The start of the fall semester is fast approaching for Illinois students. As children return to class, an advocate urges school administrators to consider alternatives to traditional disciplinary action.
Michelle Day, founder and CEO of Nehemiah Trinity Rising, a nonprofit that helps organizations create and implement restorative justice practices, has worked extensively with Chicago-area schools. She encouraged other school systems across the state to consider adopting restorative justice approaches instead of traditional punitive discipline programs.
“And when you do that, you can have a restorative environment that engenders the kind of behaviors and the kind of outcomes that not only improve school safety but improve children’s education,” Day said.
Restorative justice can take many forms, but most often it is based on reconciliation and the constructive resolution of harm that one student may have caused another without resorting to traditional sanctions, such as suspension or detention. . The Chicago Public Schools System offers a free online guide to restorative justice to help teachers and administrators apply the principle.
Day explained that integrating restorative justice into schools should be a holistic, top-down process, and everyone from cafeteria workers to school administrators should understand how it works. She added that school leaders should not feel discouraged if they do not see immediate results.
“It takes about three to five years to change a school environment,” Day acknowledged. “But when you do, the results are amazing.”
According to the National Education Policy Center, restorative justice programs could help reduce racial disparities in school discipline. A 2021 study from the University of Pittsburgh found that black students were “grossly overrepresented in rates of school suspensions for minor disciplinary infractions.”
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Young people who come into contact with the juvenile justice system are more likely to end up in the adult system. Michigan’s Task Force on Juvenile Justice Reform this week approved a series of recommendations to change that.
The goals are to improve community safety, reduce disparities and improve outcomes. Recommendations range from expanding diversion programs and funding community-based alternatives to incarceration, to creating a statewide public juvenile defense system, and increasing the collecting data to identify racial disparities, said Jason Smith, executive director of the Michigan Center for Youth Justice.
“We are extremely pleased,” he said, “that the recommendation to remove fines and fees – juvenile court fees that impose immense burdens on young people and families – has been included in the recommendations and voted unanimously, including by judges and prosecutors.”
Smith noted that the task force was made up of court administrators, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, attorneys, young people and their families. He said he hopes lawmakers will make the recommendations into law as soon as possible.
Other recommendations include creating an advisory council of young people and their families to guide future changes, as well as strengthening standards for probation and residential programs.
State Sen. Sylvia Santana, D-Detroit, said the goal was to keep young people in the juvenile justice system out of the adult system when they are old enough.
“I think anything we can do as a legislative body to make sure that we put in place the tools and the supports to redirect that behavior,” she said, “but also redirect them to a way forward, as opposed to a proverbial cycle of being part of the criminal justice system.”
She said investing in young people while they’re young will save Michigan money in the long run. A study shows that preventing a single child from dropping out of school, using drugs and entering the system can save more than $2.5 million.
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Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, is revamping its approach to juvenile justice, launching a new Department of Youth Development, which will take a more supportive and less punitive approach.
The agency debuted on July 1 and aims to divert teenagers from the justice system to social services.
Vincent Holmes, the Department’s acting director, said more children with petty crimes will bypass the courts, incarceration and probation.
“Instead, you’re going to be referred to a community organization that understands the dynamics and culture of your community,” Holmes explained. “This agency is going to engage with you and your family unit, to do an assessment and figure out exactly what kinds of services you might need, what kind of care plan needs to be created for you.”
Young people can be offered counseling or make amends through a restorative justice program. The county’s previous diversion programs operated through a patchwork of agreements with local police departments, serving just 700 youths last year, according to Holmes. But he pointed out that about 85 percent of youth arrested in Los Angeles are charged with crimes, making them eligible for diversion programs; approximately 6,500 per year as of 2018.
Holmes noted that the first thing to do was to expand the diversion program to the entire county. Part of the goal is to reduce the number of young people of color caught up in the juvenile justice system.
“We think this is definitely a way to address the patchwork and disproportionate representation that we see of black and brown youth in our justice system,” Holmes argued.
A 2021 study by the Sentencing Project found that young Latinos were 28% more likely than their white peers to be detained or committed to juvenile facilities, which is a big improvement from 2021, when young Latinos were incarcerated 80% more often than young whites.
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Reducing the number of young people involved in the criminal justice system means working on the root causes that can lead them there. A youth justice advocacy group will host a series of events this week to address the issue.
The Connecticut Justice Alliance’s #InvestInMeCT campaign was first launched in June 2020 after much discussion about the state’s lack of investment in youth, especially in communities of color.
Christina Quaranta, executive director of the Alliance, said the relaunch of the campaign comes at an important time, after a bill became law last month aimed at tackling a perceived crime wave among young people.
“We don’t pay attention to the fact that we are in a pandemic and before March 2020, black and brown communities were ceded, intentionally, for many years,” Quaranta claimed. “The importance of addressing the root issues and investing time and money, resources, love and care, is more important now than ever.”
As part of the week of events, the Justice Alliance updated its report from two years ago on ending the criminalization of young people. Quaranta said it includes new conversations with members of the community that the Justice Alliance had during its “visioning sessions.”
The new state law increases penalties for some serious crimes, with the maximum sentence for minors being extended to five years. It also increases the length of time a young person can be detained pending a judge’s decision.
Quaranta explained that she hopes the events can spark more discussion about the root causes of crime, such as mental health and trauma, in public policy.
“For many years, Connecticut made many different changes to the legal system without necessarily hearing from those who had actually gone through the system,” Quaranta noted. “Hearing what people have to say about how they have been affected by the justice system will inform the decisions lawmakers make.”
Alliance Visioning Sessions are held Tuesday through Thursday, in New Haven, Norwalk and Waterbury. They will discuss with residents what solutions are working in their communities to support youth and find out what resources are needed. The week of events culminates Friday with a celebration in Bridgeport.
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