Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 

Wednesday, December 6, 2023 

1:00PM - 4:00PM ET 

U.S. Department of Justice 

810 7th Street, NW 

Washington, DC

Main Conference Room, 3rd Floor 

[00:33:19] Liz Ryan: Good afternoon. I'm Liz Ryan, Administrator of the Office of Juvenile 

Justice and Delinquency Prevention, or OJJDP, and as administrator I also serve as Vice 

Chair of the Coordinating Council. Welcome, everyone, to this afternoon's meeting. After 

a fantastic informative visit to Houston in September, the council is back in Washington 

DC today at the Justice Department. Our September meeting was really special. Not only 

was it the first time that the council has convened outside the DC metro area ever, our 

colleagues in Harris County also invited us to visit an extraordinary multidisciplinary site 

called The Opportunity Center. 

Harris County's Juvenile Probation Department has taken what once was a secure 

detention facility for youth and transformed it into a hub of support services for youth. A 

myriad of community partnerships makes the opportunity center possible. Caring, 

committed organizations are collaborating to give young people access to a wide range 

of programs and services from GED and ESL classes to healthcare services and 

treatment for substance abuse. Youth can access employment opportunities and training 

programs, counseling and case management, clothing, assistance with housing, and 

even more. 

Harris County's Youth Justice Community Reinvestment Fund is taking the savings from 

facility closures and decarceration and reinvesting them into community-based 

organizations that work with youth, helping to reduce disparities in the juvenile justice 

system. No single agency or organization can meet all of the needs of every young 

person. That's clear to those of us who work with young people. Each youth is unique 

with needs that cut across numerous disciplines. We cannot act alone. We must partner 

strategically. It's hard work. 

Partnerships can be complicated. They take commitment and in some cases, 

compromise. Organizations in Harris County have committed to that work and their young 

people and the wider community are benefiting. Harris County is a great example of the 

success that a community can have when we get creative and collaborate, when we pull 

our collective expertise and resources to serve youth. I was really thrilled to have a chance 

to visit. I look forward to similar opportunities in the future when we can take the council 

on the road to visit other communities and learn from their experiences. 

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I'm excited to build our knowledge base. It will inform council deliberations and shape our 

efforts to increase the range of multidisciplinary services available to the young people 

that we serve. Access to a wide range of programs and services benefits all youth. 

Whether they are system-involved, at risk for involvement, or currently in a good place. 

When youths receive the support they need and can take advantage of real opportunities 

for growth, they are less likely to engage in delinquent behaviors, and their chances for 

success increase. Access to needed services helps families stay together, and it helps 

keep communities safe. 

In a few moments, we're going to hear from two panels of experts with a wealth of 

experience in the juvenile justice system. One of our panelists is a parent with lived 

system experience. One leads a state agency, another serves as a youth member on a 

state advisory group. Others are professionals who work in law enforcement and the 

juvenile courts. They are all experts in youth justice. We have asked them to respond to 

two questions. One, how can the council member agencies, that is the federal agencies 

represented on this council, enhance the coordination of services for youth to help ensure 

young people never enter the juvenile justice system? 

Two, how can the member agencies coordinate to increase youth access to opportunities 

and services and decrease barriers so that justice-involved youth have the best chance 

of success in their home communities? I'm eager to hear our panelists' responses and 

our conversations will continue beyond this meeting. We're also eager to hear from you, 

the members of our audience who are here with us in person today, and all of you who 

have joined us virtually. 

Because the council could only invite a limited number of people today as panelists, we 

are posing the same questions to young people, family members, practitioners, and other 

experts in the youth justice field. If you are attending today's meeting, whether virtually or 

here in this room with us, I encourage you to tell us what you think. We've created a 

unique page on the council's website where you can submit comments and other 

feedback. For those of you in the room, you will find the URL for that page printed on the 

bottom of your agenda and also on the screen behind me. There you go. Okay. 

Those who are listening in virtually will see the URL on your screens as well. The statute 

that created the Coordinating Council requires the council to prepare a report to the 

President and Congress that makes recommendations to improve coordinated services 

across the federal government in ways that achieve the greatest benefit for youth, their 

families, and communities across the US. The feedback we hear today and the responses 

we receive online will inform the report. 

The council's report will also reflect insights we heard last fall when a panel of justiceinvolved young people joined us and described, very frankly, the difficulties they faced in 

the system and the barriers they encountered and overcame as they reentered the 

community and rebuilt their lives. Their wisdom continues to inform us. You may have 

heard me say this before, when young people take the time to share their insights, we 

must listen. 

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Before I close, I'd like to thank the members of the council's two subcommittees, policy 

and programs, and practice. These subcommittees meet monthly in between our full 

council meetings, further evidence of their commitment to our young people. I'm very 

grateful for the time and effort they spend examining strategies and opportunities the 

council can leverage as we strive to create just policies and build communities our 

children deserve. Subcommittee work is essential to realizing the council's objectives. 

Thank you. 

Finally, you will remember that we voted at the April council meeting in favor of cosponsoring OJJDP's National Conference to be held in November 2024 here in 

Washington DC. Planning has begun. We'll hear some details this afternoon when the 

council subcommittees give their reports. I hope you are as excited about it as I am about 

this upcoming event and the council's role in it. Thank you again for everything you do to 

give our young people the best chance for a healthy, fulfilling future. We will introduce 

members of the council, and I'll start with my left on my left. 

[00:40:54] Sonali Nijhawan: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sonali 

Nijhawan. I serve as the director for AmeriCorps. I'm here on behalf of our CEO Michael 

Smith who was unable to join, but I'm glad to be here on behalf of the agency. For those 

who don't know, AmeriCorps is the federal agency for service and volunteerism. We have 

nearly 200,000 members and volunteers serving every year in close to 40,000 locations 

across the country. We are so happy to have embarked on a partnership with the team 

at OJJDP around creating carve-outs and opportunities for second-chance youth for them 

to serve and for them to be supported by our program. Thanks for having me. 

[00:41:42] Mark Patterson: Hello, everyone. My name is Mark Patterson. I'm the 

administrator of the Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center in the state of Hawaii. 

I'm here and I'm cold and saying hi to everyone. Aloha. 

[00:41:58] Renee Rodriguez-Betancourt: Good afternoon. I am Renee RodriguezBetancourt. I am a district judge in the state of Texas for the 449th District Court. I preside 

over all juvenile cases in my county, a growing county of almost a million population. I'm 

excited to be here, but more importantly, I'm excited to hear from our panelists and just 

get more information from their views. 

[00:42:24] Michael Mendoza: Good afternoon, everyone. Michael Mendoza, practitioner 

member of the council, also a director of advocacy with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition 

based in Los Angeles, California. 

[00:42:37] Maria Lana Queen: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Maria Lana Queen. I'm 

representing the Department of Housing and Urban Development, specifically in the 

Office of Public and Indian Housing. We work with 3,200 public housing authorities across 

the country. A third of that population are vulnerable children and young people. I serve 

as the HUD Youth Liaison for federal interagency work as well as nonprofits. We work 

with all of your agencies, and I look forward to, or I should say HUD, further coordinating 

how we can serve young people who live in low-income housing. 

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[00:43:13] Rebecca Zornick: Hello. I'm Becky Zornick. I represent the Substance Abuse 

Mental Health Services Administration, part of the Department of Health and Human 

Services. I'm the Deputy Director for our National Mental Health and Substance Use 

Policy Laboratory. 

[00:43:28] Shaina Vanek: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Shaina Vanek. I'm a Senior 

Policy Analyst with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we serve consumer 

rights and love being able to work on justice-involved individuals and their families' issues 

and really further young people as consumers. Thank you. 

[00:43:48] Ana Hageage: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Ana Hageage. I'm 

the Chief of Staff for the Employment and Training Administration. I'm here in place of our 

Acting Assistant Secretary, Brent Parton, with my wonderful colleague Jennifer Kim. We 

oversee the nation's public workforce system. Part of that is our Office of Workforce 

Investment which supports a lot of our reentry grants as well as the Office of Job Corps, 

the Office of Registered Apprenticeship, and then Unemployment Insurance, and the 

Foreign Labor Certification. 

[00:44:21] Adam Tierney: Hello. My name is Adam Tierney. I'm the representative for 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I'm looking forward to the panel members today. 

[00:44:32] Liz Simons: I am Liz Simons, Chair of the Board of the Heising-Simons 

Foundation, which addresses, among other things, human rights, by which we mean 

people who are in the justice system as well as immigrants and others. I'm also Chair of 

the Board of the Marshall Project, which is a journalism outlet that looks at the criminal 

justice system and all the people associated with it. I volunteer for a magazine bind for 

incarcerated youth in juvenile halls in Santa Clara County. I'll just mention that our CEO 

and president of the Heising-Simons Foundation is here with us as a guest, Sushma 

Raman. 

[00:45:13] Deborah Smith: Hi. Good afternoon. I'm Deborah Smith. I'm representing the 

US Department of Education. I work in the Office of Elementary and Secondary 

Education, and I manage a group of programs that serve high-need youth populations, 

one of which is our Title I, Part D program that serves justice-involved youth. These are 

programs that go to every state in the country. They're small programs, but they serve 

students all over the country. Thanks. 

[00:45:47] Lourdes Rosado: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lourdes Rosado. 

I'm President and General Counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, which was started as the 

Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in the '70s. We are a civil rights and 

social justice organization, and one of our pillars of work is criminal legal system reforms, 

and I get to serve as a practitioner member of the Coordinating Council. I'm very happy 

to be here. 

[00:46:15] Amiyah Davis: Good evening, everyone. I am Amiyah Davis. I'm the project 

coordinator at the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University, as well 

as a practitioner member for the council. 

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[00:46:26] Nataki MacMurray: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Dr. Nataki 

MacMurray. I'm with the Office of National Drug Control Policy. We are a small agency 

out of the White House, the executive office of the president, responsible for coordinating 

substance use policy across the federal government. I work in the area of public health, 

particularly on prevention. That's all things young people, especially. Glad to be here. 

[00:46:52] Miranda Lynch-Smith: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Miranda Lynch-Smith. 

I'm representing the US Department of Health and Human Services. I am the Deputy 

Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy in our office of the Assistant Secretary for 

Planning and Evaluation. We serve as a think tank of sorts for the secretary and for the 

department. My office in particular covers issues from early childhood up to positive youth 

development. Talk about the intersections between human services and poverty and 

economic mobility. Very happy to be here today. 

[00:47:28] Julie Herr: Good afternoon. My name is Julie Herr, and I'm the Designated 

Federal Official for the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 

Prevention. 

[00:47:37] Liz Ryan: Great. Thank you so much to all the council members for being 

here. We are going to start with our first panel. I'd like to invite our first panel to please 

come up and join us at the table. While they are getting assembled there, I'm just going 

to let you know who is on this panel. We have Vincent Schiraldi, who is the Secretary of 

the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. We have Susan Badeau, family 

engagement and trauma expert, author, and parent. Angela Chang, Director Youth 

Defense Division, Hamilton County Public Defender. 

Robert Rodemeyer, Assistant State Attorney, Cook County, and Kyla Woods, CEO Klover 

Strategies. I apologize if I have mispronounced anyone's name. What we're going to do 

for the panel is each panelist is going to present their statement. After each panelist 

speaks, we will go in order that I just read. Then after everyone on the panel has spoken, 

we will take questions from the council members. We will start with Vincent Schiraldi. 

[00:48:58] Vincent Schiraldi: The one that looks like a face. Hi, everybody. Thanks for 

this opportunity to dialogue about youth justice and the role that the federal government 

can play. I've been in this field for 43 years now, and I've seen these cycles of concern 

about youth crime ebb and flow during which young people can often be vilified by officials 

of all stripes. Certain elements of today's dialogue feel uncomfortably familiar, so I hope 

to talk to you about some facts about youth crime, how we can promote what's effective 

and just, rather than just allowing political momentum to reverse decades of progress. 

In 1996, Princeton's John Dilulio famously wrote that there was "a rising tide of juvenile 

super predators who were fatherless, godless, and without conscience about to engulf 

us." Going on to claim, "that all it's left of the Black community in some pockets of urban 

America is deviant, delinquent and criminal adults surrounded by severely abused and 

neglected children, virtually all of whom were born out of wedlock." Far from being vilified 

for this, he was later appointed to be the first head of the nation's faith-based initiatives 

office. 

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Although juvenile crime began falling precipitously in the early 1990, the damage from 

this kind of hyperbole had been done. During the '90s almost every state passed 

legislation pushing more kids into adult and juvenile prisons. By '99, there were 109,000 

kids in youth prisons, another 10,000 kids slept in an adult prison or jail every night. This 

punitive turn was obviously not felt equally. Youth of color, particularly black youth, were 

disproportionately locked up even when they committed similar crimes and had similar 

prior records. 

Since the super predator idea has been debunked, localities have tried to right the ship. 

Between 2000 and 2020, youth incarceration declined by an amazing 77%, and almost 

every single state had double-digit reductions in the number of kids they were locking up, 

red and blue, intentionally shifting away from punishment towards rehabilitation. The new 

research on brain development of young people, the advent of promising programs, and 

increasingly sophisticated advocacy often by young people themselves, all share the 

credit for this change. 

Most importantly, this did not come at the expense of public safety. With youth crime 

declining by 80% between '96 and 2020, and the youth share of overall arrests dropping 

below 6%. Below 6% of all arrests are juveniles. These substantial declines in youth crime 

alongside similarly substantial declines in youth incarceration give the lie to the notion 

that less incarceration equals more crime. Now I feel the super predator misconceptions 

rearing its ugly head. Although kids account for a small percentage of crime over the last 

two years, juvenile crime has become a major focus in the media and among 

policymakers, with complaints about the system's leniency dominating the dialogue. 

While some categories of youth crime have increased, these increases follow a period of 

historic lows. While we should take any increase in crime seriously, if we're not careful, 

we're going to repeat the mistakes of the past. We're already seeing this happening a bit 

according to analysis by the Casey Foundation. Detention populations have risen by more 

than half since 2020, that is, and twice as many black youth as white youth were in 

detention on a given day prior to the pandemic. There are now almost three times as 

many black youth as white youth in detention. 

