The Steady Decline of Youth Incarceration, with Melissa Sickmund
On this week’s episode, Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, joins us to dive into the decades-long plummeting of youth arrests and incarceration, juvenile justice in the age of Covid-19, data blind spots and more.
Guest Interview Details
Dr. Melissa Sickmund joined the National Center for Juvenile Justice in 1986 and has been at its helm since 2012
On this week’s episode we discuss some notable changes in Congress’ 2023 spending deal, a new study on equity in services, and the release of The Imprint’s 2022 foster care capacity data.
Marina Nitze, author of Hack Your Bureaucracy and a co-founder of the Child Welfare Playbook, joins to discuss strategies for improving child welfare, why she’s optimistic about the future of kinship care, and more.
Guest Interview Details
Marina Nitze, co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy and a co-founder of the Child Welfare Playbook, joins to discuss strategies for improving child welfare, why she’s optimistic about the future of kinship care, and more.
We will get back to our regular podcast format next week, but today we are featuring the work of Julie Reynolds, who is The Imprint’s new Associate Editor.
Reynolds has produced and released the second season of her Podcast Grey Area. This new season, called After Life, explores one man’s journey into and then out of the California penal system, the latter part of which might not have happened but for changes over time in the state’s view about a second chance for young offenders.
First you will hear a brief interview with Julie about the new season, and then we will present Episode 1 of AfterLife.
Guest Interview Details
Julie Reynolds is the associate editor of The Imprint, an investigative journalist and author of “Blood In The Fields,” a book documenting the lives of young gang members in the Salinas Valley that was a finalist for the 2015 International Latino Book Award.
Reynolds co-founded the nonprofit news site Voices of Monterey Bay and produces the podcast “Gray Area: a Show About Justice and Redemption.”
The Best of The Imprint Weekly Podcast, 2022 Edition
We had some amazing guests join us on The Imprint Weekly Podcast this year, and we reviewed the entire 2022 archive to bring you clips from some of the very best! This episode includes clips of 20 interviews from this year.
If you enjoy this podcast, or the great work our reporters do at The Imprint and Fostering Families Today, and the work that our Youth Voices Rising team does, please consider making a donation. And if you do so this month, during Newsmatch, your donation will get doubled!
Fostering Media Connections is very lucky to have some terrific philanthropic supporters, advertisers and sponsors, and subscribers to our business and policy section that help make this organization go. But we really cannot do it without donors like you who read our stuff, listen to our podcasts and attend our online events.
There are tons of really great nonprofit, independent news outlets to support out there, and we hope you consider us one of them. To give today it’s easy! Visit www.imprintnews.org/donate.
Guest Interview Details
Guests include:
Les Gara, former gubernatorial candidate in Alaska
Ruth White, executive director, National Association for Housing and Child Welfare
Andrea Elliott, author, Invisible Child
Chief Cadmus Delorma, Cowessess First Nation
Jess Dannhauser, commissioner, New York City Administration for Children’s Services
Karl Wyatt, digital artist
Jason Smith, executive director, Michigan Center for Youth Justice
Carrie Etheridge, director of social work, Sheppard Pratt
Len Edwards, author and former judge, Santa Clara County, California
Colleen Henry, associate professor and researcher, Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College
Patty Duh, associate, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Lemn Sissay, author and former chancellor of the University of Manchester
Diane Redleaf, lawyer and founder, United Family Advocates
Sixto Cancel, founder, Think of Us
Dee Wilson, author, The Sounding Board
Kristen Ethier, research fellow, University of Chicago
Marsha Levick, chief legal officer, Juvenile Law Center
Liz Ryan, administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Tara Reynon, child welfare director, National Indian Child Welfare Association
Leslie Lacy, founder, Fostering Hope Louisiana
The Sex Trafficking Exception
On this week’s podcast we talk about a racial equity audit New York City never made public; welfare payments and foster care; and the emergence of lifebooks.
Robin Rosenberg, deputy director of Florida’s Children First, joins us to discuss Florida’s implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act. In particular, we focus on a sex trafficking exception to federal limits on congregate care funding that Florida is using to place hundreds of youth in group settings.
