Youth Justice Quotes

Robert F. Kennedy Juvenile Justice Collaborative was formed in 2009 to improve federal youth reentry policy through advocacy, coalition building, and giving voice to youth who are directly impacted by the justice system.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

There are some really good experiments with the youth offending service, joining up youth offending teams with the youth justice board, and good local authority and primary care trusts working together.

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.

People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.

When a young person is sent 'up the river,' we need to remember that all rivers can change course.

Juvenile justice is probably the area that's most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there's no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.

The main point in our report was to recommend decriminalization...because of the way laws are applied, which have not worked. We have applied them for decades and it's got the prisons filled with lots of young people who sometimes come out destroyed for having half an ounce... We should approach it through education and health issues rather than a brutal reaction... There is need for change in policy, but it has to start with debate and discussion... I think the whole approach has to be reviewed.

As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

You shouldn't have a profit motivation to fill prison cells with young Americans.

Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses.

A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.

I was a truant. And if you're a truant in New York City, the truant officer gets after you, and then you get into the courts, and then things happen which they really shouldn't. But I ended up in a very sweet reform school. It's the place you go to if you've got a really kind judge.