Maine Center for Youth Policy & Law

01/29/2025

Lessons from a radical 20-year experiment and a quiet triumph of public policy.

12/08/2024

Hamilton County Juvenile Court Youth Detention Center students were asked to share their thoughts on youth violence in Cincinnati.

08/21/2024

Regional Care Teams, a collaborative of the University of Southern Maine’s Catherine Cutler Institute, the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC) and Center for Youth Policy and Law at the University of Maine School of Law released a new report summarizing the progress of the Regional Care Teams i...

03/05/2024

Maine can capitalize on New Hampshire’s outcomes to guide the best way forward.

03/05/2024

"We can, in fact, effectively treat most of these youth" - Lindsey Tweed is the immediate past president of the Maine Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"We can, in fact, effectively treat most of these youth."

03/05/2024

"When a child is sentenced to Long Creek, many other failures have already occurred. These may include failures of the state’s child protective system, schools and behavioral and health care systems, and family supports."

"When a child is sentenced to Long Creek, many other failures have already occurred."

03/05/2024

Ward said it might be more effective if the juvenile justice program was in a department more aligned with social services than incarceration. “If we want to just put the kids in a place, we’re doing that,” Ward said. “If we want better outcomes for the kids … we need a different model that doesn’t try to fix all that in a place that’s trauma-inducing, itself.”

The Maine Department of Corrections tells lawmakers it had to halt operations at 2 homes last year because it couldn't find enough workers, compounding ongoing issues at the state's only youth detention facility.

03/05/2024

“It just feels a little bit like Groundhog Day,” said Atlee Reilly, an attorney with Disability Rights Maine. “You’re just struck by how long are we going to keep trying the same things and expect a different result.”

Juvenile defense attorneys say incidents of unrest at Long Creek Youth Development Center have led teens to be held in frequent 23-hour lockdowns.

03/05/2024

“Frankly, we need to stop talking and we need to actually start doing some of the things that people have written in those reports,” said Sarah Branch, a former juvenile prosecutor who is now a defense lawyer and director of the Youth Justice Clinic at the University of Maine’s law school. Supporting children is what makes the public safer, she added, “and we have the capacity and responsibility as a state to do that.”

Even as fewer teens are being prosecuted, the state is not providing enough intervention, rehabilitation and other help.

12/22/2023

In Texas, a youth lockup facility is now a community resource hub. Watch a video on the center's transformation.

08/23/2023

07/27/2023

Findings: In this cohort study of 8951 youths, incarceration in an adult correctional facility before the age of 18 years was associated with a 33% increase in the risk of mortality between 18 and 39 years of age.

This cohort study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–1997 to evaluate whether being incarcerated in an adult correctional facility as a youth was associated with mortality between 18 and 39 years of age.