The federal government obviously plays a limited role but an important role in juvenile 

justice. You can use your resources and bully pulpit to send a message that we should 

follow evidence and best practices and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. You can 

convene stakeholders and appoint task forces or commissions to promote national 

conversations about what's really happening with youth crime and what can be done 

about it, like was done with Bob Liston and Joe Torre around child abuse issues. 

You can also put forth a national roadmap to achieve better outcomes in juvenile justice, 

advancing reforms that research suggests can actually make a positive impact on youth 

crime. Everything else I'm going to say pales in comparison to what I just said. This is the 

most important thing for you guys to do, because I spend between 400,000 and a million 

dollars per bed per year in one of my facilities. You can't give me that much money. If you 

guys all sat down and wrote checks today, you can't compete with that. I don't need your 

million-dollar grant. I'm spending that on one girl today in detention. 

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If you can get us to do that stupid stuff less frequently, and do the good stuff that all the 

evidence from all your departments tell us is the right way to handle kids when they run 

afoul of the law, that's going to reap a lot more benefits at the local level than any amount 

of money you could put out. Plus, you can't put out that much money because of the way 

things are. Your agencies can also help assure that policies don't create unnecessary 

barriers. I'll say, two, because I know I don't have a lot of time. DOE, you've done in the 

past and I think you could help again, remind us not to push kids out of school and into 

detention cells. 

There was a lot of good work under the Obama administration around that, reminding 

people that social-emotional learning, restorative practices. Do that instead of kicking kids 

out, because I'm seeing that turn. I'm seeing kids getting kicked out quite a bit from 

schools. People just forgot there was a pandemic. The absentee rates in schools double 

what they were pre-pandemic. Kids who end up in my system are the ones that were just 

hanging on by a thread and that thread's cut. 

Then DOL, you guys could help us out. You push a lot of kids out of programs. The way 

your programs are structured, they're rightly based on how well they do in terms of getting 

somebody a job. My kids are always a lousy bet because my kids are a pain in the ass 

who don't show up to work on time or show up stoned. There's a lot of disincentives to 

take them into the regular programs. If you could work to give people waivers or allow 

them to-- somebody told me it's called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act 

waivers, to help lift up kids into the delinquency system in a way that reverses some of 

those disincentives. That would be super helpful. 

If you work together with advocates, young people, state and local stakeholders, the 

Coordinating Council can promote an effective system rooted in research and best 

practices to help young people find their way out of the system and towards a productive 

future. Right now, we're continuing to hurt a lot of kids, and you guys could really help us 

out of that hole. Thank you. 

[00:56:19] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much, Mr. Schiraldi. Next, we'll hear from Ms. Susan 

Badeau. 

[00:56:27] Ms. Susan: Thank you. Good afternoon, Administrator Ryan, council 

members, panelists, and guests. I am Sue Badeau, and I'm here today to talk to you from 

the perspective and on behalf of the parents and family members of all those young 

people that Vinny was just talking about. Every one of those stories like mine is unique. 

Every one of our families has strengths, has pride but also has trauma and loss. In 

between all of that, there are some common themes from which I'll draw the 

recommendations that I'll share with you today. 

I first became a parent to justice-involved youth 40-plus years ago. Since that time, I've 

raised 75 young people through a combination of birth, foster care, and adoption. We now 

have many grandchildren as well. I've also worked professionally in juvenile justice, foster 

care, child welfare, mental health, and special education. Through those roles, I had the 

opportunity to interview and spend time with family members and parents in all 50 states, 

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thousands and thousands of families, including as recently as last month. It is all those 

voices I'm going to try to bring to you in the next couple of minutes. 

As a way of framing what I'd like to give you for three concrete recommendations that I'll 

leave you with, I just want to share a story. Now, I know I shared a couple in my written 

testimony that I hope you'll read, but this is a fresh one just from this week. You see, this 

week, our youngest son was arrested and locked up, something that has happened nearly 

every year at this time of year. Now in his early 30s, he was just 14 years old when he 

first became involved with the youth justice system. 

He was four years old when our family adopted him. He was a delightful little boy who 

loved doing puzzles and riding his bike and playing little league baseball, and generally 

pestering all his older siblings. He also came to us with many medical, mental health, and 

educational special needs, and a boatload of trauma that came partly from multiple foster 

care moves already in his first four years. From the trauma of being the one who found 

his older brother who died at Christmas time, is it any wonder this is a hard time of year 

for him? 

Now, before he entered the juvenile justice system, therefore, he had been failed by the 

child welfare and the special ed and the mental health, and multiple other systems across 

three states. He now had loving parents and a good home but it wasn't enough. We were 

actually ferocious advocates for him in all of those systems. Yet later when we had access 

to his file, we saw that we had been described alternatively as uninterested, disinterested, 

uncaring, or too demanding, too involved, overbearing, hostile, all kinds of words like that. 

His arrest just this week brings home the urgency of everything I wanted to share with 

you today. I'm going to share, as I said, three actionable recommendations. First, I would 

say do everything Vinny said. Underline all of that. Then three recommendations that I 

believe are really in the purview of this council, and that's why I've limited myself to those 

three recommendations. I believe if you do these three things, you can literally not only 

save lives but save families like ours and like our sons from going through this kind of 

trauma again and again year after year. 

First I'd like to just highlight a few of the themes that our families share in common that 

lead to these recommendations. One, families love their kids and they want them to be 

safe and thriving. Two, families who have needs in one area generally have needs in 

more than one area, and so, three, when they seek help, they often either get misdirected, 

or slipped through the cracks, because they're not quite asking at the right door in the 

right way. If they can get the right help at the right time, justice system involvement can 

be decreased. Four, children thrive best in the context of their families. Supporting 

families is supporting children. Five, both children and families thrive best in the context 

of their own communities, including their culture, their communities that they know, their 

language. 

Based on those themes, my three recommendations are, one, establish a national family 

information and peer navigation clearing house with state affiliates. Families desperately 

desire and need accessible real-time trauma, responsive information developed by 

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families for families. There are examples of this, I've given some in my written testimony, 

but they need to be sustainable, they need to be funded, they need to be supported. 

Secondly, institutionalized roles for families at leadership levels at the highest level. 

I'm delighted that this council today has a couple of members here with lived experience 

in the justice system, but it's not yet institutionalized in the requirements of who sits on 

this council. Actually, a dozen years ago, I sat at this very table, in this very room, and 

asked that two of the nine practitioner members of this council could be designated for 

youth and family members, so that you would always have the voice of youth and families 

at this leadership level. That has yet to pass. 

It needs to happen, and it needs to happen now, because until those voices are 

institutionalized at this level, it won't happen at the state and county and community level. 

Then thirdly, I would really like to encourage you all to work better together to address 

both individual and collective trauma. By collective trauma, I also include that, which is 

created by historic racism, which leads to many of the disproportionate outcomes that 

Vinny mentioned a moment ago. 

Nearly every single young person who enters the justice system or stands skirts around 

the edges of it is at risk for that kind of involvement, and their family members have 

experienced trauma. This council is uniquely situated to ensure that every single young 

person and their family members have access to research-based, trauma-responsive 

supports and services that are grounded in, and listening to, and informed by the voices 

and leadership of young people and their families with lived experience. Those are my 

three recommendations. I thank you for your time. 

[01:02:42] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Ms. Fido. I want to commend both you and Mr. Schiraldi. 

I think both of you said you'd been in the field for more than 40 years, and I appreciate 

the decades of dedication to young people from both of you. Thank you. I'd like to next 

introduce Angela Chang, who serves as the Director of the Youth Defense Division for 

Hamilton County Public Defender's Office in Cincinnati, and she has extensive expertise 

as a trainer on youth defense. Ms. Chang? 

[01:03:13] Ms. Chang: Thank you, Administrator Ryan and council for having me here. I 

am the Director of a Youth Defense Office that offers holistic defense, thanks in part to 

an OJJDP grant as the grantee. We're grateful to be here and to represent the voices of 

the youth that we serve. In preparation for this meeting, my staff was tasked with asking 

their youth clients what one thing they think could have made a difference in preventing 

them from having contact with the juvenile court. 

As you might expect, there are a variety of answers, but a clear theme emerged. Our kids, 

predominantly Black youth that we serve, are constantly surveilled and disciplined for 

normative, youthful behaviors in the spaces that they're supposed to be able to feel safe. 

One young person said, "We get in trouble for everything everywhere we go." The system 

response is to continue to react and restrict instead of providing supportive resources. 

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For example, in the Winton Terrace neighborhood in Hamilton County, Ohio, where youth 

struggled to survive much less thrive, the basketball hoops were taken down recently in 

courts bulldozed, because there were too many fights. In Downtown Cincinnati, we built 

two beautiful parks with playgrounds that were built in just this past decade, but anytime 

you go there, it's heavily policed. Another young person told me, "We need places to get 

jobs, play sports, and do activities to stay out of trouble." 

It's supposed to be the hallmark of childhood to experiment, explore, play, test 

boundaries, and make mistakes. However, the reality is that this idea of childhood is not 

available to Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth in our country. They're not safe, and they 

cannot drive. It's also a fundamental constitutional right for people to be secure in their 

persons houses, papers, effects, and against unreasonable searches and seizures. Yet, 

youth of color in our most system-impacted communities are, in fact, less secure because 

they're policed wherever they go: in school, in their neighborhoods, in their homes, in 

public spaces. 

My ask to this council is to help reimagine safety. If we reimagine safety in communities, 

to be places where children can access food, healthcare interventions, recreation, 

education, and employment, instead of places of surveillance, we can make a much larger 

impact on the prevention of delinquency. We must devote resources to redeveloping the 

infrastructure of the communities to achieve this goal of true safety. We must commit to 

creating, maintaining, and protecting these communities for children. 

I appreciate your attention to my written comments, but to summarize my 

recommendations for the council, I would ask that you consider the following five 

recommendations when developing policies and practices for prevention efforts. Number 

one, consult directly with the community and the individuals that interventions 

programming and services are meant to serve. Our kids are the experts in their own lives, 

and they need to have a say in what will make them safe and successful. 

Number two, make interventions, programming and services accessible directly in the 

neighborhoods where youth live. Youth should be able to access quality education, 

recreation, treatment, and job opportunities, where they live. Number three, promote 

coordination and collaboration between youth-serving government agencies, non-profit 

organizations and care providers, to reduce the need for youth and families to navigate 

multiple systems and agencies. 

Number four, prioritize creating safe spaces for youth to play, pursue creative interest, 

obtain employment, and build positive relationships. Number five, provide more funding 

to strengthen youth defense. Holistic, specialized youth defenders are critical to protecting 

youth and their rights, and the only advocates for their expressed interests. Of course, 

what [laughs] the panelists ahead of me said already in much better words. Thank you so 

much for listening and having me here. 

[01:07:19] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Ms. Chang. Next, we will hear from Robert Rodemeyer, 

who is the Assistant State Attorney for Cook County, Illinois, and has extensive 

experience in juvenile justice and child welfare assistance. He also serves as the 

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gubernatorial-appointed member of the Illinois task force on racial disproportionality in 

child welfare. Mr. Rodemeyer? 

[01:07:45] Robert Rodemeyer: Thank you so much for this opportunity to be here today. 

17 years ago, I started working with young people in the child welfare system, and it was 

just a job out of law school. It has become a life's work, one I'm tremendously proud of. 

To think that I have an opportunity here to speak with you all today about that work is truly 

an honor. Thank you for giving me the time to share my experience. As professionals 

working in the juvenile justice system, we're standing on the bank of a stream. We're 

tasked with assisting young people as they're polled by a heavy current, further down and 

away. 

From our position on the bank unassisted, our probability of success is, unfortunately, 

very low. Once in the stream, the current has the advantage. We must therefore position 

ourselves and change our directional focus to keeping youth out of the stream altogether. 

By promoting positive social and emotional development, secure attachments, as well as 

strong pro-social identities, and a sense of belongings to their communities, we keep our 

young people safe within those communities and on the shore. 

Positive social and emotional development begins at birth. This is the most crucial time. 

ACE studies, adverse childhood experience, as well as childhood development research, 

has shown the positive effects of nurturing secure attachments for children in the first 

three years of their life. It also has established the effect and impact of adverse childhood 

experiences in this time period as well. I've laid out a lot of neuroscience research. In my 

testimonial, I would encourage you to look at it, but it cannot be overstated. 

The adverse impact of those childhood experiences, and the lack of secure social 

attachments on emotional and social functioning later in life. Early childhood education 

centers, and early childhood education in and of itself, provide positive supports, secure 

attachments, as well as the ability to work with families.The child welfare sphere. We have 

seen the benefits of nurturing parenting programs on parental education in terms of 

helping parents understand the developmental stages and milestones of infants through 

toddlers. Child parent psychotherapy has been critical in the state of Illinois in terms of 

working with our young parents and understanding their actions and picking up on their 

child's cue. 

The second most important phase of child development is adolescents. We must meet 

the children before they get to adolescence. This is when they're being targeted by 

negative peer influence. We must be well ingrained and entrenched before those negative 

influences, and it's much earlier than we ever thought. It's not 6th Grade, it's not 5th 

Grade. We need to be there at elementary. Neural pruning occurs during this time period. 

Adaptive behaviors are further cemented and formed. We need to make sure that those 

behaviors are not maladaptive. 

Those behaviors came from someplace. They served a purpose and a function for 

survival. Those same behaviors that were critical of the juvenile justice sphere served a 

purpose for those young people. It was how they got by. We must teach them before 

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they're cemented, and we know this through scientific research alternatives to processing 

those emotions, and that work begins well before adolescence when they're formalized 

within the brain. Adolescence is also the phase where we're finding out who we are. 

We're forming our attachments and our identity. We need to provide youth an identity 

within the community that rings authentic, that is representative of them, and kids know 

the difference. They need people to look up to, people from the community, people that 

they identify with, more positive social attachments. As they come into adolescence, 

financial opportunities must be there for young people to deter the influence of the street 

economy. It has to be part of any programming. 

Most importantly, the street doesn't sleep and neither must our centers and those 

community centers. We need to have open access to youth at all times. We need to be 

as omnipresent and we need to work ourselves into the home. The beautiful thing about 

all of this preventative programming is that we need it at the stage where we're having 

our initial contact, standing back on the bank of our stream by investing in these programs 

and early childhood and in adolescence, we've made our youth stronger swimmers. 

