When a young person enters the de-escalation room in the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility , they’ll find dimmed lights, bottles of lavender, orange and other essential oils, an audio menu featuring the rush of ocean waves and other calming sounds, along with squeeze balls, TheraPutty, jigsaw puzzles, and an exercise ball to bounce on. Sometimes, with a teen’s permission, “We’ll put a weighted blanket on them, just to give them that hug that feels good, since we can’t give them...

By Anne Stuhldreher, Cal Matters, April 27, 2021 Growing up, Blossom Sergejev was lucky if she talked to her mother once a week. Usually it was once a month. Even then their conversations ended almost as soon as they started. She and her brother and sister had a timer to make sure all three got their fair share of their mother’s time – five minutes each. “There was no small talk on those calls, and it wasn’t at all light-hearted,” Sergejev says. “We got down to the grit of what was going...

Education for Liberation requires bold critique, creative acts, and, particularly for teachers, a willingness to take risks outside the status quo. Below we offer suggestions based on the ways many teachers and other youth advocates are building the capacity to challenge the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). We know teachers are already practicing, generating and sharing other interventions. This is not a checklist of must-dos, nor is it an exhaustive list or intended to apply to every...

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Mississippi needs to do a lot of things. In the scheme of things, are you sure hope is really all that important?” My answer is an emphatic, “Yes!” What I want to share are four lessons I learned from having been one of the event planners of the three-day conference.

Dr. Chan Hellman, leading researcher in the power of hope to improve lives of impoverished children and families who have experienced abuse and neglect, Justice Dawn Beam, and Christopher Freeze, co-chair of Mississippi ACEs Connection , on day three of presentations by Hellman to judges and staff members of Mississippi's Youth Courts. “Hope is a better predictor of college success than the ACT or the SAT score” was one of the startling comments made by Chan Hellman, Ph.D., in the first of...

By The Council of State Governments Justice Center, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, March 29, 2021 In This Report, You’ll Learn An overview of the research methodology used. How juvenile justice involvement can carry lifelong consequences. How state policies are blocking people with juvenile justice involvement from opportunity. Advice for lawmakers on removing these barriers to opportunity. Summary This report — which can be downloaded or viewed online — explores how barriers to education...

By Tyler Evains, Daily Breeze, December 11, 2019 The meeting began with a moment of silence to remember the six people who were killed in a New Jersey shooting. The country’s latest episode of mass gun violence occurred just hours before nearly 50 students and community members met Tuesday night, Dec. 10, at Banning High School in Wilmington for a town hall to discuss that very issue. Assemblyman Mike Gipson, D-Carson, hosted the meeting to inform potential policies, programs and funding...

A corner of the Multi-Sensory De-escalation Room, All MSDR photos courtesy of Valerie Clark When a young person enters the de-escalation room in the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility , they’ll find dimmed lights, bottles of lavender, orange and other essential oils, an audio menu featuring the rush of ocean waves and other calming sounds, along with squeeze balls, TheraPutty, jigsaw puzzles, and an exercise ball to bounce on. TheraPutty, squeeze balls and more Sometimes, with a...

Over the past few years, statistics on how the U.S. justice system is failing its citizens have come fast and hard. With more than 2 million people detained in jails and prisons, we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world—a rate that’s increased 500% in the past five decades Possibly as many as 482,000 people currently held in local jails are there simply because they’re too poor to pay bail; they haven’t been convicted of a crime. African Americans are three times more likely to...

By The Annie E. Casey Foundation, March 8, 2021 A year after the coronavirus pandemic began, the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that a historic drop in the size of the youth detention population at the beginning of 2020 did nothing to reduce the already huge racial and ethnic disparities in who gets detained, despite the health concerns of confinement during the pandemic and a national reckoning about racial justice. In fact, the overrepresentation of Black and Latino youth in detention was...

By Patricia K. Kerig, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, March 10, 2021 The well-established finding that a majority of youth in the juvenile justice system have been exposed to trauma has led to a clarion call for the implementation of trauma-informed practices . However, to date, less attention has been paid to the importance of providing juvenile justice staff with the tools needed to carry out trauma-informed practices in ways that protect them from the potential risks associated...

By Taylor Walker, WitnessLA, February 22, 2021 On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in favor of legislation to shutter the local juvenile hall by December 2021. The ordinance, which SF supes authored in partnership with the Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC), made SF the first major urban jurisdiction to choose to abolish juvenile incarceration. The city-county’s lone 150-bed youth lockup is already so close to empty — on August 15, 2020, there were 13...