The Center for Families, Children and the Courts Student Fellows Program: A Unique Experience to Develop Lawyers as Problem Solvers

The Center for Families, Children and the Courts Student Fellows Program I (SFP) is now underway.  The course provides students with a unique perspective on the law, instructing them on policies and theories that underlie family justice system reform.  The SFP includes classroom discussion, lectures, and guest speakers about cutting edge issues in family law, including unified family courts, therapeutic jurisprudence, and the ecology of human development. 

Student Fellows have the opportunity to see firsthand how theory informs practice during visits to the Family Division of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, a drug court, a teen court, and the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center.  They also are actively involved in CFCC’s projects, including its Truancy Court Program (TCP).   For example, as part of their TCP involvement, Student Fellows serve as law clerks to the TCP judges, collaborate with public school faculty and administrators, work with service providers, and develop workshops for teachers, parents, and students on issues relating to school attendance.   Interested Student Fellows can continue their involvement for a second semester in the Student Fellows Program II, which has no seminar component but includes a weekly team meeting.

Throughout the semester, the CFCC Student Fellows will be posting blogs about their experiences with some aspect of the SFP.  Click here to view and engage with past and current blogs by Student Fellows and to learn more about the Student Fellows Program. 

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.

Celebrating Success with the Truancy Court Program

Proud TCP Graduate Aaliyah Grimes poses with
Mrs. O'Malley (Photo by Tom Nappi). To view
more photos from the event, click here or here. 

"This has always been my dream," remarked Aaliyah Grimes, a third grade student at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore City. Aaliyah, a 2012 graduate of the Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) Truancy Court Program (TCP), was referring to the annual First Lady of Maryland’s reception for all the TCP graduates and their families.

 Maryland's First Lady, the Honorable Catherine Curran O'Malley, has served as a volunteer TCP judge since the program's inception seven years ago and has hosted the reception for the past six years. Two hundred TCP graduates, parents, school principals, staff, and teachers – the greatest number since the receptions began– participated in the festivities at the Governor’s Mansion and attended the graduation ceremony at the Senate Office Building.

The TCP has enjoyed unprecedented success this year. Over 75% of the program participants graduated, based on a minimum two-thirds decrease in unexcused absences and tardies and improved classroom behavior and academic performance. Participants overall averaged a 64% decrease in unexcused absences and an additional 43% decrease in tardies during the program. The data also indicate a 54% reduction in absences by participants in the ten weeks after the program concluded, as compared to the ten weeks prior to their participation in the TCP.

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.

ALL FAMILIES COUNT

One of the most essential tools in the making of law or regulation is the tool of enumeration.  It seems obvious that in order to define whether a population suffers from a condition that can be remedied by a change of public policy – we need to quantify the number of people who experience the condition.  We also need to quantify the cost of implementing a change relative to the number of people affected, so that cost effectiveness, as well as the overall cost of the solution, can be evaluated.   The need for counting, or enumeration as it is known in public policy-making, is not complicated but it is vital to the justification of any legislative initiative or expenditure of public revenues.   It is also the deficit that most fundamentally impairs the ability of the lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender (lgbt) community to make their case to policymakers.  Simply put –- we don’t count --- because we are not counted.

The boxes that we check off in the myriad forms and demographic surveys that are part of daily life –everything from birth certificate, driver’s license, health insurance and social security applications to standardized academic tests, consumer surveys and census forms.  All of these instruments take data  about our gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, income, education level, profession, marital status, and geographic location – but almost never query for sexual orientation or gender identity.  As a result, the lgbt community remains one of the last significant minority populations to remain largely unquantified.  The implications are dire: it is almost impossible to justify the need for public policy for a group that doesn’t exist. 

In recent years, The Williams Institute, which is endowed at the UCLA School of Law, has undertaken the herculean task of educating public policy makers about the importance of quantifying the lgbt community, and gathering the nascent data that exists to provide foundational metrics for our population.  One of their most significant achievements came in the 2010 Census, where for the first time in the history of the US Census, same-sex couples had a box to check to indicate that they were “unmarried partners”.   Since the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act  prohibits the federal government from recognizing marriages of same-sex couples – households with two adults of the same gender who identified as married were recoded to “unmarried partners”.  Although this is legal fiction since civil marriage is available to same-sex couples in six states and the District of Columbia, it is an improvement over previous Census when there was no option to capture same-sex households, and the brave citizens who were willing to identify as a married same-gender couple  were recoded as heterosexual.