We have attachments in the stream with them that we can work on. We've seen great 

success with programs like SAS for our hospitalized youth. SAS work with youth after 

discharge from psychiatric facilities, they go in the home and they work with families to 

connect to resources. Foster care uses placement stabilization services to deter 

disruptions to foster placement and minimize costs. Similar resources are allocated for 

first contact with law enforcement, rather than saying, “Okay, go report to court the next 

day," or "Okay, a probation officer will be in touch with you with diversion.” No, we go in 

the home and work with families to fashion an in-home response, to provide support to 

parents as they learn to work with the young person following this contact. 

We also need to bring true accountability, a courthouse, a courtroom downtown with 

individuals who look like me saying, “Hey, we really disapprove of your actions,” does 

nothing to foster a sense of accountability. It only further pushes historical trauma and 

racism on our young people. There's no chance of them thinking that we are invested in 

caring. We should invest in community courts, peer courts, the same community centers 

and early childhood centers that we have, building in juvenile justice proceedings for nonserious non-violent offenses, housing them there so people can hear from their neighbor 

the impact of those actions, so people can hear from the community what's going on and 

the community can fashion a response. 

One of the issues we're seeing time and time again are long waiting lists for clinical 

services as well as high turnover of practitioners. No one is going to feel like we are 

invested in them or their success when they're on a waiting list. No one is going to form 

a real true clinical attachment capable of formulating change when there's frequent and 

high turnover. We need to incentivize good practitioners, reflective of the community or 

at the very least, cognizant of historical change and historical prejudice. 

Lastly, in talking about effectuating positive change, and there's a fair amount here in my 

testimonial of what we are doing in Cook County, we need to look at the numbers. The 

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numbers that I cite come from the Chapin Hall Study out of the University of Chicago 

looking at Cook County of the real issue of dual system youth and the failures that we 

have as a juvenile justice system of dual system youth. When we're talking about our 

most at-risk kids, the kids at the highest risk of violent offenses, of incarceration, and 

mistreatment within the juvenile justice system, those are dual-system youth across the 

board. 

What we have here are two systems not working together, not information sharing, when 

in reality, it's seen as one system by the family, and that is the way it should be. To the 

extent we can have one courtroom, one kid, everyone within the same room sharing what 

we know, sharing the successes as well as the struggles. I've laid out some of the things 

that we've set forth to try to accomplish that. I think we can start to see better results for 

those children. Thank you very much. 

[01:16:27] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Mr. Rodemeyer. Next we'll hear from Kyla Woods, who 

serves as the CEO of the consulting firm Klover Strategies, which specializes in providing 

strategic capacity-building, support to marginalized communities. Ms. Woods also serves 

as the youth chair of Washington DC's Juvenile Justice Advisory Group. Ms. Woods. 

[01:16:50] Kyla Woods: Thank you, Administrator Ryan, and council. It's wonderful to be 

here. I want to second so many things that my fellow panelists said, but the point that 

Robert made about the intersectional interaction that our young people have with 

systems, that's why coordination is so important and so I'm just going to jump into my 

testimony. It is a pleasure to be here with you all. I often advocate for a multifaceted 

approach to respond to the needs of youth and young adults, and I'm encouraged by the 

commitment council member agencies have made to system-wide collaboration. 

My name is Kyla Woods. I'm a youth justice advocate with lived experience, a direct 

service provider, a policy expert, a member of the District's Juvenile Justice Advisory 

Group, and CEO of Klover Strategies. For the past five years, I have partnered with youthserving agencies to ensure the integration of youth expertise to improve policy and 

program implementation. Since 2019, I have witnessed the value of creating space for 

young people to be directly involved in driving systems that heavily influence their lives. 

I've had the privilege of mobilizing youth-centered initiatives within the Interagency 

Council on Homelessness, the Department of Behavioral Health, and the Juvenile Justice 

Advisory Group in the District of Columbia. In 2016, I sought out multiple youth service 

agencies after a trafficking sting operation resulted in my trafficker being arrested while I 

was charged with prostitution to ensure my testimony. I was left with a record, homeless, 

and suffering with depression at the age of 18. It was advocates and social service 

coordination that allowed me to foster the confidence to apply to the University of District 

of Columbia in 2017 and graduate magna cum laude in 2021 with my bachelor's in political 

science housing. 

[applause] 

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Housing, legal, and healthcare resources provided me a path towards higher education 

and economic stability. I'm confident that without receiving support to meet my basic 

needs, I would have not been prepared to advocate for myself or imagine life beyond 

crisis. While it's often said that many metropolitan areas are resource-rich, it is also true 

that many are coordination-poor. Unfortunately, this leads to bureaucratic and often 

duplicative procedures that can be discouraging and confusing. 

In 2019, I had the privilege of participating in a two-year HUD-funded fellowship designed 

to improve youth homeless services in the District of Columbia. During my tenure, my 

colleagues and I conducted countless listening sessions and participated in biweekly 

youth advisory board meetings. Our peers often responded that a combination of mental 

health, housing, and employment support would lead to the prevention of housing 

insecurity and legal system involvement. 

In my experience, social service and justice agencies that partner strategically with youth 

and families benefit from consistent quality improvement by identifying pain points, and 

need of greater coordination. However, most of the youth justice sectors remain siloed. I 

have found myself advocating for similar interventions to prevent exploitation, housing 

instability, and incarceration in sectors that are not incentivized to collaborate on the 

ground. 

As an advocate, I commend the investments made in recent years towards system 

collaboration but I've yet to see this reality fully realized in my direct service experience. 

When advocating for service coordination for my clients, I've noticed that efforts can be 

often stunted or slowed due to limited incentives to partner. Service providers that are 

overwhelmed and under-resourced struggle to extend themselves not from apathy, but 

from a lack of organizational capacity. 

In my experience, transparency among youth-serving agencies also remains a barrier, 

but yet, this is imperative for system improvement. Multidisciplinary prevention incentives 

must prioritize the implementation of oversight to match policy and resource 

advancements that have been made. By partnering and investing in the expertise of youth 

families and frontline staff, youth agencies can obtain a more accurate picture of the 

achievements made and lessons learned. 

When considering long-term successes of justice-involved youth, we must not only 

respond to vulnerabilities that they face, but we must identify and build the capacity of 

protective factors that exist in their communities. Ultimately, we cannot rely on systems 

to provide the care, love, and consistent connection that young adults deserve. 

Investment in community-based organizations that build resilience and social connection 

for youth and families is key to achieving a proactive posture. 

In many areas, there are mutual aid wellness, mentoring, and violence disruption 

organizers that meet the needs of their communities but lack the funding or coordination 

support to make impact at scale. I believe council member agencies can greatly benefit 

from calling on non-punitive community-based orgs, justice-impacted youth, and families 

14 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to reimagine prevention. Interventions will vary. However, collaboration with youth, 

families, and communities will have a long-lasting impact on both the youth-serving 

agencies and the individuals who have leveraged their systems knowledge to build 

resilience. Thank you. 

[01:23:00] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Ms. Woods, and thank you all for your very thoughtful 

and comprehensive set of recommendations that you've provided to the council. For all 

the council members, you have copies in your packet of their lengthier statements. We're 

going to take questions now and we're going to start with Mr. Schiraldi because he has to 

leave a little bit early. If any members of the council have questions for Mr. Schiraldi, we'll 

start with that. I'm just looking around. Do you want to just raise your hand? Lourdes and 

then Liz. 

[01:23:36] Lourdes: Hi, Mr. Schiraldi. [unintelligible 01:23:37] Nice to see you again. 

Could you repeat again, you said there was one thing that you wanted us to take and I 

really want to understand what it is that you think is the priority. 

[01:23:50] Mr. Schiraldi: It's just that the more than any kind of thing each of your 

individual organizations, departments could do is to uplift the issue that youth crime is not 

as bad as what you see on the evening news, and that there are ways that this panel is 

laid out to address it that don't involve us rehearsing the way we are. That could be a 

commission that-- I remember when Mr. [unintelligible 01:24:21] and Joe Torrey were 

doing that commission, they went to numerous different places. Every place they went, 

there was a communication strategy so people heard all about it. 

At the end, the recommendations had a big buzz. Right now, literally, I'm talking to elected 

officials who think that because Maryland before I got there passed a law that prohibits 

prosecuting kids 12 and under for nonviolent offenses. Because of that law, shootings are 

up. Parenthetically, shootings are down. Even before you get to that, the fact that not 

prosecuting a 12-year-old for stealing stuff doesn't relate to shootings, shootings actually 

are down and kids make up 1 of the 13 shootings in Maryland. 

There's so much bad information out there, that they ask for a little extra money from 

America while I'm sitting here. Yes, by the way, if you want to give me extra money, I'm 

going to take your money but you need to help us with that message. I doubt you could 

do anything this year but if you started planning something for the year after the election, 

when people can actually hear again, I think that might be a pretty cool thing to do. 

[01:25:39] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Yes, Liz Simons. 

[01:25:43] Liz Simons: It's really a question for all of you. So many of you have talked 

about what we need to do to address the needs of children before they get into the 

system. Susan called it out explicitly, we need to support families and help to support their 

children and do it in a more literally upstream way, as Robert talked about. I'm curious if 

you could give us recommendations. This is really for any of you who want to comment 

on this. How can we think about that strategically as a council? How do we think about 

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doing this work outside of the system so that children aren't caught up inadvertently in 

families? What are some strategies we should think about? 

[01:26:30] Mr. Schiraldi: I got a midstream thing I'm working on right now. It's totally 

upstream. I've got 1500 kids on my caseload, either on probation, or aftercare. I've been 

here 10 months in Maryland, and 42 of them have been shot or shot somebody, which is 

an incredible number of shootings. Think about high school, where on 42 different 

occasions, somebody was shot. I hooked up with the National Institute of Criminal Justice 

Reform, David Muhammad's group, Annie E. Casey Foundation, we took a hard analysis 

of three and a half years of data on kids involved in gun violence on our caseloads, the 

2% versus the 98% that weren't involved, to see what factors teased out. 

Then we used that as a screening criteria and then we got in a room with a bunch of 

formerly incarcerated people in police and said, "All right, just get the haystack to be 

smaller, but where are the needles?" That's our first 35 kids. Every one of those kids is 

now called the Thrive Academy. Every one of those kids, we sit down with a life coach 

that's formerly incarcerated, have a respectful conversation with them about the 

ramifications of gun violence, both in terms of harming themselves, harming others, going 

to prison, all that stuff, but respectful is important, but then offer what we call a suitcase 

for success. 

Every one of them has a life coach, that life coach and them and my case managers 

create a life plan. We have money to send them to college if they want to go to college. 

We have money to stipend work. If they want to become a mechanic, we'll pay Joe a 

mechanic to employ them. We have money to move them and their families if they're 

really in danger. There's quite a bit of that. We take them on camping trips, and to 

museums. It's a no-bullshit bunch of stuff. It's not just a little MST and go forth and send 

no more. Not that MST. Nothing wrong with MST. 

For these kids, they're so deep in. They've all been traumatized so we have traumainformed therapy actually. Not just trauma-informed, trauma therapy. That is not upstream 

but they're not locked up. These are young people. If they're volunteering. In our case, 

they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and we pay them to do it. We give them 

$150 the day they join, a bunch of milestones that they agree to, every time they hit one 

of those, another $100, another $150 is negotiated. The kids negotiate well. 

To me, I think that that could have multiplier effects because it's reasonable to assume 

that my kids are disproportionately driving fear of guns, which is why a whole bunch of 

people-- like everybody's carrying in these neighborhoods right now because they think 

everybody else is carrying. I'm doing my part to tamp it down. I think that'll affect my kids, 

but it'll also affect all our friends and neighbors. We have not yet decided to try to get their 

guns away from them, which has been an absolutely fascinating conversation with the 

cops. 

The credible messengers, all of whom were saying, if you try to take their guns away from 

them, they're leaving this program because they don't want to be the only one bringing a 

fist to a gunfight. They think everybody else has got a gun. As crazy as it is, I got these 

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kids that are the most at-risk.We're not yet having a conversation with them that says, 

"Can you give us your gun?" I think we will get there eventually, but we have to have a 

real serious relationship before we can get to that, I think. 

[01:30:13] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much, Mr. Schiraldi. I know you have to leave in a 

few minutes. We really appreciate your taking the time to be with us here today. Thank 

you. Okay. 

[laughter] 

Okay, thank you. I'd like to open it up, yes, to other questions. Maria. 

[01:30:32] Maria: Yes. Thank you all for sharing your testimonies and experiences. I have 

a question for Kyla. Thank you so much again for sharing your personal story. I too am 

an alumni of the University of the District of Columbia. Go Firebird. I'm 30 years before 

you, but it's all good. [laughs] I wanted to ask you, you spoke about your HUD experience 

and the program with the homeless-- I think it was the Homeless shelter program that we 

ran for about two years. We are constantly looking for more opportunities to engage young 

people with lived experiences such as yours. I wanted to ask you, might you have a vision 

or recommendation to the council for a more coordinated approach? Perhaps we can 

work in a more comprehensive manner to meet the needs of the same young people that 

we're serving. I'd love to hear your vision. 

[01:31:26] Kyla: This is such a good question. The fellowship was a wonderful 

opportunity, not just because it was a job, but my system's knowledge expanded 

exponentially from being an advisory board member. I was on a youth advisory board, 

had some context of what it looked like to think about systems improvement, leveraging 

lived experience. I can say it's very difficult to fully grasp the ecosystem and know where 

you fit in, know where your talents are if you're not fully steeped into it. 

It first started out as a part-time fellowship. We did really good the first year and were able 

to sell them upping our hours. It was almost full-time. It was amazing because we were 

in coordination with-- I was at the Interagency Council on Homelessness. My colleague 

was at the Department of Human Services, and all of us are the same age, and the other 

person was at the community partnership. 

Our approach, we were coordinating, it was still focused on housing, but we were still 

coordinating in that we all were at different agencies, but then our cohort was packed in 

together. I can imagine something happening, all these member agencies and, say, 

there's a fellowship. The fellows, they're developing that coordinated plan from all of the 

insight that they're gaining from respective spaces. I think that would be awesome. 

[01:32:55] Liz Ryan: Great. Thank you. Ms. Fido, go ahead. 

