"In considering different strategies for promoting productive and safe school environments, it can be difficult to know what works and what doesn’t. In particular, longstanding debates about zero tolerance policies leave many people confused about the bas ...

Juvenile justice probation and detention workers play an important role in helping system-involved youth and families navigate justice and social service systems; achieving goals of accountability, competency, and community safety; and promoting safety, s ...

Each year, nearly 380,000 minors experience “unaccompanied” homelessness — meaning they are homeless and without a parent or guardian — for a period of longer than one week. (1) These young people, much like their adult counterparts, are often cited, arre ...

After years of study, the research is clear: (1) the impact of truancy on students, schools, communities and society is profound; and, (2) it is critical to take a multi-faceted approach to prevent and reduce truancy. This webinar features positive and c ...

Childhood trauma exposure is a significant public health concern. Children are exposed to potentially traumatic events at alarming rates and the negative effects of untreated traumatic stress can last a lifetime. By the age of 17, more than 71% of all chi ...

Screening and assessment of traumatic stress and its psychosocial after-effects play an important role in a trauma-informed juvenile justice system. Trauma exposure and its negative consequences are highly prevalent among justice-involved youth. For examp ...

Excerpt: School-based police officers, known as school resource officers (SROs), have become a common and growing presence in schools across the nation. The presence of law enforcement in school, while intended to increase school safety, has also been ...

This manual summarizes the major activities of the Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative (SBDI); an initiative funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The manual is intended to aid communities in developing their ...

This Brief describes how partnerships developed by Network members and police agencies are helping to create a trauma-informed law enforcement system.

Excerpt: Communities of color have a long-standing history of inequitable treatment by the police in the U.S. In recent years, activists with the Black Lives Matter movement have helped to raise the profile of the destructive treatment of the black comm ...

The first issue of the series describes why creating trauma-informed child-serving systems is necessary and suggests specific competencies that systems can adopt to work effectively with traumatized children and their families.

In 2005-2006, juvenile justice professionals in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties were assessed to determine their current aftercare practices. As a result of this assessment, this Toolkit was written in 2006 to address one of their main areas of concern: helpin ...

Mission Judge Steven Teske, a juvenile court judge in Clayton County, Ga, began to observe and learn that referrals to law enforcement skyrocketed as soon as school resource officers were stationed at local schools. In fact, in the mid to late nineties ...

Therapeutic treatment of the psychosocial after-effects of childhood exposure to traumatic stressors is a key component in the development of trauma-informed juvenile justice systems (Kerig, 2012). More than 80% of juvenile justice-involved youth report a ...

A majority of children involved in the juvenile justice system have a history of trauma. Children and adolescents who come into the court system frequently have experienced not only chronic abuse and neglect, but also exposure to substance abuse, domesti ...

Learning is not just a cognitive process. Research shows that powerful social and emotional factors affect learning. Some of these factors involve social relationships. These social factors include the teacher's relationship with the student, the student' ...

Our nation’s schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning free of crime and violence. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the ...

Child trauma is endemic in the juvenile justice system. At least 75% of youth involved in the juvenile delinquency system have experienced traumatic victimization, and 1111–50% have developed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many of these young peopl ...

The most disadvantaged, troubled students in the South and the nation attend schools in the juvenile justice systems. These children, mostly teenagers, usually are behind in school, possess substantial learning disabilities, exhibit recognizable behavior ...

I am a reformist who happens to be a judge. I came to this realization when introduced as a "reformer" at a recent Houston gathering of politicians, judges, clergy and juvenile justice stakeholders. I was invited to share some insights into the collabo ...

Criminalizing kids for minor misbehavior in our schools unnecessarily exposes them to our justice system and increases the likelihood they will drop out of school and face later incarceration. Involvement of all stakeholders, including judicial leaders, i ...

Many schools across the United States have enacted zero tolerance philosophy in response to perceived increases in violence and drugs in schools. It is believed that aggressive and unwavering punishment of many school infractions, including relatively min ...

Exert from website: "Restorative justice is an approach to offending behavior that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships, rather than just punishing the perpetrator. Schools are increasingly adopting restorative justice to address conce ...

Exert from website: "Restorative justice is an approach to offending behavior that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships, rather than just punishing the perpetrator. Schools are increasingly adopting restorative justice to address conc ...

Exert from website: "Restorative Justice Practices in U.S. Schools Restorative justice is an approach to offending behavior that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships, rather than just punishing the perpetrator. Schools are increasi ...

The NCJFCJ has published this guide as part of a larger project addressing school discipline referrals to the juvenile justice system. The project aims to reduce the number of referrals to the juvenile justice system for school based behaviors through the ...

The NCJFCJ has published a Technical Assistance Bulletin on the School Pathways to the Juvenile Justice System: A Context for a Practice Guide for Courts and Schools as part of a larger project addressing school discipline referrals to the juvenile justic ...

Exert of Preface: In 2014, the American Bar Association (ABA) Coalition on Racial and Ethnic Justice (COREJ) turned its attention to the continuing failures in the education system where certain groups of students—for example, students of color, wit ...

Each year more than 10 million children in the United States endure the trauma of abuse, violence, natural disasters, and other adverse events. These experiences can give rise to significant emotional and behavioral problems that can profoundly disrupt th ...

Youth who become involved with the juvenile courts have many common background risks. These risks are related to the individual (e.g., early aggression, mental health problems, substance use, trauma, education deficits, special education disabilities), fa ...

The Let Her Learn Survey revealed that more than 1 in 5 girls have been sexually assaulted, while 1 in 3 girls reported either sexual assault or other violence. As a result of educational barriers, girls are being pushed out of school. There was an increa ...

Many students across the Nation struggle with emotional and behavioral problems that may lead them to act out in ways that school administrators and teachers might not understand or be prepared to respond to effectively. In today’s era of highstakes testi ...

The juvenile justice system in America is a paradox when it comes to promoting the welfare of our nation’s young people. We have come a long way from old English common law which treated children as adults under the "vicious will” doctrine,1 to creating j ...

Prior to the passage of the Gun Free Zone Act of 1994 (GFZA), school administrators and educators were largely responsible for addressing students' misbehavior in school. However, since the implementation of GFZA, there has been an increasing number of sc ...

This toolkit provides a step-by-step guide for implementing some of the core principles and activities of the full SBDI initiative. A simple-to-use checklist is included to guide you through implementation of key SBDI elements. There are self-assessment q ...

RESEARCH AND DATA ON SCHOOL DISCIPLINE practices are clear: millions of students are being removed from their classrooms each year, mostly in middle and high schools, and overwhelmingly for minor misconduct. When suspended, these students are at a signif ...

Despite falling crime rates, more adolescent girls are arrested and incarcerated in the United States today than ever before (NMHA, 2003). Nearly three-quarters of a million girls below the age of 18 were arrested in 1997, accounting for 26 percent of ju ...

What is Truancy? Truancy is generally considered any unexcused or unverified absence from school. Because states enact their own school attendance laws, the legal definition of truancy may vary from state to state.

Children of all ages in the United States are increasingly being exposed to violence and victimization. While the types of violence and levels of exposure differ for children of different ages, rates of interpersonal violence and victimization of 12-to-1 ...

Exert from website: "Restorative Justice Practices in U.S. Schools Restorative justice is an approach to offending behavior that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships, rather than just punishing the perpetrator. Schools are increasi ...