So even at this late date – the biggest dataset on the lgbt population in the US only counts households where there is a same-sex couple, and only those couples who are willing to self-identify.   There is no formal counting of individual lesbian, gay or bisexual adults or children, and virtually no information on the gender identity of US citizens.

Despite the lack of formal counting in the US Census or the majority of federal health surveys – the Williams Institute has begun to gather the data that exists and extrapolate the size of lgbt populations nationally and in various states.  Data gleaned from the 2010 Census and ongoing American Community Survey samples indicate that there are approximately 167,864 lgbt adults in Maryland – representing 3.8% of the adult population in the state (which is about the same size as the Asian population in Maryland).  Data taken directly from the US Census show 12,538 same-sex couples in Maryland, the majority of whom identify as “unmarried partners”, but 2,321 who identify as married.  Approximately 24% of the same-sex coupled households are raising children – 5,088 children.  Interestingly, the 2010 Census reports that 30.3% of all households in Maryland have a child present, indicating that lgbt families are very similar to all families in their desire to parent.

In the coming weeks and months, I hope to explore the various populations that make up the lgbt community in Maryland – what we know about them, what we don’t know; the gaps in public policy, the potential solutions and implications of delayed action.  I hope you will join me for this exploration.  I welcome feedback at Lisa.Polyak@gmail.com.

 

Lisa Polyak is an Environmental Engineer with the U.S. Army Public Health Command. She has graduate degrees in Chemical Engineering and Occupational and Environmental Health from the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She has served on the Board at Equality Maryland, Maryland’s largest LGBT civil rights group, since 2008 in various capacities and is currently Chair.

Active in the local and national LGBT community, Lisa is the Moderator of the Baltimore-based Families With Pride, a support group for LGBT parents and children. She is a founding member of The Dallas Principles and ACT On Principles that advocate at the national level for the comprehensive and immediate legal equality for all members of the LGBT community. In 2004, Lisa and her longtime partner Gita were lead plaintiffs in the ACLU-directed litigation to achieve marriage equality for same-sex couples in Maryland.

Lisa will write a series on lgbt family issues, covering both timely topics and the underlying issues that do not generate press attention but are, nonetheless, impactful for children and families.

The Pirates of Pelican Point

On January 13^th, students at Violetville Elementary-Middle school who participated in the Truancy Court Program’s Kids & Theater program presented a morning of theater to their families, fellow students and staff at the school. The actors were dressed in their purple for Violetville's "Purple Friday." The production included a staged reading of a play written by half of the students in the class. The other half presented a performance of the play “The Pirates of Pelican Point.”

The Kids & Theater Program was first presented last spring as an after-school program at Hampden Elementary-Middle as an arts enrichment program for students enrolled in the Truancy Court Program, who were given priority enrollment. Enrollment was opened to students from the whole school, which allowed a nice cross-section of students to work together. The spring program focused on playwriting and culminated in a performance of the original work for family and friends.

For the first sessions at Violetville Elementary-Middle this fall, teaching artist Caitlyn Joy, a local actor and playwright, and I worked with all the students on both acting and writing skills, including beginning-middle-end storytelling, improvised scenes and theater games. Then the students were given a choice to pursue either writing or acting. The writing students worked with Caitlyn to write a play through a process of improvisation, writing exercises and group discussion. The other half of the class auditioned for, were cast in and rehearsed a short play under my direction.

Each time I work with kids doing theater, I learn new things from them and about theater. The program at Violetville taught me again that when faced with challenges, kids will respond to the call. When the stakes are personally high, such as performing in front of the whole school, kids can accomplish more than they think.

Our lead girl in Pirates of Pelican Place stepped into the role one week before the performance. She took the script, went home and memorized all of her lines in just a few days. She performed in front of the whole school after having had only one rehearsal. She proved to herself that she could reach her goal, even when it seemed insurmountable. The rest of the cast supported her both onstage and off-stage. They came together as a group to give the best performance they could.

