efforts to end corporal punishment in schools.
- Oppose “school hardening” legislation that bolsters physical security at local schools.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) sets the floor for states, the basic core protections that youth deserve, and the standard for juvenile justice settings that the federal government provides.
- The JJDPA also is a springboard for juvenile justice facilities and systems to evolve. The JJDPA encourages and promotes reform efforts in the states.
- Expand resources for youth tried as adults and support legislation to remove the valid court order exception.
- Provide funding to improve data collection and reporting capabilities.
- The Title II grant process should be streamlined and updated; it is a difficult process to receive funds and many of the program areas are no longer relevant.
- Expand the JJDPA to emphasize a continuum of care that includes reentry services.
- Create technical assistance that provides a blueprint for alternatives to detention and help states implement programs that have demonstrated success in other jurisdictions.
- Provide in-depth technical assistance to states that are not in compliance with the core requirements and support them to become complaint instead of punishing those systems.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- OJJDP can support training for all youth- and family-serving agencies about youth neurological and psychosocial development.
- OJJDP can support training for justice system stakeholders to create more uniform responses to juvenile referrals across jurisdictions.
- Increase funding that would allow jurisdictions to create crisis intervention teams specifically trained to respond to youth.
- OJJDP can help provide support for collaboration between stakeholders along the continuum of agencies that provide services to youth and families.
- OJJDP can be more accessible. Accessible materials and processes are essential to stop youth from going in and out of the system. There needs to be a focus on training staff on accessibility and best practices, especially as they pertain to Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
- OJJDP can support increasing the focus on providing individualized treatment.
- There is a lack of programs that provide holistic support and wraparound services, incorporate peer support or mentors, and provide support while youth transition to adulthood.
- OJJDP can support funding for programs that are informed by individuals with lived experience.
- The current juvenile justice intake process evaluates the youth’s criminogenic risk and needs to create a case plan. This process should be expanded to include the individual youth’s goals and vision of success.
- The juvenile justice system and youth-serving organizations need to expand the definition of family beyond blood relations so that individuals close to the youth can participate in family team meetings and provide support for system-involved youth.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- The science on neurological development should inform policy decisions regarding the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
- OJJDP should support efforts to decriminalize normal childhood and adolescent behaviors.
- OJJDP should fund planning and coordination and capacity-building grants specifically for communities and grassroots organizations to design programs and eventually receive funding.
- OJJDP should partner with Health and Human Services and other government agencies to provide holistic funding to communities.
- There is a need for national data on the number of justice system-involved youth and the number of youth in out-of-home placements.
- OJJDP should support efforts to remove barriers to accessing education and employment opportunities by promoting resources to aid with expungement.
- OJJDP should support an integrated youth voice and collaboration in state and local governments.
- OJJDP should provide funding and technical assistance for youth-serving organizations to build capacity to effectively reach and communicate with youth where they are, online and through social media.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Children need opportunities to laugh, learn, play, and develop their own interests.
- OJJDP could support the development of a platform for providers to share best practices, program implementation, and lessons learned across jurisdictions and create opportunities for train-the-trainer training.
- Provide funding for communities to create an inventory of available resources as well as identify gaps in services to better support children and families in their communities.
- OJJDP could support funding for training and educational programs for families.
- Increase funding for programs that provide individualized treatment and services to youth and their families.
- Policy guidelines from OJJDP that really affirm the importance of diversion programs, peer advocates, and mentors are needed.
- OJJDP could support opportunities for cross-system collaboration, support, and education to reduce referrals to the juvenile justice system from schools, child welfare agencies, and foster care.
- Increasing funding for pro-social programs and the community is a useful way to open opportunities for justice-involved youth.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- OJJDP should increase funding for strengths-based community interventions that promote protective factors in youth.
- OJJDP should help promote paid reentry opportunities for youth and support services that continue after justice involvement.
- Comprehensive data is needed to counter anecdotal stories that focus on extreme incidents.
- OJJDP could support efforts to address the stigma around justice-involved youth and their families.
- OJJDP should support policies that shift resources from juvenile facilities to pilot programs that provide direct services to youth in the community.
- OJJDP should increase funding for individualized treatment programs that align with the risk, need, responsivity principle of using least-restrictive interventions.