Guest Interview Details
Robin Rosenberg, deputy director of Florida’s Children First, joins us to discuss Florida’s implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act. In particular, we focus on a sex trafficking exception to federal limits on congregate care funding that Florida is using to place hundreds of youth in group settings.
The Storyboard Project
On this week’s podcast we talk about some interesting stories in The Imprint last week, an interesting filing in a faith-based discrimination case, juvenile diversion and fathers.
Mira Zimet, founder of The Storyboard Project, joins to discuss her three seasons of profiling youth and young adults who have experienced the foster care system in America.
Guest Interview Details
Mira Zimet founder The Storyboard Project in 2014, and recently completed a third season of her work profiling young adults who have experienced foster care. She joins to discuss her three seasons of profiling youth and young adults who have experienced the foster care system in America.
On this week’s podcast, we discuss a big state court opinion on juvenile life sentences, some more workforce crisis stories, and one state supreme court chief justice’s scathing dissent in perhaps her last case involving a foster youth.
Guest Interview Details
Leslie Lacy of Fostering Hope Louisiana, who used to represent parents and children in child welfare cases as an attorney, joins us to discuss her organization’s effort to get braces for youth in foster care as part of a broader mental health and life skills strategy.
Election Night for Youth and Families; Five Scenes from Brackeen v. Haaland
Youth-related funding and policy was on the ballot in several states last week, and Olivia Allen of the Children’s Funding Project joins to help us break down what happened with those measures.
Then, we break down five different exchanges that capture the essence of the Supreme Court’s three hour oral arguments over the Indian Child Welfare Act last Wednesday, and share some thoughts on what seemed to be on the mind of the likely “swing votes” in the case.
Guest Interview Details
Olivia Allen is the strategy director of the D.C.-based Children’s Funding Project. She joined us to discuss the details and outcomes for six funding measures on the ballot in various states and counties this year, and talk about the push for more states to enable local children’s funding mechanisms.
Reading Room
What’s On The Ballot for Youth and Families
https://bit.ly/3DJpLxiSupreme Court Probes Constitutionality of Indian Child Welfare Act
https://bit.ly/3NQ50F3In Prayer and Protest, People of Indian Country Gather Outside the Supreme Court to Defend the Indian Child Welfare Act
https://bit.ly/3hvL0LzBrackeen v. Haaland: The Imprint’s Coverage from 2018-Present
http://bit.ly/3ttyzTy
Understanding ICWA Part 4: What’s At Stake in Brackeen v. Haaland
The number of youth in foster care is below 400,000 for the first time in nearly a decade. On this week’s podcast, we break down the new data released by the Department of Health and Human Services, Florida’s ban on trans medicine for minors, and the worsening news out of Louisiana’s juvenile justice system.
Guest Interview Details
Kate Fort, director of clinics at the Michigan State University College of Law, joins us to break down the constitutional questions and potential outcomes of Brackeen v. Haaland, which could decide the fate of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Understanding ICWA Part 3: Placement Preferences, with Chrissi Ross Nimmo
On this week’s podcast we discuss a landmark case out of New York over the rights of biological parents, connecting homeless children to early childhood programs, a federal end-around on monitoring unaccompanied minors, an AI Bill of Rights, and the placement preferences required by ICWA.
Guest Interview Details
Chrissi Ross Nimmo, deputy attorney general of Cherokee Nation, joins us to discuss the placement preferences required by the Indian Child Welfare Act when a child is going to be adopted or placed in foster care.
Understanding ICWA Part 2: Qualified Expert Witnesses, with Tara Reynon
On this week’s podcast we discuss Maine’s legislature suing its child welfare agency over fatality records, the Angola transfer begins in Louisiana, and what low-income families used the enhanced child tax credit for.
Guest Interview Details
Tara Reynon, a member of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians and child welfare director for the National Indian Child Welfare Association, joins to discuss the role of qualified expert witnesses when Native children face family separation or termination of parental rights.
