This blog that I came across on the website for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice discusses a recent reform of the juvenile justice system in Georgia, Hawaii, and Kentucky. The goal of this reform is to reduce the number of youth being sent to residential correctional facilities. Their focus is identifying the low-risk youth within the system and providing them with community based interventions rather that time in the facility. Judges will be implementing an assessment tool before sentencing the youth. There have already been better outcomes and lower costs found in Georgia, where they have already been able to shut down two correctional facilities. They also say that the majority of the voters say they are not concerned with whether juvenile offenders spend time or how much time they spend in a correctional facility, but instead that the system can intervene to prevent the offenders from becoming adult offenders. It is exciting to see that they are using evidence-based interventions and thinking.
This is the link to the video: http://www.juvjustice.org/blog/879
Betsy Leal, 1/31/15
