The school-to-prison pipeline refers to a system in which school-discipline practices—from suspensions to corporal punishment to disturbing-school laws —push children out of education and into the criminal-justice system. It’s a pipeline with which disadvantaged kids and families of color are particularly familiar. Black children, for example, comprised just 16 percent of the country’s student population in the 2011-12 school year yet roughly a third of those suspended at least once or...

The Chadwick Center for Children & Families at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego has just released a set of trauma-informed guidelines with concrete strategies for approaching secondary traumatic stress (STS). While these guidelines were created for intended use within child welfare systems, they may be easily adapted into other child-and family-serving organizations. These guidelines were created as part of the Chadwick Trauma-Informed Systems Dissemination and Implementation Project...

A new California law that gives all juveniles the right to a hearing before they can be transferred to adult court will require training and vigilance across the state to put in place, supporters say. Among the many boxes to check off: Many defenders, prosecutors and judges have to learn how to apply the law’s intricacies. The juvenile system as a whole has to prepare to offer services to teenagers who likely would have ended up in adult prison. And the legal community will have to grapple...

Over 5 million kids in the United States currently have or have had a parent in prison. That works out to about one in 14 American children—a majority of whom are under age 10. Broken down by state, children with incarcerated parents can represent 3 to 13 percent of the population, according to “ A Shared Sentence ,” a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The unusually intense stress that these children face has been well documented and studied. That’s mostly due to researchers’ emphasis...

Manuel Dircio, 20, a business administration student at Fullerton College boasts a 4.0 GPA. He is also a recovering alcoholic with a history of arrest and incarceration in juvenile detention — not quite what you’d expect from a seemingly model college student with a stellar grade point. Dircio credits the Youthful Offender Wraparound program (YOW), which he says “helped [him] grow successfully.” It’s what’s known as a full-service partnership (FSP) in Orange County, California, that uses a...

“Tell me about a time you made a mistake.” Every young person has been asked this question in a job interview. After all, what better way to assess someone’s work ethic, perseverance and self-reflection than hearing how they learn from failure or just life’s challenges? Ask any seasoned academic, entrepreneur or parent and they will tell you mistakes were invaluable to their personal development and ultimate success. Yet, despite our society’s theoretical value of resilience, when it comes...

As a family court judge in Flint, Michigan, I see poverty flood my courtroom in a vicious cycle of cases in dependency, delinquency, criminality, and then back to dependency. The mantra in family court is that no one should lose their kids because they’re poor. The sad reality is that this happens all too often when generational poverty creates what Nicholas Kristof calls a “broken class.” Many times it falls to the courts to fix families. It would be nice if it were easy. But often courts...

In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that have limited extreme sentences for juveniles, states are relying on parole boards to put those rulings into effect. But those boards operate with little transparency, rarely focus on how a prisoner has changed while serving their time and ultimately seldom grant parole to serious offenders, the ACLU researchers said. “It’s wonderful there is attention on making sure juveniles and other young people aren’t going to die in prison, but all the...

I am excited to announce that ACEs Connection Network has partnered with the producers of the film, Portraits of Professional CAREgivers: Their Passion. Their Pain . to host a FREE SCREENING of the film for our members. If you have been t hinking of hosting a screening of CAREgivers in your community or are interested in learning more about secondary traumatic stress and what to do about it, join our ACEs Connection Network for a FREE screening of this film and a virtual chat with the...

Children as young as 13 can be tried in adult criminal court for serious crimes in New York state. But instead of redirecting troubled kids, prison hardens them. That’s why the New York Foundling, a private children’s-advocacy organization, offers an alternative, Families Rising , a diversionary option that mandates family therapy in exchange for delayed sentencing and avoiding a criminal record entirely if the program is completed successfully. The program also costs significantly less than...

Pictured: Darius Irvin, a sophomore at San Francisco State University, has survived three separate shootings. The Wraparound Project helped him get out of the line of fire and go back to college. (Laura Klivans/KQED) Darius Irvin grew up in violent neighborhoods in Oakland and San Francisco. While Irvin was never in a gang, he was around them a lot. One winter when he was back home in Oakland from his freshman year of college up in Chico, he knocked on the door of his barbershop. He wanted a...

The Youth First Initiative wants to help end the use of youth prisons. The justice-advocacy group works from the premise that detaining minors—whether in youth facilities or in prisons—is not just a poorly executed practice; it is simply beyond repair. “This model of incarceration is broken—it does not work,” says Liz Ryan, the president and CEO of the Youth First Initiative . “It actually has never worked.” The United States has been incarcerating child offenders for a couple hundred years...