Click Here to Register for the Youth Justice Listserv

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The Youth Justice listserv was created with the generous help, support and insight of Judge Maurice Portley and Kahryn Nix. This listserv will enable you to contact individuals, such as leaders from the legal profession, the juvenile justice system, the education community, youth services, faith based organizations, and many others to discuss issues affecting local youth.

This Youth Justice listserv will expand upon the successful youth at risk roundtable discussion from 2006. The Arizona Foundation for Legal Services & Education is helping expand the dialogue by opening the conversation to all individuals who provide services to Arizona youth.

The recommended focuses suggested by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Youth at Risk are:

• Finding better ways to serve juvenile "status offenders," such as school truants, runaways, and youth in conflict with their parents, and addressing the disproportionate custodial detention of girls who fall into these categories;
• Meeting the needs of those youth who, when they turn 18 or 19, are "aged out" of foster care or juvenile justice systems and may become ineligible for needed services;
• Assuring more meaningful participation by youth in the court proceedings affecting them;
• Enhancing access by teens and their families to "evidence-based" services within their community, focused on preventing involvement with juvenile and criminal justice systems and aiding teens with emotional, behavioral, or other mental health issues;
• Better supporting teens living in chaotic and violent homes, and youth who are going through high-conflict family breakup; and
• Improving how different legal and court interventions affect youth "crossing over" from one category of systemic label (e.g., abused and neglected child) to another label (e.g., delinquent child or status offender).