Centers and Clinics: Juvenile Justice Project
Juvenile Justice Project: Conferences & Workshops
2010 Juvenile Justice Conference
Juvenile Justice: Passages, Prevention, and Intervention
Feb. 19 & 20, 2010
Conference Schedule [PDF]
Conference Logistics [PDF]
Sponsored by
University of Florida Levin College of Law
Center on Children & Families
Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations
Co-sponsored by
Child Advocacy Program, Harvard Law School
Juvenile Justice Clinic, Georgetown University School of Law
Children and youth become involved with the juvenile justice system at a significant rate. While some children move just as quickly out of the system and go on to live productive lives as adults, other children become enmeshed in the system, moving to deeper problems and even to the adult criminal justice system.
This conference is focused on (1) avoiding this connection, whether brief or deep, and (2) intervening, at the initial contact between children and the system, in a way that most effectively prevents further involvement with the juvenile justice system, addresses the problems or mistakes that a child has made, and fosters their success as children and adults.
Prevention. For many children, involvement in the juvenile justice system is a link to other problems, difficulties and issues. Those might include: the structure of work and family responsibilities and supports; the educational system, and the "school to jail" pipeline; family difficulties and the "dependency to jail" pipeline. This would also include examining policies regarding school discipline, bullying, sexual harassment, sex education, drug and alcohol education and abuse, truancy, and ungovernability. Various systems and statutory structures impact on the ecology of children's development: we encourage both broad and very specific analysis of existing structures or proposals/strategies for change. We seek to critique and disrupt existing pathways, in order to create the supports and strategies for children to succeed, as well as identify model programs and best practices.
Intervention. Those children who can be identified as likely to become involved in the system, or those initially involved in the juvenile justice system, may be "turned around" or rehabilitated by effective programs that are developmentally sound and seek the goal of restorative justice. As with the topic of prevention, the possible issues here may be either very broad and overarching principles that must be recognized and integrated into the system, or very specific models and programs that require better statutory supports or funding or both. In addition, systems of evaluation and ongoing monitoring are critical to effective intervention. We encourage papers that address any part of the subject of early intervention, either among juveniles who have not yet come into the juvenile justice system, or those who are in the "shallow" end of the system. We seek to identify programs and strategies that have been effective, or critique those that have failed, in order to explore and identify better ways for diversion and intervention to operate to keep children from further involvement with the system while effectively addressing the problems and issues that they present.
Race, Gender, Class and Disability. We aim to explore these issues with respect to all children, and strongly encourage issues of race, gender, class and/or disability to be addressed in the papers. In addition, we welcome papers that focus on one or more of these critical identifiers with respect to juvenile justice and prevention or intervention.
Rehabilitation, not Punishment. We hope to focus on strengthening the rationale and operation of rehabilitative justice as the core principle in juvenile justice.
While this conference will be focused on issues of keeping children out of the juvenile justice system and effectively dealing with in the early stages of involvement in the system, talking about the current juvenile justice system may well be necessary as part of the focus on prevention and avoidance. The Juvenile Justice Project will be holding a second conference focused on critique and reforms of the existing juvenile justice system.
We aim to gather data, critique and models for juvenile justice, using multi disciplinary approaches, connecting academics, practitioners and policymakers. We mean to include the voices of children as well. To that end, we encourage you to respond to the call for papers either with (1) an abstract describing research that you wish to present, or (2) identify yourself as a practitioner or policymaker with specific expertise to present or who would like to participate as a commentator. Our goal is to include academics and practitioners/policymakers in every part of the conference. Finally, (3) if you have experience in the juvenile justice or work with children directly in a way that you could bring your or their voice to the conference, please describe the "voice" you can bring to the conference to work on the issues of avoidance, prevention and intervention.
We hope to identify good systems, models and/or legislation. We hope also to be a sounding board for ideas, as well as a connecting place for those who might enrich each other's perspectives or assist in outcomes if they work collaboratively.
Papers may include already published work or works in progress.