Understanding ICWA Part 1: Active Efforts, with Shannon Smith
On this week’s podcast we discuss a scandal that sparked new mandated reporting laws, the Biden administration’s kinship care ideas, and a new adoption information system in Ireland.
Guest Interview Details
Shannon Smith of Minnesota’s ICWA Law Center joins us to talk about the active efforts provision of the Indian Child Welfare Act something she sees in play everyday in one of America’s only ICWA courts.
Reading Room
Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead.
https://nbcnews.to/3yLi08pCPS Workers Search Millions of Homes a Year. A Mom Who Resisted Paid a Price.
https://nbcnews.to/3TJcyeDCan ‘Kinship Care’ Help the Child Welfare System? The White House Wants to Try
https://nyti.ms/3yKDJNVBiden Proposes Major Spending Shifts to Prioritize Kin, Foster Care Prevention
https://bit.ly/3iL0U26Prioritizing Kinship Care with Kim Clifton
https://bit.ly/3EvWFSbIrish Leader Apologizes for Adoptions That ‘Robbed Children’ of Their Identity
https://nyti.ms/3VBAhijIreland Opens Decades of Secret Records to Adoptees
https://nyti.ms/3VyrtdiA Seattle Agency Digs Deep into Unanswered Questions About Past Adoption Practices, and its Obligations to Families
https://bit.ly/30I2KLOMinneapolis Lawyers Rely on ‘Gold Standard’ Law to Keep Native American Families Together
https://bit.ly/2QwINmeSupreme Court Set to Consider Fate Of Indian Child Welfare Act in November
https://bit.ly/3BIVPlC
See the Girl, with Lawanda Ravoira
On this week’s podcast we introduce listeners to Nancy Marie Spears, who will be covering Indigenous children and families for The Imprint and talk a bit about the upcoming Supreme Court case that could determine the future of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Guest Interview Details
Lawanda Ravoira of the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center joins to talk about how juvenile justice systems continue to miss on designing effective interventions and solutions for girls, and to discuss her organization’s new See the Girl manifesto aimed at improving things on that score.
The Impact of “Drugging Our Kids” with Karen de Sá
On this week’s episode we discuss new child mental health legislation, an investigation into abuse at Head Start programs, and child poverty in America continuing to plummet.
Guest Interview Details
A recent study found that the use of antipsychotic medications on California foster youth has dropped by more than 50%. The Imprint’s executive editor, Karen de Sá, joins to discuss her investigative series Drugging Our Kids, which nearly a decade ago helped to prompt a number of policy changes in the state when it came to powerful psychiatric meds and youth in foster care.
Episode 100! Biden’s Juvenile Justice Agenda with Liz Ryan
On our 100th episode of The Imprint Weekly Podcast, we discuss a raft of new youth-related legislation introduced by Congress, moving teens to one of America’s largest adult prisons, and a new investment in adoption training.
Guest Interview Details
Liz Ryan, administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, joins us to discuss the Biden administration’s priorities for juvenile justice.
Reading Room
A Federal Bill Could Boost Funds for Home Visiting Program for Parents
https://bit.ly/3ByFPBcRunaway and Homeless Youth and Trafficking Prevention Act of 2022, Section-by-Section
https://bit.ly/3DTaRWYStrengthening Tribal Families Act of 2022https://bit.ly/3DRnvFYFederal Judge Allows Louisiana to Move Incarcerated Teens to Angola
https://bit.ly/3C9BFBaDecarceration Advocate Liz Ryan to Lead Juvenile Justice for Biden Administration
https://bit.ly/37hzj6ANation’s Top Juvenile Justice Official Disputes ‘Youth Crime Wave’ Narrative
https://bit.ly/3xR7k7X
The Fall of Child Poverty, and Home Visiting’s Looming Fiscal Cliff
On this week’s podcast we discuss a major drop in the use of powerful psych meds on California foster youth, and discuss how child welfare metrics behaved during the prolonged decline in child poverty that was recently analyzed by Child Trends.
Guest Interview Details
Jenny Harper joins to talk about the looming federal cliff facing a program aimed at supporting new and expectant mothers, and what advocates are hoping will happen in the near future.
