Senate Bill 399 is the California Fair Sentencing for Youth Act introduced by Senator Leland Yee.

Congratulations to Patti Lee and Jeff Adachi of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office for their tireless effort in defeating AB 2141.

Daniel Macallair, MPA, Executive Director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, article titled “Wasting Tax Dollars: Public Relations and the California Youth Corrections System” was recently featured in the California Progress Report.

The recent report titled “Proposition 63: Is the Mental Health Act Reaching California’s Transitional Age Foster Youth?” from Children’s Advocacy Institute estimates that about 4,000 California youth age out of the foster care system annually.

My earlier blog focused on long-term California statistics showing Latinos, the most immigration-impacted ethnicity, actually show bigger declines in arrests over the last three decades than do populations dominated by long-term residents, such as Whites.

Hundreds of news stories and expert commentaries, with few exceptions, depict juvenile crime as soaring, becoming more violent, and involving ever-younger killers and criminals. Occasionally, youth crime is depicted as declining, but only when interest groups are positioned to take credit.

American Conservative publisher Ron Unz has always taken a refreshingly wonkish approach to public policy.

The recent decision by the three judge panel in the Coleman/Plata case should be applauded as a short but positive step forward in forcing some degree of sanity upon the broken California prison system.  Unfortunately, the fact that a panel of Federal judges was forced to step in and force the state to make long overdue policy decisions is simply another poignant reminder of ou