The proposed date on which New York City’s ‘Close to Home’ initiative will begin accepting children into its facilities is September 1, 2012.  The City’s Administration for Children’s Services, which will be in charge of the new initiative, has already released a list of recommended service providers, and a detailed [...]

The Children’s Defense Fund of New York has just released a toolkit on youth justice which can be used by educators to teach students about juvenile justice reform.  The toolkit includes important data about how many youth become enmeshed in New York’s system, the costs of secure care, and what kinds of reforms [...]

The New York State Juvenile Justice Steering Committee has released a strategic plan for implementing juvenile justice reforms in the state.  Components of the plan include the development of system governance and coordination, an effective continuum of diversion, supervision, treatment, and confinement, accountability of system and actors within the system, shared data and information [...]

Today, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would be donating funds from his private foundation to a major new jobs initiative for young men in New York City.  These funds would be matched by George Soros.  This initiative seems to be an important and essential step in the city, particularly in light of research which [...]

Milk not Jails has started a campaign to raise money for a line of dairy products to support their campaign.  Please consider supporting this effort! You can pledge money here.   More information is below:

Eating ice cream every day can actually make the world a better a place with the new [...]

The Reclaiming Futures blog has just put up a video interview with Karen Pittman of the Forum for Youth Investment about the forms of support that kids need to grow into adulthood.  She talks about the myriad ways in which young people can be supported by adults in order for them to become successful.

Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University and Aaron Kupchik of the University of Delaware have an article forthcoming in the Duke Forum for Law and Social Change comparing the pains of imprisonment for young people in New York’s and New Jersey’s adult prisons and their juvenile facilities.  The data was collected between 1999 and 2001 and [...]

I have added a new page to the resources section on the issues of rural imprisonment.  I am for this new section to provide some good resources about the dynamics of economic development and imprisonment in rural areas, as there has been a lot of good work done on this issue.

One of my Soros justice fellow colleagues, Zachary Norris, has just launched a website for his organization, called Justice 4 Families.  This organization is a national support, advocacy and training organization for families of court involved and incarcerated youth.  So far, the organization has developed a network of 2,000 families.  The organization is working [...]

In the latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, there is an article about collective impact on social change.  The authors argue that in order for some social problems to be solved, a collective, coordinated approach, which involves different actors from different sectors to be involved in addressing a single problem.  The authors [...]

On Monday, a former staffer of the New York State Commission on Corrections, the agency responsible for monitoring the State’s secure residential facilities for juveniles (as well as some facilities for adults), held a press conference in which she spoke about violence by young people against staff members.  She revealed surveillance [...]