Youth prisons are standing empty, but are a huge opportunity

Girls Court brings an all-hands-on-deck approach to the lives of vulnerable girls, linking them to social service agencies, providing informal Saturday sessions on everything from body image to legal jargon, and offering a team of adults in whom they can develop trust.

The foster care system is widely acknowledged to be 'broken', and to ignore those who age out of the system. A program in Memphis is improving the lives of at-risk youths by working to reunite them with their original families.

Palm Beach County, Florida has many of the same social problems that Philadelphia has, including “gangs, drugs, and poverty.” However, their school system has managed to keep students safe by employing “safe-school case managers” who build relationships with students, and they offer a youth court that is a system run by students who peer-review cases of unrest. The initiatives in this county has prevented school violence from happening without metal detectors and just two police officers.

It’s now common for youth to remain in foster care or residential treatment for years. For troubled or victimized children in need, assistance at home is often more effective than foster placement.

Huge numbers of students lack the chance to go to college because of financial problems. Recently, Kalamazoo schools received more funding allowing them to have the chance to help and pay for students to then go to college and receive a higher education.

York schools are considering changing public schools into charter schools, following the example of New Orleans and Michigan, in order to help their crumbling school system. The privatization of these schools can help the facilities become more financially stable, in turn preventing school closures and instability for their students.

A new juvenile justice center in Wyoming begins the movement to bring greater technological advancements to the education of the girls living there. The Wyoming Girls' School provides them with the state of the art tools they need to not fall behind while they fulfill their sentence.

Civic leaders in the U.S. struggle to effectively help their distressed neighborhoods. East Lake, Atlanta, created a replicable model that mixes residents of differing socio-economic status, and focuses on education and health in the area.

For first-time youth criminal offenders, the traditional American jury falls short in encouraging behavioral change and may even set the juvenile on a course for repeated crimes. Washington, DC’s Youth Court is a jury that tries juveniles for minor non-violent offenses and offers peer pressure to prompt positive behavioral change. The DC Youth Court is one of many in the United States that reduces crime and future court costs.

In Clayton County, Georgia, the Second Chance Court is using a different tactic to give offenders the opportunity to move forward. The program, started in 2010, allows selected teens to attend counseling and classes – often with their parents – centered around self improvement and appropriate behavior. Collaborating with a community organization, the Second Chance Court has been able to reduce recidivism in youth.