[01:33:01] Ms. Fido: Could I have an opportunity to respond to Liz's question? I know 

she put it to everyone and really goes along with what Kyla was just saying. I think those 

internships and fellowships are really valuable. I actually participated in a few myself 

sometime ago. [laughs] I love the example that Vinny gave. A little further upstream 

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comes in that idea of the information clearinghouse that I was talking about. I just want to 

put a little more meat on those bones because family after family after family that I've ever 

gotten to know in this, who has ended up with a child in the justice system, including ours 

years before that, not days, not weeks, years before that has sought help for something 

related to their child. 

It might be a medical need, it might be a mental health need, it might be a school, which 

very often it's a school need. It might be housing. There's just such a range. Every single 

family that I've ever gotten to know in this work has sought help, and not even knowing 

what help to ask for. First, they've sought information in order to get help and time after 

time after time again, they either get the door closed on them because of the waiting list 

that Robert talked about, or they get the door closed on them because, oh, we don't do 

that. 

They don't even really know what they're asking for. Of course, any particular program 

doesn't always do that [laughs] because they don't know what that is, that they're even 

asking for. It's when they are able to get steered and met with peers, with other family 

members, with other young people, with other peers who have walked this journey, but 

maybe a month or two or a year or two before them, then they can, even in their 

inarticulate way of saying, "I'm not really sure what I need or I'm asking for, but I need 

something." 

By the way, when I say inarticulate, that doesn't have anything to do with socioeconomic 

class or education. It means if your kid is in crisis, you don't know what to ask for no 

matter where you are on any of those other spectrums. Having the opportunity to meet 

with, talk to, get information from, get your hand held by someone who's walked that path 

and then can help you get the information and therefore the support you need before 10 

doors have been slammed in your face, before you've had been on waiting lists forever 

and ever and ever, and then before behaviors and circumstances escalate to where they 

then become justice system involved. 

It sounds like one of the simplest of the recommendations, but it's profound. I've seen it 

happen. I've seen it work. I did mention in my written testimony, the family to family health 

information centers that are funded under the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, I was 

part of the original team of people many years ago that got that movement off the ground 

and got that funded. 

We've seen the tremendous difference that has made in the lives of families raising 

children with special healthcare needs and so I know that it can make a difference here. 

There's pockets where it's happening, but as I said before, it's not really sustained. That's 

a really upstream thing. The beauty of it is it's upstream, it's preventative, but it also serves 

people that are already in the system. It already serves people that are out and prevents 

them from going back in. It's upstream, but it's the whole stream at the same time. 

[01:36:28] Ms. Chang: Yes. That's so good. I'd love to just jump on that. Because when 

I was reading both Susan and Kyla's testimony, I was so excited because I think this is 

where my community is hoping to go. I guess to add to that vision of that clearing house 

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of information and youth with lived experiences or people with lived experiences to be the 

experts and the navigators. Then to add on top of that, in your neighborhood, you 

shouldn't have to bus across town and miss work and pay for parking and do all these 

things to get to a job program. 

If you get kicked out of school, then the services they have at school, you're not going to 

get because you're not in school. If all of these things are in the neighborhoods that need 

it the most and are guided by the people who are the experts in that neighborhood and 

with the trusted community organizations that are already there and we really loud the 

funding and the resources to build up those trusted community members there, I think we 

could really impact all the entire stream, upstream and downstream. 

[01:37:35] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Look like Ms. Woods [unintelligible 01:37:37] 

[01:37:37] Kyla: Yes. I'll be brief. I just wanted to tease out a little bit about the protective 

factors that we're talking about. Just with a quick example, part of my job is mentoring, 

and so some of my mentees are 15, 16 or so. The difference between my ability to get 

whether it's just extracurriculars for them whether they're system involved or not, has 

made me so aware of the needs that the gaps that exist within prevention. 

Because if I can get a boxing class for someone who currently has a charge to work on 

anger management and tie it to some, instead of us all knowing, yes, exercising, boxing, 

especially, all of these things are ways to not only like get rid of anger, but learn to be in 

community, learn to build resilience. I don't feel like it should be so much that we have to 

sell for that to be either free or low-cost. Because every single one of my clients, I can't 

go to their parents and be like, "Hey, this is $100 a week, and can we put them in?" It's 

almost like just knowing there's a cost to it a lot of times for them, they don't even want 

me to look further into it. I think we can do so much more on the front end, even if we're 

starting with fun. 

[01:38:56] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Lourdes, it looked like you had a question then. I saw a 

couple other hands up. Miranda's will be next. Yes. 

[01:39:02] Lourdes: Thank you. Actually, it was to pick up on something that Ms. Chang 

was talking about is services being spread all over the place. It reminded me when we 

were in Harris County in Houston. In September, we spoke a lot about lack of 

transportation being a huge barrier for kids and their families who were on probation to 

cause people to violate terms of probation because we simply could not get there. I 

remember when I was doing defense work decades ago and taking kids in my car to get 

them to programs because I didn't want them to flunk out and getting yelled at for that, 

that I wasn't supposed to. It's a real issue that I think we really need to be paying a lot of 

attention to. Thank you for raising it. 

[01:39:53] Ms. Chang: Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, transportation's a big 

one, and bus cards aren't going to cut it. If you think about the number of hours a kid 

spends on a bus, busing across to different places and just how many things could go 

wrong in that period of time and then we're on that, and then suddenly everybody's mad 

19 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

at them for not making it to group. My motivation for taking an hour-and-a-half bus ride to 

something that's mandated for me to do is probably pretty low. I think even just being 

there and not making them come to you is a big deal. 

[01:40:30] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Miranda. 

[01:40:34] Miranda: I really appreciate your testimonies and I love this conversation that 

we've been having about prevention and working upstream and making sure that 

community-based systems are there to support families so that they don't have to get to 

these deep-end systems of child welfare and juvenile justice. At the same time, I also 

heard some of you speak to some of the real collaborative challenges between juvenile 

justice and child welfare, juvenile justice, and behavioral health, I think. I just wanted to 

tease that out a little bit to see if you could highlight perhaps some opportunities for us to 

think about in terms of how we can coordinate to close some of those collaboration gaps 

so that when folks are system-involved, we're best meeting their needs and getting them 

back to their communities. 

[01:41:27] Robert: In Chicago, we have a dually involved group that functions out of our 

juvenile justice center which houses both the child protection as well as the juvenile justice 

system. This group meets once a month to discuss challenges in serving the population, 

to address redundancies, as well as information gaps, and to break down silos. It's proved 

pretty effective. One of the things that I think could truly assist that Chapin Hall pointed 

out in the study are trauma checkpoints. 

We get very concerned about confidentiality and what system can share with what, 

particularly in child welfare systems because there is sensitive information in that that we 

don't want made widespread. I know from speaking with a lot of foster parents in the 

juvenile justice sphere, they don't have information about the youth in their home. They 

don't know what the needs are when they're coming to live with them. They don't know 

how to meet those needs. 

I had an opportunity to speak with Angela coming in in terms of trauma treatment centers 

for youth and care. The number of criminal charges that come out of those trauma 

treatment centers is pretty disheartening. We're funding and providing these trauma 

treatment centers based on behaviors, behavioral disorders. Then when these youth go 

to these facilities, and they're exhibiting the type of behaviors which led to them being 

there, and then they're directing them at staff, and then staff turns around and presses 

charges on them, it's wild. 

I think trauma checkpoints throughout the juvenile justice system where we can capitalize 

on those clinical staffing involving the youth, I think information fair sharing in the form of 

dossiers that transfer over when a youth becomes juvenile justice-involved from the child 

protection system so that the juvenile justice system is operating with the same 

information that's been gathered. What treatments at work? Who's the positive support? 

Real simple things. 

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We saw in Chicago, Illinois, when a youth was picked up at 12, 13 years of age, even if 

they were awarded the state and living within a foster home, they would give the police 

department mom's number. Mom would come in and sign them out, and then the youth 

would fail to appear for their court date. Their caseworker was never notified, and then a 

warrant would be issued for their arrest. Eliminating simple communication gaps like that 

downstream, I think those are big ways that we can assist and address some of those 

issues. 

[01:44:16] Liz Ryan: Thank you. It looked like Dr. McMurray has--

[01:44:19] Dr. McMurray: Yes, good afternoon. Thank you so much for the information 

that you've shared, both the written and wearable testimony, and your responses to the 

question that we've asked around the table. It's interesting. I'm sitting here wearing 

multiple hats. The Office of National Drug Control Policy being at the federal level 

responsible for coordinating a range of services, also as a former practitioner working 

with young people, and more recently as a licensed foster parent. Reflecting almost 

everything that you've said was the experience that I had with at least one in a very short 

period of time. It makes me think about all the different hats. 

The question I wanted to bring to you all is around, someone mentioned that these are 

dual system youth. It's triple, multiple-system youth, really. One of the challenges I think 

of working together in collaboration is not just the idea that everyone functions in a siloed 

approach because I think more people recognize the need to collaborate and integrate 

services, et cetera, but how do we do that in a way that helps us to show that it's better 

to work together without losing our dollars, that we can show multiple outcomes from 

programs that are more integrated in a way that allows us to continue our funding to 

programs that may be supporting children in foster care, children in juvenile justice 

systems, children in behavioral health systems, et cetera. 

We want to be able to comprehensively serve them, but we don't often integrate services 

because we think that we may be losing our funding if what we're doing is being seen as 

duplicative. Your experience of how you may be mentored systems to change in a way 

that they can provide the services in an integrated way, demonstrate the multiple 

outcomes in multiple systems so that there's better justification for continuing to work in 

an integrated way rather than the continued silos. 

[01:46:23] Kyla: I'll be brief because I feel like others may have more of a layered 

response. One way I've seen is just by funding that coordination, like having it tied to their 

dollars. It's not that you would rather use the carrot than the stick, but sometimes having 

it be a goal, whether it's a coordinated plan that must be delivered that speaks specifically 

to. It doesn't have to be that they're-- We don't want to duplicate services, but each agency 

would be responsible for what is their response within this larger plan, I think, could be a 

way to get folks to the table. 

[01:46:58] Ms. Fido: Just to what everyone has said so far, programs and systems don't 

really heal trauma and don't solve these problems, people do, and primarily relationships 

do. The brain science research that Robert was referencing and all the research back set 

21 
 

 

 

 

 

 

up. It really does come to supporting the people that do the work and there is something 

to be said for historic knowledge of a case as well. Back in the '90s, I was actually the 

director of a federally funded program called The Longest Waiting Children in Foster 

Care. 

Anyway, the thing that we found was that what caused a lot of children to just continue to 

cycle and stay in foster care, one of the most striking findings was absent of anything else 

related to the demographics of the child, their abilities, their disabilities, charges against 

them, duly adjudicated, all of that stuff. The single most important factor that determined 

if they got what they needed and got out, or if they still lingered longer in the system was 

if they had the same case worker over time or how many case workers they had. 

Combining that with the family experience, this is a direct quote from a family member 

that I once interviewed who said, "Because my child has all these different systems in 

their life, we have case managers in our life from all these systems. I don't feel like I'm a 

parent anymore," she said, "I feel like I'm a traffic cop of case managers." If we can bring 

it to the point where we support our workforce so that they stay and they have the training 

and equipping that they need so that you really do get those long-lasting people with the 

historic knowledge, but more importantly connection, and relationship with the child and 

the family, but also with the community so they know about those boxing classes or 

whatever, other things. 

The street knowledge; they know what's going on if they're there long enough to know 

that. Secondly, a single point of contact case manager for the family so that if you're 

involved with seven systems, you don't have seven case managers, you have one. That 

one person is then responsible for helping coordinate the others, not the parent who's 

already overwhelmed. 

[01:49:09] Robert: I think taking the prosecutor and the judge and the legal system on 

the juvenile justice thing and requiring for them. Our office used to require a rotation within 

the child protection system before going into juvenile justice, which would enable them to 

develop that sense of empathy and to understand social welfare issues. I think baking 

that into judicial ED-con so that our judges are having that kind of understanding I think 

that's incredibly empathy-building to understand what truly is decision-making. If we're 

talking about all of this being rehabilitative and redirective for our young people, I think a 

critical understanding of to what extent are actual decisions being made versus social 

programming, maladaptive behaviors forged through years of neglect or abuse within 

systems, I think helping people better understand that requiring trauma-responsive 

training for judicial officers who are hearing these kinds of cases, requiring some 

familiarity of that and training within the Child Protection sphere because a lot of times 

our judges in the juvenile justice arena, they're criminally mindset. They're approaching it 

in these proceedings the same way they would approach an adult criminal proceeding 

and I think requiring them to be more versed within the child welfare sphere because 

ultimately, that is what these proceedings should be more akin to, I think can produce 

better results and treatment within the system. 

[01:50:44] Judge Betancourt: Question? 

22 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[01:50:46] Liz Ryan: Thank you. We're a little bit over, we have time for one quick 

question. Judge Betancourt. 

[01:50:50] Judge Betancourt: [inaudible 01:50:50] for status. A dual status court in my 

jurisdiction along with the Child Welfare judge has done amazing things, however, I'm 

more about prevention. Obviously, if I can go hear adult cases, I would, and not have a 

juvenile justice system, that is what a fairy tale would like to be. 

My question to you is, you spoke in the information you provided us about early childhood. 

Again, that's more preventative, preventing our children from going into dual systems. 

What is your recommendation or what is your position in regards to working with certain 

agencies to implement that, especially early childhood type of services to teach parents 

to show them the effects of what happens when a child does endure some type of 

traumatic situation and how it can lead them into, unfortunately, going into these dual 

systems? 

I know you've talked about certain programs, but anything else that you could give us 

guidance on or give us recommendations as to working with other federal agencies on 

this? 

[01:52:00] Robert: I really benefited from the Erikson Institute which is located in 

Chicago, Illinois. It has an executive fellowship program that brings in judges, 

prosecutors, judicial officers, and lawmakers as part of an executive fellowship annually 

to talk about the benefits of early childhood education as well as the importance of the 

zero to three time period. We launched in Cook County and are currently launching 

statewide Zero to Three courthouse rooms in the Child Welfare sphere recognizing the 

specialized nature of Zero to Three youth and the chance for intervention in that time 

period and we're seeing a lot of success with those. 

