Maryland’s Juvenile Justice System: Year in Review

CFCC’s 2012 Urban Child Symposium (UCS), entitled "The Urban Child in the Juvenile Justice System: The Beginning or the End?," focused on the  juvenile justice system.  Symposium panelists identified several priorities for juvenile justice system reform (more information is in the Unified Family Court Connection Winter 2013 Issue, which featured articles from several UCS presenters):

• Direct juveniles toward community and family-based treatment rather than incarceration;
• Address racial and ethnic disparities on a system-wide basis;
• Abandon laws that require or allow juveniles to be tried as adults; and
• Include all stakeholders in reform efforts.

In the past year, the juvenile justice system has received significant local and national media attention for improvements in policy and practice: 

• A Baltimore Sun op-ed praised the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), under Secretary Sam Abed’s leadership, for making progress in diverting youth from confinement, decreasing overcrowding, and providing more community-based, evidence-supported alternatives to detention for youth offenders.  The Sun op-ed, based on a report by the independent Juvenile Justice Montoring Unit, announced that conditions and safety in Maryland’s youth detention centers have improved, with reported decreases in violence, injuries, group disturbances, and use of restraints.  
•  Longstanding plans to build a $100 million, 180-bed jail for juveniles charged as adults were scrapped, with $70 million allocated instead to renovate smaller facilities and build a desperately needed new treatment center.   A promising part of this plan includes placing youth who have been charged as adults but are eligible for waiver into the juvenile system in special juvenile pre-adjudication facilities.
• Mandatory sentences of Life Without Parole for juveniles, including for murder, have been abolished by the Supreme Court (see Bernadine Dohrn’s  article in the UFC Connection at page 5).
• An  Annie E. Casey Foundation national report  concluded that significant gains have been made in the last decade in reducing the youth prison population while also improving public safety, with Maryland showing some of the greatest improvements.  

These changes represent a sea-change from the highly punitive and largely ineffective practices of the 1990s toward evidence-based and holistic reforms that focus on alternatives to detention and improved outcomes for youth.  Capitalizing on the progress made in the past decade, the juvenile justice system should consider the following reforms, among others:

• Increase the availability of treatment programs and community and home-based alternatives to detention.  According to the Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit report, hundreds of youth were held in detention centers for more than two months (with one youth waiting 217 days) last year while awaiting placement in treatment or other community-based programs .  DJS has already made significant progress in this area – the Baltimore City Juvenile Detention Center showed a 36 percent reduction in the number of youth who waited over two months for placement in a treatment program.  There is still room for improvement, given the risks of high-security detention for non-violent and low-risk youth.
• Improve conditions and expand availability of alternatives to detention for girls.  Programs and services for girls, who are generally low-risk and high-need, lag well behind those for boys.  Very few alternatives to detention in Maryland accept girls, and there is a dearth of programs and services available in the all-girls treatment facility (the Carter Center) and the detention facility (the Waxter Center), where numbers have remained nearly the same as last year.  The staff at Carter has been trained in the Attachment, Self-Regulation and Competency (ARC) model of trauma-informed care, a practice which should be continued and expanded to address other gender-specific needs of girls throughout the juvenile justice system.  DJS and its partners should continue working to bring the progress seen for boys to girls in the system and should consider racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation sub-populations to ensure that progress is equally helping meet their needs.
• Schools, social services, the courts, the police, DJS, and community-based resources should adopt promising practices to prevent youth involvement in the justice system and to end the “school-to-prison pipeline” or, more comprehensively, the cradle-to-prison pipeline.  Youth should have access to programs and services before they end up in the juvenile justice system. 

Policymakers and advocates must continue to work together to ensure that recent progress represents a new beginning, and not the end, of our efforts to improve outcomes for our youth.

Stepping Back from Solitary Confinement

One recurring theme during the CFCC’s fourth annual Urban Child Symposium was that youth in the juvenile justice system are best served by community- and family-based treatment options, not incarceration. My colleague, Dana Shoenberg, helped explain why in her presentation on the needs of youth who get in trouble with the law. Incarceration is not only expensive, it’s actually associated with higher recidivism rates than other cheaper, more effective approaches to holding youth accountable for their behavior. When youth are locked up, they’re also exposed to a range of possible negative outcomes, including disengagement from school, severed connections with family members, deteriorating mental health conditions, and physical and sexual victimization by youth and staff.

