February 2022
Bridging justice between childhood and adulthood
Upcoming Webinar:
The Impact of COVID-19 on Youth Justice in Wisconsin

Friday, February 18, 1pm EST

The Youth Justice Wisconsin COVID-19 Impact Project has undertaken three phases of data collection and analysis to explore the impact of the pandemic on youth justice in Wisconsin. The Project's findings suggest that the state can safely, and equitably, reduce the reliance on confinement, law enforcement, and fines and fees with coordinated action in key areas. This webinar will include a presentation of significant findings followed by a panel discussion.

  • Presenter: Ann McCullough, Youth Justice Wisconsin Consultant
  • Moderator: Erica Nelson, Kids Forward Advocacy Director
  • Panelists:
  • Genevieve Caffrey, University of Wisconsin-La Follette School Capstone Project Team
  • Lance Horozewski, Wisconsin Division of Juvenile Corrections
  • Sharlen Moore, Youth Justice Milwaukee/ Urban Underground
  • Alana Peck, Wisconsin Department of Children & Families
  • Joshua Rovner, The Sentencing Project
  • Philip Stegemann, La Crosse County Human Services
  • Bridget Todd-Robbins, La Crosse County Human Services
Specialized Practices

On January 31, 2022 Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner announced that his office will turn its Emerging Adult Initiative, which began operating in October 2020, into a permanent unit. Sangeeta Prasad, a lawyer and Stoneleigh Fellow who helped develop the initiative for the DA’s Office, said the unit’s approach differs from existing diversion efforts because, among other things, it will not impose the same monitoring standards on defendants whose cases are selected, and it will seek to connect defendants with community-based organizations that meet their needs.

Read the Justice Lab press release and Philadelphia Inquirer article to learn more.

EAJP Director, Lael Chester, EAJP Senior Researcher, Selen Siringil Perker, and Professor at the University of New Haven Law School and EAJP Learning Community member, Michael Lawlor, presented at an event for senior staff of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, launching the new B.R.A.V.E. Correctional Unit for emerging adult fathers, located in a Department of Corrections facility in Concord, Massachusetts.

Explore more by reading the EAJP Learning Community Brief on Specialized Correctional Units.
Neuroscience Transforming the Law


This guide for judges, attorneys, and policy makers, published by the Harvard Center for Law, Brain & Behavior with lead authors, Robert Kinscherff, Judith G. Edersheim, and Bruce H. Price, reflects on neuroscience as a rapidly evolving domain of research for legal studies and practice. They anticipate that it will have significant and enduring impact nationally in shaping litigation, legislation, and practice, particularly as state juvenile justice and correctional authorities have begun considering reforms to better align responses developmentally in preventing or responding to misconduct by adolescents and emerging adults.



This panel discussion hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute with Lael Chester, Robert Kinscherff, and Sheriff Steven W. Tompkins considers how public policy and carceral institutions can respond to the harmful impact of stress and trauma on the developing brain.



Presented by Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center and introduced by Carmel Shachar and panelists Honorable (Ret.) Jay Blitzman, Lael Chester, and Stephanie Tabashneck. The event highlighted the current landscape of cases and legislation focused on crafting developmentally aligned frameworks for responding to misconduct by younger adolescents, late adolescents, and emerging adults (to age 25).

Aging Out of Foster Care in California
Bridge to Adulthood: A Discussion on California's Extended Foster Care System
Webinar panelists discuss the origins of California's 2010 decision to extend foster care beyond the age of 18, what has worked and what hasn't, and the future of extended foster care across California state. Panelists include Executive Director of John Burton Advocates for Youth, Amy Lemley, Executive Director of California Youth Connection, Janay Eustace, Statewide Legislative & Policy Manager, California Youth Connection, Jordan Sosa, and University of Chicago Professor of Social Work, Policy & Practice and member of the EAJP Steering Committee on a new developmental framework, Mark Courtney. In the podcast, the federal Fostering Connections to Success Act's passage into law is considered in light of California's extension of foster care to the age of 21 with additional financial assistance.
In July 2021, California's state Senate and Assembly unanimously passed a $35 million program guaranteeing former foster youth $1,000 monthly payments - the state's first universal basic income (UBI). With the largest state foster care population in the U.S., the program is likely to impact the lives of 2,400 to 2,500 young people each year. In response to a pilot project established in May 2020 that exposed the dilemma of enrollees needing to choose between their UBI and other government assistance, the state has directed that UBI payments be disregarded as income when considering eligibility for public benefits programs. Expert Mark Courtney notes that the UBI will help bridge the gap from foster care to independence.
Spotlight: Elizabeth "Betsy" Clarke