There's a federal organization called zerotothree.org. I would encourage you to look into 

it. They've done a lot of research on these types of court programs as well as working 

with families in implementing them because it's a great opportunity to work with families 

early and immediately before they're getting too deep into the Child Protection sphere. 

They're usually opt-in-type programs where families like, "Yes, we're out over our skis. 

Anything you can help us with here, we would greatly appreciate those interventions." 

They provide the clinical resources that I mentioned there. They do a lot of programming 

and education around Zero to Three. I would say look to them. They're great resources 

that have served us in our local area. 

[01:53:40] Liz Ryan:: Thank you so much. I know we're a little bit over, but this was just 

such an engaging panel discussion. Please join me in thanking our panelists for today. 

[applause] 

[01:53:58] Liz Ryan:: We will take a short break. We will reconvene at 2:30 PM and that 

will give time for the next panel to come up by 2:30 PM. Thank you. 

[pause 01:54:08] [silence] 

23 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[02:04:19] Liz Ryan: Okay, thank you for joining us after the break. We've had a couple 

members of the council join us in the interim, so I'd like to just give them the opportunity 

to introduce themselves before we start the second panel. If you want to introduce 

yourself, 

[02:04:39] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm [unintelligible 02:04:39] and I work for the Department of 

Defense in Military Community and Family Policy, Child Youth Advocacy. It's great to be 

here. Thank you. 

[02:04:50] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Then--

[background conversation] 

[02:05:00] Bonita Williams: Ah, thank you. My name is Bonita Williams. I'm with the 

United States Department of Agriculture, the National Institute of Food and Nutrition, and 

the Division of Youth and 4-H. 

[02:05:19] Liz Ryan: Great. Thank you. All right. We will hear from Steve Anjewierden, 

Chief of Police Services, Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake, retired, Laura 

Broyles, Director Office of Standards for Prevention and System Improvement, Oklahoma 

Office of Juvenile Affairs, Ernestine Stewart Gray, retired juvenile court judge, and Kari 

Rumbaugh, Deputy Administrator Juvenile Probation Services Division, Administrative 

Office of the Courts and Probation. We will start with Mr. Anjewierden. 

[02:05:57] Steve Anjewierden: Anjewierden. Well, done. 

[02:05:59] Liz Ryan: Did I pronounce it right? [laughs] 

[02:06:01] Steve: Well, we got there. Thank you for that courtesy. Since I'm already going 

to go over time, I'm just going to waste a few seconds, one, by saying thanks to the 

previous panel who set that standard so high that I feel a little uncomfortable with my 

comments. Two, the emphasis on the retired Chief of Police Services. I did have an 

opportunity to work for 25 years as a sworn police officer, and I retired approximately 

seven years ago but still felt that passion to serve our youth. I've been involved in direct 

services with the iCHAMPS Crime Prevention Center and also as a consultant for CCAS 

and been able to work with communities around the country, a few of which I'll reference 

in my comments, which look very different from where I started today. 

With emphasis on preventing youth from entering the juvenile justice system, I'm going to 

state the obvious, the point of contact with youth and police is a critical decision point, 

and we need to make sure that our officers understand that there are a lot of options and 

there's a lot of discretion at that point to make the best decisions for the best outcomes 

for our young people. Police officers encounter youth every day and have a significant 

impact on a young person's life. These encounters can be positive or negative because 

positive police encounters are possible. These outcomes are highly influenced by the 

officer's actions. Officers often encounter youth in non-criminal situations, and these 

situations need to be maximized to create positive law enforcement and youth relations. 

24 
 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm also an advocate of ensuring that our officers have opportunities to see young people 

in positive circumstances, so they don't treat young people as a problem, because if 

you're only called to see the negative parts of our society, that's how you'll start to view 

it. We need to have opportunities for those positive encounters. Unfortunately, officers 

also encounter youth in situations where there are violations of the law. In many of these 

cases, the nature of the offense does not allow for discretionary decision-making. In other 

cases, there is a wide range of options that the officers can take, and in all of these 

situations, the officers need to know that they should be thoughtful about their actions 

and understand that the outcome we're looking for with young people is behavior change 

and not punishment-focused. 

Today I'm going to talk about three specific areas where I think we can do better in law 

enforcement. As a council, I think y'all can help out by providing advice and incentives 

and continuing to support facilitations of building coalitions where law enforcement can 

be present and have alternatives to the traditional juvenile justice system where it's 

appropriate. Three areas are in training, partnerships, and internal policies. 

Training for law enforcement can significantly reduce the number of arrests of youth, 

thereby keeping young people out of the system. For example, training on the teen brain 

can help officers understand youth development, that they're not just little adults and they 

will therefore be less likely to criminalize normal adolescent behavior. Training on 

restorative practices can provide law enforcement with a better understanding of how and 

why diversion programs produce better long-term outcomes for youth, the community, 

and for law enforcement. 

In a recent training with detectives in the Minneapolis Police Department, we included 

several adolescent development and restorative practices. What made this training so 

special is that we invited community service providers to attend the training and describe 

the work that they're doing with youth. This was the first time these service providers and 

these detectives engaged in such training and it created an atmosphere of striving for the 

common goal of helping our young people succeed. 

Second is partnerships. Law enforcement also says we can't arrest our way out of the 

problem, but we need partners to have those alternatives. Law enforcement should 

partner with several institutions and community-based organizations to increase the 

number of options to address areas of youth need, while also increasing protective 

factors. For example, in Kalispell, Montana the Kalispell Police Department partners with 

the local school district, the juvenile courts, and the Center for Restorative Youth Justice, 

which as the name says, is a diversion program based on restorative justice. Through this 

partnership, a large majority of school-based defenses are referred to CRYJ for 

programming as opposed to citations and arrest, thereby keeping young people out of the 

juvenile justice system. 

The third area are policies. With my readers, I can't even see how many minutes I have 

left, so I got one page to go. Here we go. Internal policies, law enforcement agencies can 

implement internal policies that would improve the quality of professionalism among 

officers, improve the relationship with the community, and uphold the safety and well25 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

being of both community and law enforcement officers. Through these policies, we can 

generate a clear understanding for the appropriate use of law enforcement discretion to 

divert youth from arrest and establish minimum specialty training requirements for officers 

working with youth because specialized knowledge is important when we're interacting 

with young people. 

For example, in school-based law enforcement programs, I think it's critical for there to 

be a memorandum of understanding between the law enforcement agencies and the 

partnering school districts. This will provide officers with a clear understanding of their 

role in the school environment. To be clear, that role is not to be the hammer. There are 

occasionally appropriate law enforcement interactions to be taken, but they're not the 

disciplinarian and they're not the punisher. A more appropriate role is one which is 

focused on relationship building, mentoring, and being a positive role model. 

These MOUs should also establish training requirements for school resource officers, 

which are meant to create a safe and healthy learning environment for all the students. 

These policies can go above what state statutes require to actually raise that floor to 

provide further protections for the rights of students when they're interacting with police 

officers in schools. An example is requiring that a parent or guardian be present if a 

student is being questioned for a criminal violation. Some states require that, but not all. 

That's an example of a way we can look after our kiddos. 

Those are just three areas where we can make a difference in the juvenile justice system. 

Please understand that based on the restrictions of time, it's just a quick overview. The 

implementation, of course, is certainly nuanced, but I just want to express that they can 

be done at a state level, the county level, or a local level, and that this council can help 

by setting policy and best practice guidelines based on research to help provide direction 

across the country. Another way is supporting communities with resources. I thought I 

heard somebody was giving away $1 million earlier, but maybe I misunderstood that. 

After creating a coalition with community and local resources and law enforcement and 

engaging in a data-driven analysis on what some solutions might be for that particular 

community through asset mapping or other gap analysis, maybe we can incentivize and 

fund some of these coalitions by providing the resources that are specific to that local 

level after some thoughtful approach that I just want to end with saying should absolutely 

have community input. So there's that community conversation about the standards 

where the level of diversion might be or where the resources should be. All of those 

entities come together in a comprehensive model which includes law enforcement to get 

better results for our youngsters. Thank you. 

[02:15:11] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Mr. Anjewierden. Next, we'll hear from Laura Broyles, 

who serves as the director of the Office of Standards for Prevention and System 

Improvement at the Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs, where she oversees OJJDP's 

Title II, Juvenile Justice Formula Grants Program. Ms. Broyles. 

[02:15:32] Laura Broyles: Good afternoon. Thank you, Administrator Ryan and council 

members. It is an honor, really, I take it very seriously that I'm here today and want to 

26 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

share with you some of my recommendations. I've had the opportunity to serve for the 

Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs. It's a hope-centered trauma-informed juvenile justice 

agency. We are a centralized state agency that serves all of our kids in 77 counties across 

the state. 

My first recommendation would be that the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 

Act core requirements be embedded across all systems and in every part of the system. 

Law enforcement should understand it. Child Welfare should understand it. The 

Department of Mental Health should understand it. Too many times we see young people 

who are acting out due to mental health symptoms or when they're responding to their 

triggers to trauma. Instead of responding to that trauma appropriately, we find that they 

are either incarcerated in a detention setting or in some other type of setting that is just 

compounding their trauma. I would recommend that we cross-train them across the 

board. 

An additional recommendation that I would make would be, underneath my work that I 

now do along with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act Title II work is we 

started a program, a pilot project called The Hub and we have workforce Development 

specialists under it. We found that a lot of our youth who are reentering the community or 

who-- one of my pet peeves is I don't want you to penetrate deeper into the system to 

access resources, because that is not cost-effective and it's not fair to our young people. 

What we do is we make sure that young people, when they need a resource, think of 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. When they have a basic need, we want to make sure that 

need is met right at the very basic place. 

What we find sometimes, for example, in our partnership with the Department of Labor in 

the Workforce Investment Act, it says that if youth are out of school, that you get the 

smaller part of that budget, only 25%. Almost all of the kids that come to us are in school 

because one of the first things our probation staff do is they put them back into school, 

whether they're on a deferred agreement, whether they're on a probation plan, that's the 

first thing we're going to do. As soon as they are put back in school, they're no longer 

qualified for that higher level of funding. The Department of Labor funds shrink and that 

budget isn't as large. I would recommend that all juvenile justice system youth be 

automatically eligible for that Workforce Investment Act funding. 

I would also recommend that we take a look at all of these policies to see whether our 

juvenile justice system involves youth, or those youth are at the highest risk, whether it's 

status offense behavior, whether it's mental health behavior. Are they getting access to 

those resources that they need to not penetrate into the juvenile justice system? 

Another thing that we often see, especially for our reentry youth or duly adjudicated youth, 

is that they sometimes move around a lot. Those vital documents, it is not uncommon for 

them to have multiple moves, and those vital documents are hard to track. Sometimes 

there's lifetime limits on things like social security cards, and if they've had multiple 

caseworkers, then that could be very difficult and that can sometimes fall reentry, and 

that causes hardship to those young people. I would recommend that we do listening 

sessions actually with those young people and those caseworkers and find out what we 

27 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

need to do to make that easier for them to access. I would think that we could do an 

interstate process that allows us to help those young people that are at that greatest risk. 

We heard a lot in our first panel, we talked about young people and their continuum of 

care across all agencies. I would recommend that we think of our young people and our 

families as a single continuum of care. In every agency, whether it's the Department of 

Human Services or it's the Office of Juvenile Affairs in my state, they get into our care 

and we think of them in our continuum of care within our agency. We need to start thinking 

of our families and our youth as one single life continuum. There isn't any reason why we 

can't come up with a way to have a resource allocation plan, whether it's an interstate 

process where those kids are moving, those families are moving through that single 

continuum. Every time they come to us, whether it's in a court setting, whether it's to a 

provider, they're having to rehash that trauma every single time. That isn't fair. 

There's a lot of intelligent people in this room, a lot of people with amazing resources and 

experience. I bet if we counted up how much each one of us have in years of experience, 

we'd be amazed. I think we can come up with a way that across all of us, that there is a 

way to figure out where we could put our families and our young people on a single life 

continuum instead of having them do individual continuums of care with every agency 

that they're in. I would recommend that we find a way to do that. 

Lastly, one of the things that we have found to be the most effective in our agency is for 

our young people and our families to be what guides policy and practice at every level in 

our agency. Youth Voice is a part of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, 

and so is strengthening families. Pre-pandemic, it was much easier to do that. I'm going 

to tell you a story very briefly about some of the work that we did with our young people, 

just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. 

We had young people go with us to shelter. They were our youth emerging leaders. They 

went to a facility where they got to look at a shelter, and then they actually did listening 

sessions with the young people. As adults who are allies, we sit back, we let them run the 

meetings, they hear from the young people how their care is, and then they get 

recommendations. In a group home, a young person was told that they said, "It's really 

hard for me to go to sleep at night because I have a history of trauma, and there's a male 

that turns off the lights at night." We had a young person on our youth emerging leaders 

review those recommendations. He actually came from our secure care. He looked at 

me, and he had written down, he said, "This young lady said this was difficult for her to 

sleep." We need to change this policy. 

To watch one of our formerly incarcerated youth recognize that a young lady in a group 

home was triggered by her trauma and then make a recommendation for a policy change 

that then went to a residential care director was powerful for that young person. That was 

a change because then those young people met with the director of that program. We 

should let our families and our young people guide policy and practice with providers. In 

closing, I just want to thank you for this opportunity to speak to you. Thank you. 

28 
 

 

 

 

 

 

[02:22:36] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Ms. Boyles. Next, we'll hear from the Honorable 

Ernestine Stewart Gray, who is a retired juvenile court judge among many other 

leadership positions, including as past president of the National Council of Juvenile and 

Family Court Judges. Judge Gray served for many years in the Orleans Parish Juvenile 

Court in Louisiana. Judge Gray. 

[02:22:57] Ernestine Stewart Gray: Thank you, and good afternoon. I'm going to add 

the 40 years to the first panel. It's an honor and a privilege to be here with you this 

afternoon. I cannot overstress the critical importance of the messages that we send to 

our children and the youth in the juvenile justice system. Their very future is at stake, and 

we must act now to ensure that they receive the support and guidance they need to 

succeed. 