Theater has been a great match for the Truancy Court Program. Theater is a fun way for students to learn hard lessons about the benefits of responsibility, commitment and working as a group, in addition to the practical skills of speaking well in front of a group. Watching the students at the end, as they took their bows in front of the school, you could see the pride of accomplishment on their faces. As we celebrated with cookies and punch after the show, the smiles didn’t leave their faces as they received the compliments of their families and their peers. They knew they had worked hard to earn the compliments.

Reporting Child Abuse and Neglect: What Does the “Penn State Scandal” Tell Us About Our Laws and Values?

CFCC’s Director is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University. Joe Paterno was her graduation speaker. That said, like the rest of the country, all of us at CFCC are horrified as we watch more and more shocking details come out in charges of sexual abuse committed by former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. It is perhaps just as disturbing that, if the allegations are true, there were many people who could have, and should have, put a stop to it.

One of the most troubling aspects of this story is the fact that so many people believed that abuse was occurring and did not intervene and report it to the authorities. Unfortunately, the truth is that while progress is being made, we still live in a culture where child abuse is “taboo.” Even trained professionals – teachers, school social workers, doctors – sometimes face internal resistance when reporting what they believe is abuse, especially if the alleged abuser is someone with power over them. Without solid evidence (or even when it happens in front of our eyes), Americans do not want to pry into the private lives of our neighbors, co-workers, students, or clients, and we tend to downplay what we know – especially if we could lose a job over reporting the behavior.

It is critically important that we as a nation and within our communities re-evaluate our attitudes toward the issues of child abuse, child neglect, domestic violence, rape, and more. We should take the time to learn the law and to consider our responsibility to protect innocent victims of the “private” but devastating crimes that occur all too often.

Under Pennsylvania law (23 Pa.C.S. § 6311), anyone who works in a public agency or works with children and has “reasonable cause to suspect” that child abuse or neglect has occurred in relation to their employment must report it to their organization head or his designee. The head of the organization then is required to report to authorities, but only one report needs to be made from each institution.

In the Penn State case, Mike McQueary (the graduate student witness) and Joe Paterno (the coaching legend to whom McQueary went with the information) seemingly both fulfilled their legal obligations by informing the athletic director and University Vice President Gary Schultz. Mr. Schultz violated the law when he decided not to investigate the allegations or report them to child protective services. Was he more concerned with prestige than the fates of countless young boys? As Joe Paterno said, with the benefit of hindsight and knowing the consequences, he believes he should have done more. Most of us feel passionately that he and Mr. McQueary should have protected those boys. In the moment, however, how many of us might have acted the same way– saved our job and our legacy by reporting it, as required by law, to our superior, trusting the “system,” and washing our hands of the disturbing situation? As a community and a nation, we should aspire to be better than that.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has argued that Pennsylvania law needs to be changed to require anyone within an organization to report abuse to the police or the child protective agency when they see it, instead of requiring only the head of the organization to make the report. He believes that the benefits of efficiency are outweighed by the risk that the organization head will drop the ball and that others who could have prevented abuse will not do so. At a minimum, state law must protect those employees who do report suspected abuse. If such policies had been in place in Pennsylvania – or even within the Pennsylvania State University – any of the several employees who allegedly witnessed or heard accounts of child abuse might have come forward and thereby have prevented years of abuse by Sandusky.

We at CFCC agree that changing laws to ensure that more effective reporting measures are in place would be a major step in the right direction. Under Maryland law, anyone who has reason to believe a child has been abused must notify the local Department of Social Services or law enforcement agency and professionals working with children must also report to their organization head (Md. Fam. Law § 5-704 and § 5-705). The state of Maryland also has begun reviewing its child abuse reporting laws to make sure they are designed to best protect abuse victims. Criminalizing a failure to report in clear cases of abuse could be a valuable protection, although, as a recent Baltimore Sun article has pointed out, such a change may lead to unintended consequences. We at CFCC believe that this kind of evaluation and discussion are critical to protect our children. We hope to be part of an ongoing discussion long after the media ceases to cover the Penn State tragedy.

Along with changes in the law, we need to organize as communities to educate the public about our legal and moral duties to protect abuse victims. Policymakers must take a firm stance that abuse is not a “private” problem but a community crisis that must be addressed at every instance and at every level. How often do horrific incidents of child abuse occur yet not receive national news coverage? Let us make children’s health and safety a national priority. Let us ensure that we always act with the courage, the wisdom, and the “hindsight” that Joe Paterno wishes he had.