Juvenile Justice Projects
Many states have created juvenile justice projects to help their legislature reform the justice system. This includes improving conditions in detention centers, continuing to provide education to detained youths, counseling youths and parents and shifting the focus of juvenile justice from punishment to rehabilitation.
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Louisiana's Project
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Louisiana's juvenile justice project is focused on giving the state's youth the opportunity to thrive and become an important member of the community. The project achieves its mission by putting education first. The project, through Schools First, has improved school districts' discipline policies, reducing the incidents of suspension and expulsion and creating in-school suspension programs that allow students requiring discipline to still complete daily class work during the period of suspension, instead of being forced to stay home. The juvenile justice project is also believes that detaining youth offenders in prison damages the youth, and instead is attempting to find alternatives to incarceration. The project's mission is to find community-based programs that provide treatment and rehabilitation for youth offenders.
Minnesota's Project
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Minnesota's PACER Center is an advocate for children with disabilities and has created a juvenile justice project that focuses on children with disabilities. Many children in detention facilities have a disability or mental health issue. PACER's juvenile justice center is committed to protecting the rights and needs of those children by educating police officers and courts about disabilities and mental health issues. Education is also an important part of the project, and PACER works to make sure that even children in correctional facilities are still provided with an education.
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California's Los Angeles Project
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This juvenile justice project was by the Learning Rights Law Center and UCLA. The program was created because Los Angeles County has the highest rate of youth incarceration and the county is now committed to creating community-based alternatives to incarceration. The project is seeking alternatives to the punishment aspect of incarceration and focuses on rehabilitating youth offenders and prevention by counseling at-risk youths.
New York's Project
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The Correctional Association started New York's juvenile justice project in 1997. Two of the newest missions for the project are ending the use of excessive force on youths in detention facilities and ending violence perpetrated against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth in those facilities. Like other juvenile justice projects, the Correctional Association is also focused on finding alternatives for detention and incarceration. Punishment is often not enough to deter repeat offenders; it is rehabilitation and community programs that help youth offenders and at-risk youths become successful members of society.
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