Many jurisdictions are moving away from their reliance on incarceration for these very reasons. Yet we’re a long away from a world without secure facilities. Until then, we must take steps to ensure the safety of youth in our nation’s juvenile detention facilities and juvenile prisons. That means working to end the dangerous practices that take place behind those walls.
 

                                   © Richard Ross

Congress recently raised public awareness of one such practice: the excessive and inappropriate use of isolation. On June 19th, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights convened the first ever congressional hearing on solitary confinement. Although the hearing focused primarily on solitary confinement in adult prisons and jails, many youth advocates attended and submitted pages of written testimony that outlined the particular dangers of isolating children in juvenile and adult facilities.  

One needs to look no further than the Special Litigation Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to find numerous examples of the inappropriate and excessive use of solitary confinement in juvenile facilities. For example, at the Oakley and Columbia Training Schools in Mississippi, staff punished girls for acting out or being suicidal by stripping them naked and placing them in a cell called the “dark room,” a locked, windowless isolation cell cleared of everything but a drain in the floor that served as a toilet. Other Justice Department investigations have documented the routine use of solitary confinement on mentally ill children and children with disabilities.

Professor Richard Ross of the University of California has spent the past few years photographing the inside of juvenile facilities around the country, taking pictures of cells used for solitary confinement of children along the way. The images are striking, conveying the sense of hopelessness and isolation that youth experience when placed in these settings. It’s no surprise that a recent study of suicides in juvenile facilities found a “strong relationship” between suicide and isolation, with approximately half of the study’s victims being in solitary confinement at the time of their death.

Juvenile Justice Reform: CFCC’s Urban Child Symposium, The Beginning or the End? The Urban Child’s Experience in the Juvenile Justice System

Professor Bernardine Dohrn opened CFCC’s fourth annual Urban Child Symposium with a powerful presentation on the Supreme Court’s recent consideration of juvenile justice cases.    Over 200 people attended “The Beginning or the End? The Urban Child's Experience in the Juvenile Justice System,” which included interdisciplinary panel discussions of issues such as the psychological, social, and emotional characteristics of juveniles; whether juveniles can and/or should be tried as adults; racial disparities/disproportionate minority representation; and the school-to-prison pipeline, among others.

You can view the agenda here and listen to some of the panelists discuss juvenile justice issues on WYPR’s Midday with Dan Rodricks here.

Professor Dohrn spoke about positive changes in the juvenile justice field in the past decade. She discussed recent Supreme Court decisions that have banned capital punishment for juveniles and life-without-parole for non-homicide juvenile offenses.  She urged symposium participants to pay attention to the Supreme Court’s recognition that children experience the world differently and that there must be a more accurate understanding of children’s interactions with the law.

Several ideas emerged during the course of the symposium:

•     Juveniles should be directed toward community and family-based treatment rather than incarceration. Speakers urged consideration of evidence-based, non-residential programs as the single most important alternative to sending juveniles to detention facilities, many of which are characterized by violence and poor conditions.  Speakers described a number of alternative and diversion programs that are proven to be more effective in addressing juvenile crime and recidivism.  The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Bart Lubow and other speakers discussed the massive financial burden of juvenile incarceration (including Maryland’s proposed $100 million juvenile prison facility), which could be used instead to support widespread diversionary prevention and treatment programs.

•     Racial and ethnic disparities (“Disproportionate Minority Contact”) must be addressed on a system-wide basis and across all decision points in a juvenile case.  Special populations, like girls; trauma victims; children with special needs; and lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender youth must also be protected and considered.  Many presenters, including Professor Odeana Neal, attorney and reform advocate Dana Shoenberg, and Assistant State’s Attorney George Simms encouraged the expansion of best practices in this area to combat current differences in outcomes based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other characteristics.  

•     Laws requiring or allowing juveniles to be tried as adults should be abandoned because they hurt children and endanger society.  Professor Dohrn and other presenters reported that juvenile involvement in the adult criminal justice and prison systems is counter-productive.  Juveniles are often victimized by adults in the prison system, and recidivism (re-offending) increases for juveniles who come out of adult prisons. 