We must adapt and evolve. We cannot continue to rely on outdated and ineffective 

practices that perpetuate racial inequalities, stigmatize youth, and fail to address the root 

causes of delinquency. We must implement and continue to develop evidence-based 

practices and protocols that promote anti-racism, anti-classism, and any other anti-ism 

out there. We must promote programs that rely on research and findings and build 

consensus around probation reform. 

We must eradicate the at-risk label and create opportunities for meaningful participation 

in reform efforts by those with lived experience. The at-risk label does what we say we 

should not do, stigmatize. It has negative impacts because of its deficit-based approach. 

It creates expectations of failure. The at-risk label is inconsistent with the principles of 

positive youth development on which we must focus as we listen to and are guided by the 

research on brain development. 

Changing the wording I know is not going to change anything, but it is a start. It is one 

that requires us to think differently and act differently. We must empower the youth we 

are dealing with to actively shape their future, become the support systems that catapult 

them to healthy, productive, and happy lives, not the change that binds them and shackles 

them. We must redirect expenditures toward effective solutions such as communitybased programs and services that address the underlying issues that led to youth 

delinquent behavior. We heard a lot about that during the first panel. 

I wanted to say you would be surprised that as a judge, I agreed with a lot of what was 

said in that first panel because I think they were absolutely correct. I would endorse most, 

if not all, of the recommendations that they made. We must invest in communities, which 

means, for example, when we support community diversion efforts, we do not just fund 

evidence-based programs because that precludes grassroots and bottom-up 

approaches. We must fund bottom-up grassroots approaches alongside the best 

evidence. 

We must be very intentional and inclusive with community and families. They are the real 

experts. You heard that from the first panel. I was really impressed by the thoughts, 

comments, and recommendations by the young people who participated in the October 

26th, 2022 meeting of the council. I hope that the council has followed up on the 

29 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

commitment that was made to the young people and figured out ways to keep them 

involved, perhaps by creating a team of youth advisors for courts and grantors. Impacted 

youth are the best experts. 

We must stop relying on detention when interventions, methods and treatments seem to 

fail. Detention is harmful to adolescents and generally fails to address the underlying 

issues that led to their delinquent behavior and it doesn't make communities safer. You 

heard that as well earlier. Instead, we should focus on community-based programs that 

focus on rehabilitation, education, and community service, which have shown promise in 

reducing recidivism and supporting positive youth development. 

We should, together, figure out how to reduce the front door and how to close the schoolto-prison pipeline. Finally, we must really collaborate to ensure a no-wrong-door policy 

where children, youth, and families receive the services that they need the first time they 

encounter a problem and they seek support, rather than being shuffled from one agency 

to another with the expectation that the court is going to solve the problem. 

Between the time I received the invitation to participate today and today, I had an 

opportunity to talk to several of my colleagues and ask them what I might say to you 

today. Surprisingly, to a judge, they each identified this as the most critical issue. They 

said, "Tell them to get rid of siloed funding which allows agencies to pass children from 

one agency to another because of funding concerns. We cannot afford to let our youth 

fall through the cracks because of a broken system or systems." 

In conclusion, the future of our youth is at stake, and we must act now to transform the 

juvenile justice system in America into one that is more just, effective, and equitable. We 

must send positive messages to children and youth in the juvenile justice system, 

messages of hope and promise, not negativity and condemnation. Let us be good 

stewards of our children, our most precious possession. As Neil Postman wrote, "The 

living messages that we send to a time that we will never see." Thank you. 

[02:28:37] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Judge Gray. Next, we will hear from Kari Rumbaugh, 

who is the deputy administrator of the Juvenile Probation Services Division in Lincoln, 

Nebraska. As part of her work in Lancaster County, she oversaw the development of the 

Rural Improvement for Schooling and Employment RISE program, which is a nationally 

recognized partnership with AmeriCorps. Ms. Rumbaugh. 

[02:29:02] Kari Rumbaugh: Thank you so much. Good afternoon, Administrator Ryan 

and committee members. I am honored to receive this distinguished opportunity and 

invitation to come speak to you today as an expert panelist. Nebraska juvenile probation 

has strived over the last 10 years to implement juvenile justice reform which we believe 

has resulted in significant accomplishments. I come before you today with over 20 years 

of probation experience and a drive to positively impact youth and families in the justice 

system. 

In 2013, Nebraska launched juvenile justice reform, really moving legislation to the 

rehabilitative model, as the previous panel discussed. We had passage of legislation due 

30 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to two essential items. One of them was to reduce the number of youth who are being 

placed outside of their home and the second was to reduce the number of youth becoming 

wards of the state in Nebraska for the sole purpose of receiving funding for services. This 

essential responsibility was placed within the Administrative Office of the Courts and 

Probation, specifically juvenile probation due to marked leadership, and a previously very 

successful pilot. 

Additionally, similar to many other states in 2006, Nebraska had previously prioritized the 

implementation of evidence-based practices as Judge Gray just discussed. We really 

focused and believed that research and that the principles of evidence-based practices 

directly impact recidivism reduction. I'm honored to talk to you about the probation 

perspective today and give you some information about the experiences that we've had 

in Nebraska. Many of these are detailed in my testimony, so I know today I am here to 

give you some quick information about them. 

I wanted to focus on the six priorities that I had identified. The first, and you heard this in 

other panels, is that we want to spend time truly supporting local communities and what 

they identify as ways to prevent youth from entering or to help youth discharged from the 

juvenile justice system. I believe that it is essential that to help them be successful, we 

need to provide them with technical assistance, training, and support, especially 

supporting them and assisting them in determining ways to be able to do that successfully. 

In Nebraska, with our significant legislation, one of the items lifted up was a statutory 

process, as well as funding for local communities across Nebraska, in our 93 counties. 

There was coordination with a local university to help assist them and support them, as 

well as statewide assistance to help support and assist them. Probation has been a 

partner in this along the way. I think it's really essential that as we see what happens in 

the deep end, that we're there to partner to help prevent youth from entering the system. 

The second priority is that I believe it is essential to cultivate a highly skilled and trained 

probation officer. We have developed and prioritized for many years in Nebraska, a 

comprehensive eight-week new probation officer curriculum as well as what we call our 

Advanced Coaching for Excellence, or our ACE training, which is a booster or taking the 

skills for probation officers to the next level. We focus on skill building, teaching them how 

to help skill-build youth and families, as well as build relationships. 

The third item I would recommend, as the judge also spoke about, was implementation 

of evidence-based programs and services. I speak about several of them that we've 

utilized in Nebraska from a recommendation matrix that our staff used to make targeted 

recommendations to the court when they're completing a predisposition investigation to 

our home-based initiative where we brought in evidence-based in-home services, as well 

as a tangible incentive program, and what we call our reentry unit. Because in Nebraska 

probation, we work from initial entry through reentry, if a young person is placed at our 

highest-level facility. I appreciate bringing up our RISE program or our AmeriCorps 

program that was implemented in 2007 and continues today. We also work and have 

worked very diligently on dual system youth projects, which I know they talked about as 

well. 

31 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fourth area is promoting ways for us to be able to lift up youth individual strengths. 

One way we've done that in Nebraska is we have a youth artwork contest and the artwork 

is used in publications and brought to conferences across the state to recognize youth for 

their strengths and youth in the justice system. The fifth is to promote the engagement 

and the partnership with local and national experts. We have brought in different 

evaluation opportunities. The most recent we call our juvenile justice system 

enhancement in Nebraska, where we brought in the probation system review and multiple 

different national experts to help us implement juvenile justice and enhance what we 

already have been doing for the last 10 years. 

I want to stress implementation as a key component of that because we have learned a 

lot about successful implementation and I do believe that is key to successful 

implementation within any department, especially probation. Then finally really lifting up 

the ability to provide clear data and data-informed reporting. We started an annual report 

in Nebraska not mandated by the legislature, that we chose to do to lift up essential 

juvenile justice elements to help educate stakeholders. I think those kinds of data 

reporting and those elements are essential. In our annual reports, we talk about these 

evidence-based programs and these items that I mentioned to you. 

Those would be the six items that I wanted to talk about that I would encourage 

consideration, especially when it comes to the focus of probation and the work of 

probation. I want to thank you again, for this opportunity for allowing Nebraska to be at 

the table and me to be able to share our experiences with you and I hope they inform the 

council. Thank you. 

[02:35:43] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much, Ms. Rumbaugh, and I want to also say to this 

panel how much we appreciate the time and effort that you took to put together such 

thoughtful testimony and concrete recommendations. I think we have about 15 minutes 

for questions. I'm going to look to this side because I wasn't looking at you all as much 

when we were doing the questions and I want to just see if anyone on this side has any 

questions they want to ask the panel. All right. Anyone over here, Lourdes. Yes. Go 

ahead. 

[02:36:16] Lourdes: Hi, thank you, all. This actually is directed to Judge Gray and Ms. 

Rumbaugh. [chuckles] I knew that too. I knew I was going to ask you a question. It goes 

to what I call the yin yang or the tension between, on the one hand, making sure that 

we're using evidence-based practices to serve youth and their families, but on the other 

hand, not supporting innovation that rises up from the community. I say this as someone 

who I've been practicing for about 30, 35 years. When I got into the juvenile justice world, 

we were subjecting kids to things that were later proved to be harmful to them and 

increase recidivism. 

I remember specifically military-style boot camps, and were scared straight. It was only 

to-- we were forcing folks to collect the data that we saw that, "Oh, my goodness, it 

increases recidivism, it increases all sorts of negative things." For me, it was important to 

know that we were requiring evaluation and really tracking what they were doing. On the 

flip side, I realized that so much, and we saw this in Harris County when we were there a 

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few months ago, so much of the innovation comes from the community and from the 

grassroots. How do you balance that? How do we balance that? 

[02:37:44] Kari: I don't know that I know the answer, but my experience is that in the 

past, not much has been done with the grassroots initiatives. When we have looked at 

grassroots initiatives, we've done it without financial support. They don't have the ability 

to do things. I think the grassroot programs are valuable in the individual connection, the 

one-on-one connection with the kid. If you have someone who is going to be a part-time 

coach at the recreation center, figuring out ways to support that after-hour, after-school 

participation by the adult and both the children. I think one of the things we expect 

community people to do is to give of their time, without support. The people that were 

asking to do that still have to feed their families, they have to pay the rent, they have to 

do all the other things that people are getting paid to do the work. 

I think we have to figure out valuing their time and their commitment to their communities 

and figuring out how to support that financially. That goes to supporting the organizations 

with little $5,000 grants, perhaps that's all they need. They don't need a big office, they 

don't need any of that, but they might need some money to provide some snacks for kids 

after they're in a program. Just really thinking about how it might be when we've talked to 

people in the community about what they need in order to be a successful program that 

is able to pull in the kids, get them off the street, and get them involved in programs. 

[02:39:26] Lourdes: Thank you. 

[02:39:28] Liz Ryan: Thank you. I want to just reserve my right to ask a quick question 

before we go to the other folks. Each of you talked a little bit about involvement of young 

people, involvement of community and I thought maybe you could each speak to 

incentives that you think would ensure that funding gets to community and also 

community are involved. Mr. Anjewierden you talked about law enforcement being part of 

a community coalition. It'd be helpful to get just a little more detail from each of you on 

those incentives you think would be helpful. 

[02:40:09] Steve: I don't want to step in front of anybody. In my haste to get to my 

testimony, I forgot to tell you thank you for the opportunity to be here. Thank you 

administrator Ryan for the opportunity to be here, and thank you to this council for the 

invitation. I think that in general, law enforcement has challenges with authentically 

hearing what the community has to say. I think the first thing we have to do is talk to my 

colleagues about the value of the input that can come in. I think it's often, there's a fear 

that, "Well, look, we're the professional police, and the community doesn't know how to 

approach issue A or B," but they do have valuable input on how they're impacted by the 

way that you police, and there has to be some common ground that we find to have that 

conversation. 

Often, community members don't have that faith or trust in law enforcement that it's worth 

their time to show up and give that information. I think it's understanding that from the law 

enforcement side, we just got to keep trying, and we got to keep building that relationship 

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until there is enough common ground where we can have that dialogue, and that will 

range across the country, right? There'll be different areas of that. 

One example that might fit the bill here is in the Denver Police Department, they have a 

program called the Correlates of Crime where it's an effort to understand that there's often 

reasons underlying the challenges that people have that can lead to crime. They started 

a program where they can try to address those issues that officers come across in the 

course of their duties. 

By the way, I think this is fantastic because, you find out pretty quick when you're a young 

police officer that the challenges of the world are too big for you to fix by yourself, and if 

you're not sure where to reference somebody, there's a lot of helplessness out there that 

then turns to making arrests, using force to solve it. If those officers have a place to make 

those referrals, then we can do something about the underpinnings of that, but in the 

development of that program, there was a lot of community conversations, and one 

message from the community was, "We want our local existing resources to be valued 

and not replaced." 

Sometimes when those federal dollars come in, they displace an organization that's 

maybe been there for 30 years and does a great job. Part of that asset mapping in that 

community conversation is, "What are your needs? What do we have? How can we work 

best together?" Then fill the gaps. That's what I was trying to allude to in my testimony 

about, that might be a good funding formula, maybe isn't the right word, but to make sure 

that we're honoring the work that goes on in communities and has forever. 

Quite frankly, law enforcement is slow to see some of that community work, and slow to 

partner with them, and, of course, the opposite is true. Not everybody wants to partner 

with law enforcement, and that's okay, we'll get better until you do. I think that through a 

program like this where we want to hear what you have to say, we want to know the best 

way that we can actually serve the community is a good way to get the community 

together, and start to build that legitimacy of policing back and build that trust. 

[02:43:53] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Yes, I'll just hear from you. 

[02:43:56] Kari: Can I add as well? Mine will be more of a probation perspective, but, 

again, I think the answers are always complicated, right? My answer would be, it should 

be individualized. We really have tried hard. In Nebraska, I have a couple examples. One, 

I talked about in my testimony, which is a tangible incentive program that we have for 

youth, and we started a special exception incentive program within that after hearing from 

probation officers that, "This youth wants to work on something they really need." For 

example, we've had some youth moving into independent living, needing a microwave, 

or a young person needing transportation, and they've worked to get a bike. They're doing 

some of those individualized. 