- OJJDP could support policies that require youth access to defense attorneys during interrogation, arrests, and bail hearings.
- OJJDP should provide guidance on creating polices that are research based and data driven to inform a process for removing youth from the adult system and preventing the transfer of youth to the adult system.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Justice means having a fair, equitable, and individualized system.
- There should be more trainings around individuals who have disabilities.
- Increase supports in schools such as experienced guidance counselors and mentoring programs like Big Brother, Big Sisters.
- There is a need for relevant culturally competent programs.
- There is a need for more community-based organizations that provide mentorship, life-skills training, healing support, art, and recreational opportunities.
- There is a need for a robust reentry system which includes, housing, food, transportation, and that extends into early adulthood.
- Youth exiting facilities need valid identification to enroll in services, school and seek employment.
- The system needs to focus more on rehabilitation than punishment.
- OJJDP should support polices that increase the use of family-alternative sentencing programs.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Dedicated juvenile prosecutors are needed, especially to support youth with expunging their records.
- OJJDP can continue to support Tribal communities and programs. Taking youth away from their communities is detrimental, so continuing to fund crisis centers is crucial.
- Recognize knowledge sharing and collaboration between TTA providers is needed. Sharing examples of successful programs that are culturally competent, healing centered, or address poly-victimization would be helpful.
- TTA providers can be the bridge between justice-involved youth, their families, and criminal justice stakeholders to lift up the voices of those impacted.
- Increase training for initial justice system touchpoints.
- Make sure that every agency is implementing best practices through data.
- Increase funding for programs that prioritize focusing on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to help prevent young people from entering the juvenile justice system.
- Incorporate families and youth in the grant solicitation development and review process.
- Encourage TTA providers to learn more about the communities they are working with and create opportunities to work with them more closely.
- Youth and families need increased access to mentors and peer navigators.
- Provide training on grant writing and OJJDP grant management.
- TTA providers should provide more in-depth information, data, and training on racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Increase access to mentors and peer navigators to help support reentry by connecting youth to wraparound services, treatment, and employment or educational opportunities.
- Provide training to prosecutors and law enforcement about the impacts of justice involvement on youth.
- Ensure equitable access to employment opportunities and remove policies that bar individuals with felony convictions from certain careers.
- Increase funding for community-based, culturally competent, healing-centered programs.
- Address barriers to family engagement. For example, provide gas cards or bus passes and allow for flexibility to accommodate work schedules.
- Support relationship and trust building between communities and law enforcement agencies.
- Increase access to community-based mental health services and programs that address trauma.
- Expand the use of mobile crisis-response teams instead of law enforcement.
- Provide support and resources for youth to have their records expunged.
- Staff who work directly with impacted youth need to be more empathic and caring and use trauma-informed care practices.
- Increase financial support during reentry and remove court-ordered financial obligations.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- It is important to apply the science around neurological and psychosocial development to every aspect of the juvenile justice system, especially to law enforcement and the court system.
- It is important for people to be trauma informed and trauma responsive when working with young people.
- Increase access to workforce development and mentoring programs for youth.
- There is lack of community-based prevention services; specifically, mental health services.
- Encourage more law enforcement agencies to issue citations for status and misdemeanor offenses instead of arrest.
- Opening up opportunities means youth are able to receive placement, training, and equal education.
- Increase funding for family engagement programs and provide wraparound services for families.
- Alternatives to probation are needed.
- Expand access to early intervention programs that utilize mentors.
- Use credible messengers in the community to visit youth and families in their homes. These individuals know the community and can provide impactful support to youth and their families.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Meeting children where they are at includes ensuring that services consider youth development and are age appropriate.
- OJJDP and elected officials can collaborate on reaching out to state associations of sheriffs, public defenders, and other groups to increase collaboration at the state level.
- Specially trained, dedicated juvenile defense attorneys are needed.
- Conduct research and draft publications that refute the public narrative that youth are the cause of increased crime rates and are committing serious or violent crimes.
- Create more opportunities for youth to be empowered and have their voices heard in ways that avoid tokenism (e.g., meaningful State Advisory Group membership).
- Provide trainings on how to effectively remove youth from jails and prisons.
- Increase training and technical support to implement strategies that effectively address racial disparities.
- Develop webinars or materials about best practices for state-level oversight and collaboration related to youth justice.
