Today, we are releasing a new report that provides an overview of juvenile justice in Illinois. This is not a research report but is intended to offer a brief primer for those who want to better understand how many young people across the state come to the attention of the criminal punishment system.
Download the report HERE (PDF).
by Richard Ross (Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center)
The following map was created and provided by Kanako Ishida of the Juvenile Justice Initiative. Our thanks.
by Kanako Ishida, Juvenile Justice Initiative
by Kanako Ishida (Juvenile Justice Initiative)
The Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice presented the following information to legislators during a Senate appropriation hearing earlier this week. They provide a statistical snapshot of the population in our juvenile prisons.
Total admissions FY13 = 1,835
Youth on aftercare/parole as of 3/31/14 = 1,416
Youth population in youth centers 3/31/14 = 778 This is an historic low number of youth in facilities.
Average length of stay FY13 = 9 months
Race of youth in youth centers 3/31/14 = Black 63%, white 26%, Hispanic 11%
Sex = Male 95%, Female 5%
Offense class youth in centers 3/31/14 = Murder & Class X 11% (these two classifications are the only classifications not eligible for Redeploy)…..Class 1 – 23%, Class 2 – 36%, Class 3-15%, Class 4 – 11%, Misd – 4%.
43% youth receive Special Ed Services as of 3/31/14, and 48.5% received mental health FY13
We are excited to share this new paper by Sarah Brewster and Jane Hereth who were both volunteers with our Chain Reaction, youth-driven participatory action research project. Sarah and Jane have written about the project and their particular experiences with it.
“The authors detail their work with Chain Reaction, a Chicago-based participatory action research and popular education project working to spark conversations about alternatives to calling the police on young people. As volunteers for Chain Reaction, we facilitated a series of workshops an LGBTQ youth center in which youth used digital audio recorders to interview each other about their experiences with police, then curated the stories for a toolkit on alternatives to policing. As the stories consistently reflect, when young people become involved with the police, it often sets off a chain reaction that can result in dropping out of school, losing jobs, and ongoing contact with state systems. The goal of Chain Reaction is to support community-based strategies for stopping these cycles. We explore the theoretical frameworks and the limitations and successes of the project, and offer suggestions for those interested in doing similar projects.”
You can download the paper HERE.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) released “The Northwestern Juvenile Project: Overview.”
This bulletin, the first in OJJDP’s Beyond Detention series, provides an overview of the Northwestern Juvenile Project, the first large-scale, prospective longitudinal study of drug, alcohol, and psychiatric disorders in a diverse sample of juvenile detainees. This bulletin provides an overview of the project and presents information on its goals, sampling and interview methods, areas of measurement, and selected findings.
It focuses specifically on youth detained at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center so is of particular interest to us.
Here is a second bulletin based on the same data set that was released in December 2013.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
A new report from the National Juvenile Justice Network and Texas Public Policy Foundation shows that the number of youth confined in state and county facilities nationwide strongly declined in 2011.
“For the 2001-to-2011 ten-year period, the number of confined youth declined by 41% nationwide, or an annual average decline of 4.1% — a dramatic drop since 2000, when a record-setting 108,802 youth were held in detention centers awaiting trial or confined by the courts in juvenile facilities in the U.S. The nationwide decline in 2011 (from 70,793 to 61,423 youth) continues the trend from the previous year (the latest for which data is available), which showed youth confinement was reduced by 32% nationwide from 2001-2010.”
ILLINOIS FACTS
Between 2001`and 2011, Illinois reduced its youth incarceration rate by 41% matching the national number. The number of youth confined between 2010 and 2011 dropped by 5%. 2106 youth were confined in Illinois in 2011. Illinois confined 169 youth for every 100,000 youth in the state’s general population, or 13.3% lower than the U.S. average rate of confinement (195).
Information about the Report
The report, an update to the “Comeback States” report issued by the groups in June, uses data from 2011 (the most recent year for which national data is available) on youth confinement provided by the U.S. Justice Department’s (USDOJ) Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to track the ongoing national reduction of youth incarceration, as well as the continued progress of the nine states leading the nation on implementing meaningful juvenile justice reforms resulting in the reduction of youth in confinement in their states. These comeback states include: California, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Mississippi, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The Children and Family Justice Center created these great infographic about the realities of youth incarceration in Illinois.
In advance of the Week of Action against School Pushout, Project NIA created a fact sheet including data about suspensions, school-based arrests, and other information.
You can find the complete fact sheet HERE (PDF).
Our volunteer Jacqui Shine generously created a set of visually appealing fact sheets based on the data. We are grateful for her contributions to our work.
One Page Fact Sheets:
1. Chicago School-Based Arrests (PDF)
2. Chicago Suspensions (PDF)
3. Dropouts and incarceration (PDF)
These are terrific memes that were created by a volunteer named Sherry Long for us during the week of action against school pushout a few weeks ago.
This is an initiative of Project NIA.
Chicago Youth Justice Data Project 