We did a very similar process when it came to working with probation officers. We asked 

them to assist us in creating short training videos to boost our ACE initiative that I 

mentioned, and we asked the group, "How might you like to be celebrated once you 

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accomplish this?" Bringing them together to co-create, but helping them identify what they 

would like for them to receive to be recognized for the work that they put in. They had a 

listing of ideas that they brought up from the very beginning, and now our job is to make 

sure they get those when we accomplish our outcomes. That's just a little bit of a different 

response to that, but we really are learning that individualizing is really where we're finding 

the most success. 

[02:45:35] Liz Ryan: Thank you. 

[02:45:39] Ernestine: One of the things I've learned quickly is that as a government, it 

doesn't work to tell them what to do, right? Go in and listen and find out what their needs 

are, help them. Part of my role is to help pass money through at the state level for 

prevention services. All of those youth service agencies, there's designated dollars that 

we have at the state level. They go to them, they each have a local board, they do their 

local community needs assessment. My job is really to support them, let them hear from 

their own community members, and do that. 

I do that work with Title II as well in our grant process. In Title II, I also work with law 

enforcement agencies, letting them identify who their youth specialist officer is going to 

be to drive that process. I think it always comes down to listening to what the community 

needs, and then supporting them at the government level. It's really helping them build 

their infrastructure, would be what I would say. 

[02:46:42] Laura: I just wanted to say that I think in this work we have to, particularly as 

we're talking about the police and bringing them into the community, we just have to be 

honest, there are a lot of communities that do not trust the police, and for a good reason. 

I think that there will have to be some efforts that really build the trust that the community 

has. For a lot of the people that we are dealing with, the police have been the ones who 

have surveilled them for years. My own experience, I know what it's like to be surveilled. 

I talk about my experience of going to Sachs, and going into the rich, really muckety-muck 

section, and looking at a fur coat or whatever I'm looking at, or some designer thing, and 

being followed by the salesperson. For a lot of the people that we are dealing with, their 

experience with the police department hasn't been that great, but I don't think that that 

means that we can't build a great relationship. 

I'm reminded of, I don't remember what it was called when the cops were in the 

neighborhoods, and they were almost like the preacher, that people felt comfortable 

because they knew the individual police officer, and knew that that person, that officer 

had their back, but for a lot of them, they don't have that feeling today. I think until we are 

able to get back to something like that, it's going to be really difficult to get the relationships 

that we need in order for us to work, police, court, probation, human, everybody working 

together to address the needs of the families that issues are pushing them to our attention. 

Right now, we are not doing as well as we all want to do, we want to do better. I think the 

only way we're going to do that is to do this coordination that we've been talking about 

with all those agencies who have a piece of the lives of those people, housing, drug 

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enforcement, all of those agencies working together to figure out what it is we need to do. 

We know why kids come to court. We know what's driving them, and for many of them, 

it's because they don't have the resources. They don't have a decent income, they don't 

have health insurance. 

They don't have the things that we know families need in order to be able to survive. Until 

we are able to try to make that available to everybody, we are still going to have these 

issues. 

[02:49:10] Liz Ryan: Thank you all. I want to see if there are any other questions from 

the council. Yes. Ms. Senek. 

[02:49:17] Ms. Senek: Thank you so much for your testimony. I really appreciate both 

Laura and Carrie, your comments on how to recognize and honor the stories and the 

experiences and the policy recommendations that come from the youth that you serve. I 

wonder, are there ways you can think of that would help the federal government to better 

articulate when we do hear those policy recommendations and the ideas from youth and 

the families that we serve, how can we help them see that they created that change? How 

do we promote that same level at the federal level of helping them see themselves in it? 

[02:49:56] Laura: Make them the subject matter expert like you're doing. I think a 

recommendation of someone on this council is a great idea. I also think it is powerful 

when they make a recommendation on a specific policy, and then they actually see the 

change, or they see the program be developed. When they say, "I have this need," and 

then they see you respond to that need, that makes a difference. If that's a possible thing 

to do, that's what I would recommend, for sure. 

[02:50:29] Kari: I would add feedback loops in regards to letting them know they were 

heard. I also think promoting them as the expert who helped the implementation happen. 

Lifting that up, maybe if you are opening up some application, linking it to that individual. 

I think, really, that would help them feel heard, and feel like, "Oh, they listened to me, and 

now they may listen to someone else." 

[02:51:01] Ernestine: I would say too, it's not a run and done. Unfortunately, there are a 

lot of young people out there who've been touched by the system, and obviously, you 

can't have all of them be involved in policy development. Like the two previous speakers 

[inaudible 02:51:19]. I'm sorry. It's to give up their time, and participate, and then not 

ever see anything good come of what they've done. I think regular contact with them, 

feedback loops with them, and letting them know what happened with the 

recommendations that they made is critically important. 

The other thing I think is to encourage young people who are out there to-- I was 

impressed by Kala, she's still here. What I wrote down when she was talking was that I 

wanted every kid, every child that I dealt with in the juvenile court system to grow up and 

be like Kala. That's what I think we should all want for the kids who are coming through 

our system, that all of them have that opportunity to grow up, and to contribute, and be 

productive adults, then we would've succeeded. 

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[02:52:19] ?Laura: I would also add, if I might, that one of the things that we realized too 

was that they need some compensation. We're all getting paid to do this, but they often 

have to leave sometimes an hourly job if they have one, or their parent and chaperone 

does too. Making sure that there's some sort of-- for us, we worked on rates, and had 

them established through a process so that they are getting an allowance. 

[02:52:50] Liz Ryan: Thank you all. I think there are more questions, but we'll need to 

wrap up the panel here. Please join me in thanking this distinguished panel. 

[applause] 

As the panelists make their way to their seats, I wanted to take a moment to reflect with 

the council members what we've heard today, and also just thinking back to our visit to 

Houston, and our meeting at Department of Labor early in the year where we heard about 

the US Department of Agriculture Programs, and Department of Labor Programs, and 

last fall when we heard from young people with lived experience talking about their 

recommendations. 

I know that's a lot to take in, but I want to take 15, 20 minutes with you all now just to let 

you share any reflections that you have. It'd be great to hear from as many of you as 

possible. I don't want to put anyone on the spot. I'll just look in this direction, and if anyone 

over here, Maria, why don't you start? 

[02:54:06] Maria: I'll start. I had two questions for the panel, but I think it's an overall 

reflection. I just wanted to say, I love the idea, Steven, you made regarding an MOU with 

the local law enforcement agencies, entities and schools. I just think that that might be 

doable, but I don't want to be too optimistic. Or maybe it's a template or a suggestion to 

all agencies that are in the school system, or maybe case managers so that they learn to 

work better with vulnerable individuals who have been in the juvenile justice system. 

I love this idea, and I think it can be done, and maybe we can work together as a council 

to consider it. Because you have justice here, we have the Department of education here. 

Happy to help as well, perspective from HEARD. Then the other reflection is that, Judge 

Gray, I love this idea of removing the at risk terminology. Is that something that we can 

do? We don't have to talk about it today, it may be a longer conversation, but it does make 

a huge difference. 

To your point, we as federal agencies, I think have the ability to do that, and perhaps it's 

a low hanging fruit piece where we can deliver this to say that we are moving in this 

direction, and then all of these other great suggestions, maybe they're middle or higher 

hanging fruit. Again, every panelist today made excellent points, which some of us ask 

questions today about, but just excellent today, and I have a lot to reflect on from today, 

so thank you. 

[02:55:57] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Judge Betancourt, and then Michael Mendoza. 

[02:56:03] Judge Betancourt: The MOU, it's very simple, and jurisdictions across, not 

only my state of Texas, but the United States do that with agencies such as police 

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departments. It is something that is doable and easy. I think the most important thing 

you're pointing out is the language, about requiring them even through funding sources, 

requiring them to do some type of trauma-informed training, making that a requirement in 

order when they're applying for these funds, that they understand that the police agency 

is going to implement this training and do this training as part of the requisite to obtain 

that funding, and then exactly the same thing with the MOU, but is very doable. 

[02:56:52] Michael Mendoza: Thank you for the opportunity to provide some comments 

in hindsight or reflection. Two things stand out to me. Well, actually both from Vinny. You 

mentioned how right now we're in a moment where we're hearing the super predator term 

all over again, but just in different ways. We're hearing it in terms of children being called 

sociopaths or psychopaths in terms of worst case scenarios, and how it's really impacting 

a lot of the work that has been done successfully across the country. 

I think it'd be great for us to figure out how from the bully pulpit we can really acknowledge 

the wins that have been successful, while keeping our community safe, and encouraging 

elected officials and policy makers to continue in the right path really hit home with me. 

I remember it was like being called a super predator, and how it makes you feel. It's really 

discouraging. That stands out to me, but so does the thought of a national roadmap. It 

just feels like every state's trying to figure it out on their own. How can we provide a 

national roadmap, if you will, attach policies, and really help states get to a certain place 

where we know it can be effective, and it can work? Those are just two things that I see 

as priorities that can really help shape things in the next few years. 

[02:58:28] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Yes. 

[02:58:32] Speaker: Two things. First, I think trauma training is great, but I think we need 

to go deeper than that, and really look at how these systems are trauma-informed. One 

training does not make one trauma-informed. I think we've been doing a lot of work around 

that, and I think there's a lot more work we can do. I'd really love it if this council continues 

to talk about the family engagement and the family networks. I know in behavioral health, 

families often feel invisible, and I'm hearing that that's how they feel across the system. 

How do we, first of all not have them, these various networks and all these different 

systems, but one network, one family network, and one voice. I think especially at the 

federal level, we have our focus on the youth, we have our focus on adults, but really 

raising that family voice. I think this council could do a great job of that. 

[02:59:24] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Liz Simons? 

[02:59:28] Liz Simons: First, echoing Michael, and Maria Lana's, and the judge's 

emphasis on language, I do think it begins there. Frankly, I think the name of our council, 

the word delinquency in it, we might want to think about at some point in juvenile. Yes. 

[chuckles] I was really also struck by the judge's point about evidence-based. It's like I 

myself have used evidence-based frequently when I talk about promising programs. I also 

made the point in one of our last committee discussions the same point I think the judge 

was making that all too often, really promising practices are left off the table because 

38 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

those community organizations that are trying to do this work don't have the money to 

pay for evidence-based, they don't have the research. 

They can't pay for research to make sure that they actually are meeting certain 

designations that make them become evidence-based. I'm not explaining it well, but I 

think that we need to think about better ways to bring in these programs. Perhaps it's 

something a philanthropy could do with funding programs to have research done that 

brings them into our purview so we can take them seriously. It's ironic that funding breeds 

funding, but I do think we need to think about that, and I'm excited to lean into that work. 

[03:00:59] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Liz. Miranda? 

[03:01:02] Miranda: Thank you. I have a lot of thoughts. One, and part of this was 

influenced from the conversation we had even before the meeting was discussed. It's this 

idea of, how do we really get to this place where we are all working towards the shared 

goals that we have for our children, our youth, our families. I think we all agree that we 

want folks to thrive. We want to increase their resilience, build-up their protective factors. 

We don't want them to go through trauma. 

That's consistent across a lot of different systems. There's the opportunity, I think, if we 

work towards some shared outcomes, some shared metrics of well-being, what that looks 

like, that we can refocus our multiple programs across our member agencies to point 

towards those shared well-being outcomes so we can measure ourselves, that we can 

demonstrate that we are contributing to people's healthy development and young people's 

healthy development. That's one line of thought that I had in reflection of the conversation 

today. 

The other is that there was a lot of conversation about the silos that we have in our 

programs. They are funding silos, and they are system silos. One of the things that I think 

we can do well as a coordinating council in the federal government is put spotlights on 

those communities that are breaking through that, that are doing a good job of actually 

taking many different federal and state funding streams, and actually providing 

community-based services that serve people's needs well. 

I think there's an opportunity for us to think about how we can lean into that spotlighting 

feature, developing a toolkit, showing folks how this can be done, because there are lots 

of opportunities across the many programs. Then I think with lived experience, and really 

making sure that young people and families with lived experience are centered in this 

work, I think that there are opportunities for the council to promote how you can make 

sure that that is a requirement/condition of needs assessments, of plan requirements, of 

reporting requirements. 

I think we can promote ways for agencies to ensure that they are including people with 

lived experience meaningfully, and demonstrating that they are not just having people at 

the table, but they are then taking their input, providing feedback, and changing policy 

and program design based on it. There's a lot of encouragement I think we can do in 

39 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

using our belief pulpit so that we are shaping the way that we want programs to be 

designed in support of young people and families. 

[03:04:17] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Oh, go ahead. Sonali. Yes. 

[03:04:21] Sonali: I just want to add, I really appreciate the reference to spotlights. I think 

there are so many spotlights, and sometimes what happens is the spotlight doesn't need 

to be just for us. There's a lot of power in the spotlight being available to practitioners so 

they can see how folks have navigated. I just think that that is so critical, and finding ways 

for that information to be shared beyond this committee so that access gets right to the 

community. 

I think we heard a lot about collaboration, and the importance of collaboration. I think our 

power and influence sits in like what we identify as our funding priorities. I'm going to go 

back to our office and say, "How do we prioritize coordination so that it's called out, so 

that people who receive our resources are doing that?" Then just something that I think 

sat with me this entire time is, there's a lot of conversation about collaboration. 

There's a lot of conversation about neighborhoods in place, and it just made me think 

about how important it is to have time and space to build trust. I think that is also 

something that I want to go back and think about, how do we help cultivate that trust 

between various stakeholders. 

[03:05:49] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Lourdes and then Deborah. 

[03:05:53] Lourdes: Thank you. Right before today's meeting, I was looking at the notes 

of our meeting in Houston, which a number of us went to, but some people didn't get a 

chance to go to. There's so many themes that came up today that directly tie to the themes 

and issues that we discussed there. I wanted to reflect on that for a moment. Really, they 

are working in Harris County on fundamental transformation, and they boiled it down to 

three words, which I really took with me today. Reduce, improve and reinvest. We heard 

similar themes today. 

Reduce the number of kids who come into contact with the system. Reduce the number 

of kids who are put on probation. The number of kids who are detained, certainly reduce 

the number of probation conditions that kids have to go through, but to do that, they really 

saw it as, the issue that they're facing is having to reimagine public safety, and our 

conception, the public's conception of what drives public safety because, unfortunately, it 

is tied to a narrative that in order to be safe, we have to lock people up, we have to punish 

them. 

