Delinquency Jurisdiction in a Unified Family Court: Balancing Intervention, Prevention, and Adjudication

This article will examine the demographics of the current juvenile delinquency caseloads and will argue that, despite trends toward greater punitive measures-including placement of juveniles in adult courts for certain offenses, the concept of a therapeutic family-centered court, which inspired Jane Addams and her colleagues, remains the most promising approach to delinquency, articulated most notably by the proponents of the unified family court concept. The article will consider and address objections and concerns raised with respect to this approach, looking at ways in which several states have incorporated juvenile delinquency into a family-centered unified family court

Delinquency Jurisdiction in a Unified Family Court: Balancing Intervention, Prevention, and Adjudication

This article will examine the demographics of the current juvenile delinquency caseloads and will argue that, despite trends toward greater punitive measures-including placement of juveniles in adult courts for certain offenses, the concept of a therapeutic family-centered court, which inspired Jane Addams and her colleagues, remains the most promising approach to delinquency, articulated most notably by the proponents of the unified family court concept. The article will consider and address objections and concerns raised with respect to this approach, looking at ways in which several states have incorporated juvenile delinquency into a family-centered unified family court

A Comprehensive Approach to Truancy for Baltimore City: A Roundtable Discussion

The University of Baltimore School of Law Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC), one of three centers of excellence within the School of Law, is a national leader in promoting family justice system reform. CFCC’s mission is to create, foster and support local, state, and national movements to integrate communities, families, and the justice system in order to improve the lives of families and the health of the community. CFCC’s Truancy Court Program (TCP), created in 2004, exemplifies these goals through the operation of a court-school-CFCC partnership that leverages the stature, authority, and expertise of each of these three entities to tackle the truancy crisis in Baltimore City. Beginning with five Baltimore City public elementary and middle schools, the TCP has since expanded to six elementary/middle schools and one high school. The model is based on an early intervention, therapeutic, and non-adversarial approach to truancy. It targets students who are “soft” truants – students who have from three to twenty unexcused absences – in the belief that this group still has academic, social, and emotional connections to the school. The judge or master volunteers his/her time to collaborate each week with the TCP team. In addition to the judge or master, the team consists of school representatives, a CFCC staff person, a University of Baltimore law student, the TCP Mentor, the TCP School Liaison, the child, and his/her parent/caregiver. While the TCP saw immediate and dramatic improvement in school attendance, behavior and performance among participating TCP students, CFCC quickly recognized that there were few, if any, other interventions to address truancy. Until recently, Baltimore City schools relied almost exclusively on the TCP to provide an approach to truant behavior. At the same time, public attention focused increasingly on the extraordinarily high number of unexcused absences in Baltimore’s public schools. While chronic truancy was rampant throughout the state, it was far and away more pervasive in Baltimore City than in any of the counties

Families Matter: Recommendations to Improve Outcomes for Children and Families in Court

The Families Matter initiative was designed as a major, multi-year undertaking to develop legal practice methods and approaches to reduce the destructive consequences of the family legal process. The initiative was intended to respond to the need for deep and meaningful reform of the family law process. Convened in June 2010 by the University of Baltimore School of Law Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC), the Families Matter Symposium brought together an interdisciplinary group of family law experts for two days at the University of Baltimore to identify problems regarding the practice of family law and to make recommendations about promising solutions. The best outcomes for family law cases require a combination of lawyers and mental health professionals, social scientists, mediators, judges, academics, policymakers and financial experts, among others. In addition, Symposium participants acknowledged that the resolution of family law cases must not be “win or lose” and that a major shift in tone is needed. The main question was, “How do we radically transform a family court system from one that disrupts and tears apart families to one that helps heal them?” The Families Matter initiative intended to help develop and support a family justice system with an interdisciplinary, holistic and therapeutic focus; to make a broad range of family and individual services available to separating families; to foster greater use of alternative dispute resolution at the earliest stages of a case; and to encourage training law students, lawyers, judges, and court personnel toward a less adversarial, therapeutic, holistic focus when dealing with family law matters. This report provides a summary and overview of the Symposium discussions and the suggestions for reform that emerged from those discussions