In honor of Betsy’s recent retirement from her role as president of the Illinois Juvenile Justice Initiative (JJI), we reflect on a handful of highlights from her notable career, the living legacy of JJI, and her thoughts on the burgeoning field of Emerging Adult Justice. 

The context of juvenile justice reform in Illinois is an interesting place to begin. The world’s first juvenile court division was created in Cook County in 1899, while other states followed suit by establishing similar juvenile court systems of their own. In many ways, Betsy’s work and its impacts on the juvenile system almost an entire century later have had its own share of rippling effects.

Prior to establishing JJI, Betsy completed her legal training at the law school at DePaul University, and went on to serve as an attorney and policy advocate in both the Office of the Cook County Public Defender and the Office of the State Appellate Defender through the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, she noticed a nationwide shift in fiscal priorities: Illinois began disinvesting from community programs - a vast change from the previously vital subsidization of community colleges that had created an abundance of educational opportunities from the 1960s onward. Instead, Illinois began building up a rural prison economy, legislating new crimes into law, and incentivizing the incarceration of more emerging adults and juveniles than ever before. In response, Betsy founded JJI in 2000. 

Poised to center research, educate policymakers, and develop consensus in advocating for reforms, JJI would effectively work to chip away at the 1990s “law and order” provisions that very quickly increased the numbers of juveniles in pre-trial detention and post-trial prison, which had fueled an extensive juvenile detention building spree. In the course of producing research documenting the harms of detaining children and emerging adults and advocating to reduce the reach of the legal system to the lives of young people and their communities, JJI has contributed to such efforts as: ending the automatic transfer of a minor to adult court for certain crimes, expanding access to counsel at the point of juvenile interrogation, and reducing the state's total juvenile population in detention. Kudos to Betsy and her team, as these efforts have been instrumental in the closure of three of the state’s eight juvenile prisons.

In addition, JJI was a leading advocate for raising the upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction from 17 to 18 in 2010, and they are currently advocating to raise the age again to 21, so as to better align the legal precedence with the developmental science. On the opposite end of the juvenile age of criminal responsibility, JJI continues to support efforts to raise the lower age of detention from 10 to 13 across the state. In partnering with a spectrum of advocates, from parent teacher associations to physicians groups, JJI perseveres in its efforts to advocate for sustainable fiscal incentives, for the diversion of young people away from detention to its more rehabilitative alternatives. No doubt influenced by Betsy's interest in best practices around international human rights and human dignity, JJI, now under the directorship of Luis Klein, continues to seek to ensure fairer and more equitable treatment of young people under Illinois law through the continuous revision of standards of detention for the states' young people and communities that they serve.

Betsy encourages us to recognize the comparisons and value of reflecting back on the oppressive impacts of legislative change to Illinois' juvenile justice system through the foundational years of her career. She is encouraged by the continuation of Illinois' historical community-led initiatives that formed such novel institutions as Cook County's Restorative Justice Community Court, serving emerging adults ages 18 to 26, while at the same time she is concerned by the recent call to repeal the state's 2021 passage of the SAFE-T Act, which aimed to improve police accountability and end cash bail all on top of the $125 million proposal for a "Fund the Police Grant Act". As more jurisdictions become aware of the research on the impacts of involving young people in the criminal legal system all while profound racial and ethnic disparities persist, Betsy, like so many of us, is cautiously optimistic that there are many well-established values and best practices (research-driven advocacy, restorative justice, human rights, and sustainable fiscal incentives, to name but a few) to be learned from the evolution of justice for children and emerging adults over the past several decades.

Thank you for your tenacious work, Betsy - and thank you all for reading!