•     All stakeholders – including families, schools, prosecutors, departments of juvenile services, social workers, employers and more – should be involved in reform efforts.  Parent Advocate Kimberly Armstrong spoke poignantly about her experience as the parent of a child in the juvenile justice system.  Instead of finding support and collaboration in the juvenile justice system, she encountered multiple barriers when seeking help for her son and often felt alone in advocating on his behalf.  She now encourages all stakeholders in the juvenile justice system to enlist the support of parents and to treat them as valuable partners in addressing their children’s problems.

For more information, you can watch a podcast of the symposium proceedings and access many of the Powerpoint presentations here.  We hope that our presenters and participants will blog about the issues discussed during the event, and we welcome comments from our readers.

Reflecting on the Urban Child Symposium and the Future of Child Welfare System Reform in Baltimore

Over two hundred people attended the University of Baltimore School of Law Center for Families, Children and the Courts’ 3rd annual Urban Child Symposium, and the day was a passionate and intensely informative exchange. The topic was “The Urban Child in the Child Welfare System: From Fracture to Fix”, with speakers including experts from the court system, the social services system, academia, and real life – from a former foster child to a parent who voluntarily terminated her parental rights. Our audience, which included lawyers, social workers, educators, community activists, the general public, students, and policymakers, was diverse and involved. If you missed any or all of the symposium, you can watch a podcast of the powerful discussion here.

Throughout the day, the burning questions seemed to be: After many years of reform, have we actually improved the lives of children? Have we complicated rather than streamlined the system, and should we have second thoughts about our path? How can we move the system forward, introduce more research-based “best practices,” and better protect the interests of children in this complex social structure? How can we make sure that this symposium is not just a one-day event filled with good ideas and information, but is actually a springboard for reform? Former DHR Secretary Brenda Donald implored the audience to take an active role in the selection of her successor, and other panelists echoed this suggestion. We would like to encourage our readers to get involved in this process, as it will have a major impact on the future of system reform.

Further, we at CFCC want to ask you to share your thoughts, insights, and perhaps personal experiences. What do you think can be done to improve the child welfare system? How do we turn ideas into concrete reform?

Many of the Urban Child Symposium audience members requested more time to network and discuss practical steps, so we would urge you to do so, both on this blog and in your communities. Let us agree to move Baltimore’s children forward into a more therapeutic child welfare system that better meets their needs in the most difficult of circumstances.

CFCC’s Urban Child Symposium: The Urban Child in the Child Welfare System: From Fracture to Fix

We at CFCC are excited to announce that Thursday, April 7, we continue our tradition of hosting an annual "Urban Child Symposium," which brings together national experts on the cutting edge of the most pressing issues in the lives of children in urban environments. This year, we consider the plight of urban children in the child welfare system. The symposium's title, "The Urban Child in the Child Welfare System: From Fracture to Fix," describes both the experience of children in the system, who enter it with a fractured family and are meant to exit it with a loving, supportive and stable family structure, and the system itself, which too often destroys the lives it is charged with rebuilding. We know that state intervention in families' lives touches the most profound human relationships, and sometimes trauma is magnified rather than lessened. On the other hand, failure to act can mean a child never makes it to healthy adulthood. Issues of poverty, class, race, and culture further compound this extremely complex issue. The good news is that advocates from a variety of disciplines and professions have devoted their careers to improve this system and make it work for children and families. We are delighted to have many of the leading experts on the cutting edge of this most important issue speaking on panels at the symposium.

The symposium will open with a keynote discussion by Shay Bilchik about what children in the child welfare system need, along with an exploration of the future of child welfare reform. Three interdisciplinary panel discussions will follow Mr. Bilchik’s address. The symposium's first panel will consider the "Appropriate Scope and Process of the Child Welfare System,” followed by a discussion of "Making the Child Welfare System Work,” and culminating with "Straight Talk about the Child Welfare System: A Facilitated Discussion," which provides insiders' views of what really goes on in the system.

The event, scheduled Thursday, April 7, from 9am to 5pm in the Venable Baetjer Howard Moot Court Room of UB's School of Law, is free and open to the public. We encourage you to read more about the symposium, register to attend, and bring your perspective and/or questions to this important event. You also can remain involved before and after the event by keeping up with this blog and posting comments regarding your own thoughts about the child welfare system.