- Integrating restorative practices at decision points within the youth justice system—from the police department level to prosecutors, schools, and courts—has shown positive results.
- Changing youth engagement with justice system stakeholders is key.
- Expanding nationwide reach and communication between systems and providers would be helpful.
- Community involvement, guidance, and partnerships are necessary to help build trust. This also includes youth having fewer police or probation officer relations and more relations with social workers and other trusted professionals.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Credible messengers that are community experts are needed to build trust between the community and the juvenile justice system.
- Treating kids like kids means helping them find their identity within their culture and community.
- Invest in more creative programs that allow kids to play and have a free space to reclaim their lives.
- OJJDP should provide grant writing workshops to support local service providers and community-based organizations to access funding opportunities.
- Increase funding for wraparound services like internet access, transportation, housing, and food.
- OJJDP could provide guidance or share examples of creative ways courts have engaged families and shown flexibility in scheduling hearings.
- OJJDP should advance policy guidelines to address collateral consequences, including automatic sealing of records and eliminating fines, fees, and restitution.
Listening Session Materials
Key Takeaways
- Federal guidance defining when a youth should be transferred to the adult system is needed.
- Increase funding for programs that focus on rehabilitation first.
- Eliminate mandatory sentencing for repeat offenders like three-strikes laws.
- Provide funding for defense attorneys in juvenile court.
- Create a one-stop shop for federal grants from all federal government agencies.
- Increase funding for holistic community-based programs that provide wraparound services to youth and their families.
- Increase funding for training to address biases in services provided to youth and their families.
- Create a dedicated coordinator to facilitate cross-agency collaboration.
- Assistance with data collection and infrastructure and system development is needed.
Listening Session Materials
Participating Organizations
Organizations from 41 states, 1 territory, and the District of Columbia have attended OJJDP's 16 listening sessions. The organizations listed below have participated in the listening sessions or provided feedback to OJJDP.
List of participating organizations:
- A New Deal for Youth
- Afterschool Alliance
- African American Juvenile Justice Project
- Alianza for Youth Justice
- Alianza for Youth Justice/Youth Alliance
- Alliance for Safety and Justice
- American Academy of Pediatrics
- American Civil Liberties Union of WV
- American Institutes for Research
- American Probation and Parole Association
- American University
- AmericanYouth Policy Forum
- Annie E. Casey Foundation
- Arizona Youth Partnership
- Association of Children's Residential & Community Services (ACRC)
- Atlanta's John Marshall Law School
- Big Brothers Big Sisters of America
- Big Brothers Big Sisters of Wyoming
- Big Sky Youth Empowerment
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- Boston College Law School; I Am Why
- Boys & Girls Clubs of America
- Boys Town
- Bridges USA
- Calamari Productions
- Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth
- Caras South County
- Carey Group
- Catholic Charities USA
- Cecil County Government
- Center for Children and Family Futures
- Center for Children's Law and Policy
- Center for Disability Rights
- Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University
- Center for Law and Social Policy
- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
- CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs
- Chief Juvenile Attorney, Ocean County Prosecutor's Office
- ChildFocus Partners
- Children and Family Futures
- Children First
- Children Of Inmates, Inc.
- Children, Youth and Families Department
- Children's Defense Fund
- Children's Law Center
- Children's Law Center, Inc.
