Challenges for Youth Reentering Society After Incarceration Social Welfare Associate Professor Laura Abrams joined the Howard Gluss Radio Show to discuss juvenile justice and reentry.

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laura-abrams_9009188732_o_eLaura Abrams, associate professor of social welfare at UCLA, appeared as a guest on the Howard Gluss radio show (August 14, 2009) to discuss the barriers to successful reentry to society for juveniles in the incarceration system. Abrams is the director of the juvenile justice and reentry project, a program of the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA School of Public Affairs that fosters the reintegration of juvenile offenders into the community upon their release. The following are excerpts from the interview.

What are the major challenges that we face as a society for stopping young people entering the prison system?

“One of the things that it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around when we talk about juvenile offenders is that they are young people…and the majority haven’t committed violent crimes. They’re young people who deserve the opportunity to have a different pathway in their lives.”

“As a community, we think more about the punitive aspect of corrections and juvenile justice and not so much what happens when they return to society and when they transition to adulthood…When youth are get out of settings of incarceration, they’re often in a place where they don’t have school credits, or haven’t graduated from high school, they don’t have job skills, some don’t have families to return to. So they enter that already difficult transitional period of emerging adulthood without many skills or resources necessary to be successful.”

“Research has identified practices in the juvenile justice system that give youth a chance at better outcomes:

  • Diversion, or keeping low-risk offenders out of incarceration (through home arrest or probation);
  • Smaller settings, rather than large institutional settings;
  • Longer treatment duration than (6 months rather than 2 months);
  • Staff trained in therapeutic practices like cognitive behavioral work and family work; and
  • Addressing underlying problems such as substance abuse, mental health issues and learning disabilities.”

 

Institute of Transportation Studies Contributes to New Sustainable Transport Program The Program for Sustainable Transport brings researchers together from more than 30 disciplines on six campuses to seed multi-disciplinary initiatives.

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The University of California Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) Multi-campus Research Unit received a major grant to create a new Program for Sustainable Transport. The new program, supported by an initial 5-year award of $6.25 million from the UC Office of the President, was selected under the auspices of the Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI.) Leveraging the substantial capabilities of ITS, The Program for Sustainable Transport designs tools, policies, and programs to reduce congestion, oil use, local air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, in ways that contribute to economic growth and social well being. The program focuses on three specific integrated activities: vehicles and fuels, infrastructure investment and system management, and land use and mobility planning.

The new Program for Sustainable Transport supports research, education, and outreach activities on six UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and UCLA. UCLA ITS director, Brian Taylor, and associate director, Allison Yoh, contributed to the creation of this program; Taylor will serve on the program’s executive committee.

The Program for Sustainable Transport brings researchers together from more than 30 disciplines on six campuses to seed multi-disciplinary initiatives, including collaborations between economists, geographers, ecologists, city and regional planners, public policy analysts, engineers from civil, environmental, electrical and mechanical engineering, computer scientists and experts in energy. In addition to cutting-edge research targeted at key societal needs and key state initiatives that are unfolding over the next few years, this new program supports the training of the next generation of experts and leaders. UCLA researchers in the Institute of Transportation Studies, which is housed in the School of Public Affairs, are slated to focus on infrastructure investment, system management, land use, and mobility planning in their work with the center.