All of us in this room know that that's not the case. We know a lot of these practices that 

emphasize incarceration and punishment, in fact, make us less safe by increasing 

recidivism, and creating a lot of hopelessness and lack of opportunity, reduce. Improve, 

they spoke about the fact that there was a very negative view of the juvenile justice system 

in their community, and for reason. It was viewed as racist and harmful, putting kids under 

surveillance, and that they really wanted to work to create a positive view of the system. 

40 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To do that, it was about making the system community-driven and community-rooted. 

That's what led to the Opportunity center, which has a very different vibe than a lot of 

programs I've been in, and we met some of the young people who were graduates of that 

program, and they were talking about all the services they got, their educational workforce 

development, mental health guidance, all sorts of stuff. They also told us that those were 

the services that they could not and did not get in the community before they got into the 

justice system. That led to the third component, which is reinvest. 

They were saying, we have to reinvest the money we save by not locking up all these 

kids, and being able to provide these services way before there's any chance that they're 

going to get involved with the justice system. I remember the mapping that they did. That 

the gaps analysis to see where they should put the money to put the services that aren't 

there. I think a lot of the themes are the same ones that came up today, and really should 

guide a lot of our thinking about what we should be doing, reduce, improve, reinvest. 

[03:08:40] Liz Ryan: Thank you, Lourdes, for that recap of Houston, is it Deborah? 

[03:08:47] Deborah: Yes. One of the things that stood out to me, and it's something that 

we talk a lot about with my programs is the idea of keeping youth in their communities, in 

their homes. Once they're justice-involved, how do we reduce taking them out of their 

communities, putting them in facilities, whatever. I think what we hear is there's a lot of 

movement in states towards that. We heard some of that on this panel. I work on a 

program that was designed around kids in institutions and in residential programs. We 

talk a lot about how to get away from that, but if it's built into the structure of our program, 

then there are bigger fixes that need to be talked about. 

That was something that stood out to me. The other thing, and this isn't-- several people 

mentioned just records management, and data sharing, and that's something that comes 

up for us a lot because we serve kids who move in and out of either their community 

school systems to maybe a state-run system or something, or they're in and out of 

different systems. That's true of a lot of these kids. 

I think that a lot of the current data policies are designed to-- what we hear a lot from our 

grantees is, "We can't track how these kids are doing because they don't want labels to 

follow them because they don't want them to be stigmatized." How do we balance that 

need for privacy with the need of, we heard from a few people about just the need to 

share data, and share records, and these kids aren't carrying around suitcases of their 

school records with them. That prevents our being able to serve them well, or holding 

systems accountable for serving those kids well. I will stop there, but that's what I was 

thinking about. 

[03:11:06] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Dr. McMurray? 

[03:11:09] Dr. McMurray: A few things I've heard from the presentations and the 

discussions that have me reflecting on some of the work that we as a council can do. Just 

thinking about, over the years we talk about the various best practices, the various 

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technical assistance and training centers, resource centers that all of our agencies have 

access to that we promote for our particular issue of interest. 

It strikes me that so much of that is happening, but not many practitioners or providers or 

community-level members know that they exist, are able to access them or utilize them 

in a way that makes sense, and can expand the benefit of having a technical assistance 

center. 

I'm thinking about, as we all work within our agency's approach, [unintelligible 03:12:01], 

that we may need to rethink about how we share across lines the best practices, 

promising practices, technical assistance centers, et cetera, et cetera so that my world 

may be around substance use prevention, but because we know that the risk and 

protective factors are very similar to children who may be truant, who may be justice 

involved, who may be at risk, sorry to use that term, for homelessness and other things, 

that my programs, my best practices, my technical assistance could be beneficial to the 

programs, to the organizations and providers in New York Community that may be doing 

your work. 

How can we better share without recreating more centers and more resources, how can 

we better share across? Something for us to be thinking about. The second thing I heard 

in the conversation was around workforce development, but also workforce investment. 

We've known for years that often the folks who do the yeoman's work are the ones that 

are least paid, least invested in, but have the greatest connection to some of our young 

people and families. 

We may need to think about how we raise the level of profile of those who do some of 

that more on-ground work so that they are part of not just the conversation where we're 

thinking about planning, but they're incentivized to continue to do the great work that they 

do with connecting directly with families and children and communities. Then also just 

thinking about how we-- were very interested in integrating lived experiences. 

I'm starting to see or wonder whether or not we can learn from each other's lived 

experiences, instead of having to recreate an advisory council of parents and children 

with lived experience around substance use issues. What can I learn from the advisory 

councils or the other works that the others have been doing to integrate families and their 

voice? Rather than recreate, how can I learn from others? I think that's just things that 

I've heard as we've gone along for today that I'm going to be reflecting on going back to 

ODCP. 

[03:14:16] Liz Ryan: Thank you. Mark Patterson and then Judge Bettencourt. 

[03:14:24] Mark Patterson: Great discussion today. I heard a lot of things, but the thing 

that really resonated with me right now is really, if I put a number to it, 15 or 20 years of 

juvenile justice reform is the need now really to put out that positive message. That the 

ability and the opportunities for the states to create diversions to our incarceration has 

made a difference, and has made a change. 

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Then the work that we do so much, we're constantly trying to get resources in order to 

maintain our programs in Hawaii, to maintain the diversion. We don't have the time to 

promote that it's succeeding, so everyone that came to the front and presented as a panel, 

I can put a Hawaiian leader back home to, public defenders, judicial, family advocates. 

What's lucky for Hawaii is all of them are able to work together. 

We'd be able to move our system through, including the police department, the office of 

the prosecutor and whatnot. For some reason, we're not getting the message. When I go 

to the legislature, they tell me, "Well, Hawaii's DOE is number one in suspending kids 

from school." I said, "The first thing in your mind is, I don't work for the DOE," but I've 

been told and trained to look at them and say, "I'll go talk to the DOE [chuckles] to see if 

there's programs we can help them with," because I know they're high risk. I'll use that, 

or eventually become part of our system. It helps me to go help them or offer my help to 

slow that next step to me. 

I just think it's just crazy to-- when we hear about legislators talking about the rise of 

juvenile crime, and the rise of this, and you just want to tell them, "You do know we just 

came out of COVID, right?" There's a lot of people have been locked down and now 

they're out, and it's still not where it was pre-COVID. I think, I want to just mirror what 

Marilyn Vincent was saying, is that we have to get that positive message out. The biggest 

threat to reform is just the political and the media's perception that prison equals a safe 

environment, that equals lower crime. We ignore the socio economic issues that are the 

root causes. That's where my thoughts are right now. 

[03:17:02] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much. Then we'll hear from Judge Bettencourt, and 

then we'll wrap this part. 

[03:17:05] Judge Bettencourt: I just wanted to take the time to say thank you to Judge 

Gray. As judges, we serve our purpose, and most think that we are to listen to cases and 

make rulings, but when it comes to the juvenile justice system, there's so much more we 

can do. Judge Gray has shown that, and has been a vocal point, and has been vocal in 

making that point. More importantly, we sat here, and we heard from pretty much every 

type of playmaker, player in the system. We've heard everything was pretty much echoed 

from making sure that we're doing everything we can for our children. 

I think what we just need to do is really help other states, and the agencies come and 

help these states truly understand what more there is out there as far as resources, 

funding, grants. We can sit here and talk fancy words all day and say everything we want 

to say, but what are we doing, and how are we getting it done? That's our responsibility 

now. We've heard, we've seen, we've heard from youth involved, we've heard from so 

many different individuals, and everything is accurate. 

As you sit on a bench like I do and Judge Gray, we see these children, and we see what 

causes them to come before us. Sometimes we're asked to quiet down, but we don't 

because we want to make sure that people understand what is out there, and what we're 

seeing daily. As practitioners, I think it's key that we continue to use our voices, and we 

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continue to say, not only what the good, the bad, the ugly, but also show what everybody 

is doing, and how we're doing it differently. 

I just wanted to take the time and say thank you, Judge Gray, for showing that we can do 

that as judges as well. Because I know, we don't really get to, but more importantly now 

the point is, where are we going with this, and how are we going to get things done? 

[03:19:00] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much Judge Bettencourt for that charge ahead. 

Before we wrap, we are going to hear from our two subcommittees from the two chairs. 

We will first hear from subcommittee co-chairs, Kelly Blue and Sonali Nijhawan, who are 

reporting out on the programs and practice subcommittee. 

[03:19:34] Kelly Blue: All right. Can you hear me? [chuckling] Good afternoon. On behalf 

of the programs and practices subcommittee, I'm pleased to let you know that we've had 

the opportunity to meet two times since the full council meeting that was held in 

September. Also during that time, our subcommittee has expanded. We are now up to a 

total of 26 members representing 11 federal agencies and 6 practitioners from the field, 

so our subcommittee is expanding. 

Over the course of the past couple of months, the subcommittee has focused on two 

items. One is related to finalizing goals and objectives, and the other is planning for 

coordinating council sponsor track at the 2024 OJJDP National Conference that will be 

held in Washington DC in November. First, regarding newly developed goals and 

objectives, they're attached with our report for your review and consideration. Next steps 

with the goals and objectives, the subcommittee will be looking at those goals and 

objectives, and prioritizing them, and then working towards developing potential action 

plans to move forward with those goals and objectives. 

We've been working on the conference track that the council will sponsor. We looked at 

the recommendations from the youth panel that was held on October 22 to help guide the 

development of our conference session proposal ideas. Then we also took into 

consideration what we as federal agencies can bring to the table. Specifically looking at 

the notion of resources that we have, and how we could push out to conference 

participants how to access those resources. Exactly what we've just been talking about. 

We took that into consideration as well. 

We ended up coming up with 14 different proposed session ideas representing these 

ideas. I want to note that the sessions are attached to your report as well so you have an 

opportunity to look at the different sessions. Our intent with the sessions is to engage 

youth, family and community voices where we can. It's important to us. I think the other 

piece of this too with these sessions is to really look across our federal agencies and 

make sure that we are plugging in all the federal agencies where they need to be. We're 

going to make a really big effort to do that, especially when we talk about resources and 

access to resources. 

As a result of developing these sessions, our subcommittee does have a recommendation 

to put forth to the council, and I'd like to put that recommendation forth at this time. The 

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subcommittee recommends approval of the attached 14 conference session proposals 

for possible inclusion in the Coordinating Council track at OJJDP national conference in 

November 2024. Upon approval, members will continue work with conference planners 

to prioritize and refine the council's session proposals. 

[03:23:18] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much Kelly and Sonali. Before we do a voice vote on 

this, I wanted to see if anyone on the council has questions or feedback or comments for 

the subcommittee co-chairs before we vote on this. Okay, all right. All in favor of the 

recommendation put forward by the subcommittee, please say aye. 

[03:23:48] Members: Aye. 

[03:23:50] Liz Ryan: All opposed, please say nay. Okay, so that recommendation is 

passed. Thank you so much. Thank you, Kelly and Sonali-

[03:23:57] Kelly: Thank you. 

[03:23:57] Liz Ryan: -for co-chairing the subcommittee. I appreciate it. Next, I'd like to 

invite Kristen Kracke from OJJDP Policy Coordination Division, who is the chair of the 

policy subcommittee to share that report. 

[03:24:22] Kristen Kracke: Good afternoon council members. I am pleased to share the 

policy subcommittee report, and would ask that you reference that report in your packet 

for your review. The policy subcommittee has also met twice since the September 

Houston meeting. We currently have 15 members representing 6 federal agency and 5 

practitioner members on the policy subcommittee. You may recall from the Houston 

meeting that we presented in the council approved goals and objectives for the policy 

subcommittee there was one goal and five objectives. Those objectives were identified 

by our committee upon examination of the statutory language for the coordinating council. 

In our last two meetings since Houston, the policy subcommittee prioritized objective one, 

examining legislation, regulation and organizational policy across the federal member 

agencies, and objective five, exploring policies and practices for youth and federal 

facilities to develop background material and recommendations to the council. With those 

two objectives being prioritized and pursuant to those priorities, the subcommittee has 

begun work to collect and build a living repository for legislative and regulatory information 

across our member agencies. 

Specifically, for example, a master spreadsheet has been created and populated through 

key informant interviews with our member agencies, and a shared drive has been created 

for the subcommittee members for their youth to review and comment, at which point 

recommendations will come to the council. Additionally, with respect to the objective five 

on federal facilities that we have begun gathering data and background information, and 

we will continue this work with the subcommittee, and that will be ongoing work as well to 

bring back to the Council for recommendations. 

Along with this work, I would like to recognize Sarahmiehn, a presidential management 

fellow on detail from the Center for Disease Control to OJJDP, who has been instrumental 

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in building this initial repository, as well as each of the subcommittee members, the federal 

representatives who have participated in those key informant interviews, and contributed 

a vast amount of information from each of your respective agencies. A big thanks to the 

committee for that, and a promise to the council that we will bring this work forward to you 

at a future meeting. 

[03:27:17] Liz Ryan: Thank you so much, Kristen. Does anyone have questions for 

Kristen on this subcommittee? [silence] Okay. We should approve by voice vote the report 

from the subcommittee. All in favor say aye, please. 

[03:27:34] Members: Aye. 

[03:27:35] Liz Ryan: All opposed say nay. [silence] Okay, the subcommittee report is 

approved. I want to just take a moment now before we wrap up just to thank all of you 

who participated today, everybody. I think we had close to 300 people joining us virtually, 

and all of the people in the room here, we invite you to share recommendations with the 

council. We shared the URL on the screen there. We hope you will give us feedback, 

additional recommendations that you want to put forward, public comments. 

I also really want to thank the members of this council for your time and your effort today. 

It was a really rich discussion. I also want to highlight and thank all of the panelists who 

spoke on these two panels for taking the time to be with us to put their recommendations 

in writing and share such concrete recommendations for us to think about. As we head 

into the holiday season, I hope you all have a good holiday, and I look forward to working 

with you in the new year. I just want to thank you again for your dedication and 

commitment to our young people. Thank you so much. 

[applause] 

[03:28:55] Liz Ryan: With that, our meeting is officially closed. 

[03:29:14] [END OF AUDIO] 

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