- Children's Minnesota, Midwest Regional Children's Advocacy Center
- Citizens for Juvenile Justice
- Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ)
- College Mentors for Kids
- Collier Collective, LLC
- Columbia Justice Lab
- Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF)
- Communities United For Restorative Youth Justice
- Community Connections for Youth
- Community Law In Action (CLIA)
- Connecticut Justice Alliance
- Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators
- Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators
- Council of State Governments Justice Center
- Council on Legal Education Opportunity, Inc. (CLEO)
- Credible Messenger Mentoring Movement
- Criminal Justice Institute
- DC Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services
- Decarcerate AZ
- Delaware Office of Defense Services
- Department of Corrections
- Department of Juvenile Justice and Youth Services
- Department of Youth Services
- Designing Justice
- Education Civil Rights Alliance/NCYL
- Fair and Just Prosecution
- Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC)
- Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
- Family Based Alternatives Center
- Father Flanagan's Boys' Home (Boys Town)
- First Focus On Children
- Ford Foundation
- Forum for Youth Investment
- Foster Advocates
- Fox Valley Technical College
- Frank Porter Graham Child Dev Institute-UNC Chapel Hill
- Free Minds Book Club
- Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop
- Friends of the Children
- Frontline Solutions
- Georgetown University
- Governor's Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim
- Grantmakers for Girls of Color
- Hamilton County Public Defender
- Hamilton County Public Defender OH
- Harris County Juvenile Probation Department
- HelpSoar
- Human Rights for Kids
- I Am Why
- Idaho Department of Health
- Illinois Department of Human Services
- Impact Justice
- Institute for Intergovernmental Research
- Institute for Policy Studies
- Intergovernmental Research (IIR)
- Invent Yourself, LLC
- Iowa Department of Human Rights
- John Hopkins University, Bloomberg
- John Marshall Law School
- Justice Action Network
- Justice For Families
- Juvenile Justice Coalition
- Juvenile Law Center
- Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice
- Kentucky Juvenile Justice Advisory Board of KY and Jewish Family and Career Services
- Kentucky State Advisory Group
- Knox County Public Defender's CLO
- Knoxville Leadership Foundation
- La Plazita Institute
- Lambda Legal
- Latin American Youth Center
- Legal Rights Center
- Lehigh County Office of Children and Youth Services
- Liberty Hill
- Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Safety & Justice
- Lone Star Justice Alliance
- Macaluso & Associates, LLC
- Maine Center for Juvenile Policy & Law
- Maryland Department of Juvenile Services
- Massachusetts Department of Youth Services
- MENTOR
- Michigan Center for Youth Justice
- Michigan Indigent Defense Commission
- Minnesota Indian Affairs Council
- National Association of Counsel For Children
- National Association of Counties Research Foundation
- National CASA/GAL Association
- National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJFCJ)
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
- National Center for Youth Law
- National Children's Advocacy Center
- National Children's Alliance
- National Conference of State Legislatures
- National Crittenton
- National District Attorneys Association
- National Governors Association
- National Juvenile Justice Network
- National Native Children's Trauma Center
- National PAL
- National Police Athletic/Activities Leagues, Inc.
- National Recreation and Park
- National White Collar Crime Center
- ND Association of Counties
- New Jersey Institute for Social Justice
- New Jersey Parents Caucus
- New Mexico Children, Youth & Families Department
- New Mexico Youth Justice Coalition
- New York University Marron Institute
- New York University
- Northeast Region Gault Center/NJ OPD
- Northeast Regional Children's Advocacy Center
- Northwest Credible Messenger
- NYU Marron Institute
- OCA Arlington County and City of Falls Church
- Office of the Deputy Mayor of ED - Students in the Care of DC
- Office of the State Public Defender Indigent Defense Improvement Division
- Office of Youth and Community Restoration
- Oregon Youth Development Division
- Pace Center for Girls
- Police Athletic League of KCKS
- Prevention Links
- Progeny
- Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
- Renewed Minds & Raw Wisdom LLC
- RFK National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice
- Rights4Girls
- RISE for Youth
- SAY San Diego
- Servicios de La Raza
- SJ Vetter Consulting
- Southern Poverty Law Center
- Southwest Organizing Project
- StarPAL
- State of Utah
- Street Law, Inc.
- Strong Arms of Mississippi
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
- Sycamores
- The Children's Law Center
- The Forum for Youth Investment
- The Gault Center (formerly National Juvenile Defender Center)
- The Hive
- The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
- The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform
- The Office of Youth and Community Restoration
- The Uhuru Foundation
- The Up Center
- Three Flights Consulting
- TN Commission on Children and Youth
- Tribal Law and Policy Institute
- UCLA Law School
- United Women in Faith
- University of San Diego School of Law, Children's Advocacy Institute
- Unlock The Box Campaign
- Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice
- Village of Arts & Humanities
- Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services
- Washington County Juvenile Department
- Washington State Office of Public Defense
- Weed and Seed PAL
- Wyoming Children's Law Center
- YMCA Knoxville
- YMCA of the USA
- Youth Advocate
- Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), Inc.
- Youth Collaboratory
- Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice
- Youth Justice Action Council
- Youth MOVE National
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Date Created: July 14, 2022