Up to five questions posted on the blog before the event will be answered by panelists throughout the day, and a link to the podcast of the event will be posted on this blog shortly after the symposium.

Join us to celebrate CFCC’s 10th anniversary!

We at CFCC cannot believe that it has been ten years since CFCC’s launching, thereby implementing our vision to create a center to identify opportunities for family justice system reform. Beginning our work with a staff of three, we currently have a staff of eleven, including two senior fellows, six Truancy Court Program consultants, and more. Over the last ten years, we have been involved in a number of programs and reform initiatives, including:

• Planning and implementing statewide and national conferences on a wide range of issues and programs, including unified family courts, substance abuse and addiction, truancy, the child welfare system, and the practice of family law;
• Designing and operating the Truancy Court Program, which has served about 900 students in 28 schools over six years;
• Creating and teaching the CFCC Student Fellows Program, an experiential course for 2nd and 3rd year law students focused on cutting edge issues in family justice reform and therapeutic jurisprudence;
• Developing a comprehensive public outreach campaign that features media appearances and placements; publication of a national newsletter; creation of two e-newsletters, two DVDs, a website, and this blog; and production of nearly thirty reports, evaluations, and articles;
• Conducting over 29 trainings and workshops in a variety of areas related to court reform, truancy, substance abuse, and more;
• Consulting and technical assistance focused on the implementation and evaluation of family justice system reform in 10 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada.

On Thursday, March 3, CFCC will celebrate our tenth anniversary with a two-part special event at the UB Law School. Beginning at noon in the Moot Court Room, the law school with feature a joint “Lunchtime Law” lecture, “Therapeutic Jurisprudence: A Family-Friendly Approach,” by two of our most valued colleagues and leaders in the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, Judge Peggy Hora and Professor David Wexler. There also will be an evening celebration in the Moot Court Room from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. with distinguished speakers, followed by drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the law school lobby from 6:30 p.m. until 8 p.m..

Both events are free and open to the public, but we do request an RSVP for the evening portion. You can read more about the programs and RSVP for the evening festivities here.

Childhood Nutrition and Obesity: Moving from a National Concern to Coordinated Policies

Obesity in the United States has not always been at the levels we see currently. Whenever I return from an international flight, even at the airport I sense that I have returned to the land of the big. And nowhere is this more glaring than with our children.

Beginning in approximately the mid-1980s, the levels of obesity and excess weight in the US has been a monotonically increasing function.

 These averages, however, hide regional and socio-economic differences: for some sub-populations this is a medical crisis. One of 7 low-income, preschool-aged children is obese, but the obesity epidemic may be stabilizing at this alarming level. Low-income two to four year-olds’ obesity prevalence increased from 12.4 % in 1998 to 14.5 % in 2003 but rose to only 14.6 percent in 2008.

Keeping the Discussion Going after CFCC's Urban Child Symposium on Health and the Urban Child

CFCC’s second Urban Child Symposium, “Health and the Urban Child:  Diagnosing Problems and Prescribing Solutions,” was held last Thursday, April 1, and drew a crowd of approximately two hundred people.  A wide array of people from all professions and walks of life, including doctors, lawyers, judges, activists, academics, mental health professionals, services providers, parents, and other community members, attended and participated.  The audience filled the School of Law’s Moot Courtroom and also watched the action from monitors in the law school lobby.  Our panelists gave thoughtful presentations that covered the gamut of problems and solutions for the health of urban children.  Extensive audience participation created a vibrant conversation about the practical realities of urban child health and some of the steps needed to make improvements.  Congressman Cummings’ keynote luncheon speech was a call to action, encouraging all of us to increase our expectations and work to ensure that all children have what we want for our own children.

CFCC would like to thank all who participated – both as speakers and as audience members, and we encourage everyone interested to keep this lively and important discussion going-- on this blog and in your communities.

One of our conference panelists, Dr. Alan Lyles, will take the lead on continuing the discussion by writing his own blog post about childhood obesity, a topic that he also discussed at the symposium.  Be on the lookout for his guest post!

   

Also, be sure to check out the discussion on our post about the Health Care Reform Legislation, which includes a comment from another of our conference panelists, Janice Cooper.

Health Care Reform Legislation: What Does it Mean for Children and Families?

The new health care reform legislation, signed into law by President Obama yesterday, is sure to be discussed at next Thursday’s Urban Child Symposium; in the meantime, here’s a short overview of the law’s major effects on children and families:


*Insurance companies will be prohibited from denying health coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. For example, children suffering from asthma who don’t have insurance coverage will now be able to get coverage.
*CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), which provides public health care to lower-income children, will be expanded to reach more families (up to 133% of the federal poverty line) and protections will be in place to prevent CHIP reductions in the near future.
*Beginning in 2014, people who make up to 400% of the federal poverty line will be eligible for government subsidies for health care they purchase, with the amount based on their income.
*The law authorizes new programs for preventive health, including School-Based Health Clinics, oral health education, and substance use disorder and mental health problem prevention.
*Co-pays for many preventive services, like immunizations, will be eliminated from most health plans.
*Medicaid will cover an annual well-visit, assistance for pregnant women to quit smoking, and other preventive services.
*Young adult dependents will be eligible for coverage on their parents’ plan through age 26.
*Beginning in 2014, families who currently do not get employer-provided health care coverage will be able to purchase health care at a reasonable price from state-run “exchanges” (insurance marketplaces with built-in consumer protections designed to pool risk and provide affordable individual or small group policies).
*Individual, small group, and new Medicaid health plans will be required to include substance use disorder and mental health services in their basic packages and to treat these benefits the same as all others.



We’d like to hear from you--on this blog and at next week’s conference. Does the law do enough? Does it do too much? Which health problems will the new law address and which are not addressed? What role will the law play in the day-to-day health issues of urban children? How can new funding best be used to tackle the most pressing problems? How should legislators prioritize the different health challenges that exist in urban environments? How can advocates and citizens ensure that legislators prioritize correctly? What else can be done to address urban child health issues?

UB's Symposium on the Health of the Urban Child: Diagnosing Problems and Prescribing Solutions

With child health issues in the news so much lately, we thought we'd use our first substantive post to discuss CFCC’s work with urban child health. CFCC’s annual Urban Child Symposium this year is entitled  Health and the Urban Child: Diagnosing Problems and Prescribing Solutions. It takes place at the University of Baltimore School of Law on April 1st. We have an impressive roster of experts, practitioners, and policymakers who plan to discuss the unique, acute health challenges faced by urban children and to brainstorm potential solutions.

Two matters important to urban child health have made headlines in Maryland recently - disparities between suburban and urban health and the growing obesity problem. Both of these issues are on the agenda for this year’s symposium.

Disparities Between Suburban and Urban Child Health

The inspiration for making urban child health the focus of the symposium is an understanding of the exceptional health challenges that urban children face as a direct result of living in urban environments. For example, many urban children lack the basic resources necessary to stay healthy, including affordable and nutritious food, safe areas where they can exercise, and high quality medical care. At the same time, they confront problems such as poverty, lead paint poisoning, pollution, substance abuse, and violence.

Our three panels of doctors, professors, advocates, and policymakers are slated to lead discussion on how these unique features of the urban child’s environment can cause large health disparities between urban and suburban children and what we can do to help.


Obesity and Nutrition-Related Conditions

Obesity is an increasingly serious health problem for urban children, partially as a result of a lack of access to nutritious food and a lack of safe areas where children can exercise. Two speakers on our “Nutrition and Environmental Conditions” panel are going to address exactly these issues, one of whom is quoted in the nutritious food article.  Click on the links above to read recent articles from the Baltimore Sun about these issues.



CFCC would like to invite and encourage you to join the conversation to address and propose remedies for some of these daunting issues, either by registering for the symposium or commenting on this and any future posts.

Welcome

Welcome to the University of Baltimore Center for Families, Children and the Courts blog! We are excited to introduce this forum for the exchange of ideas, discussion, and news about CFCC.

Check back often for up-to-date information regarding CFCC’s activities, including Unified Family Courts (UFCs), the Truancy Court Program , the Urban Child Symposium and other conferences and symposia.

We also plan to use this blog to foster discussion related to CFCC’s mission and projects, including the application of therapeutic jurisprudence and the the ecology of human development to improve outcomes for families and children in court.  We hope to engage and interact with our readers.  Together, we can create a deeper understanding of systemic influences on the lives of families and children and can bring about meaningful change in communities, families, and the family justice system.