The Pacific Juvenile Defender Center (PJDC) provides support to juvenile trial lawyers, appellate counsel, law school clinical programs, and nonprofit law centers to ensure quality representation for children throughout California. Their mission is to promote justice for all youth by ensuring excellence in juvenile defense and advocating for systemic reforms.

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System

Sessions will be offered multiple times throughout the year. Each session will cover all the below topics:

Transformative Relationship Building as the Framework
To begin each workshop, we will center a transformative relationship building framework including several values: that all young people are sacred, universal principles of non-violence, and Indigenous and Black principles and concepts of relating to each other and relating to ourselves.

Roles of Juvenile Court System and Court Process
An overview of the juvenile court system, including the purpose of rehabilitation and punishment elements in Welfare and Institutions Code section 202. This module will include key roles, terms, the court process, including case outcomes and disposition (sentencing) options, with an emphasis on the juvenile court system specific to Los Angeles County.

Diversion Away from Government Intervention
Options for diversion away from the juvenile court system, and how the work of community intervention workers can help increase public safety and decrease behaviors that would normally provide for entry into the court system. This module includes lessons on school based probation and effective educational advocacy.

Harms of Detention
This module addresses the harms of detention, and the intended changes surrounding SB 823 and the closure of the state’s juvenile youth prisons, the Division of Juvenile Justice. This module also addresses preparing workers to help youth re-enter the community and access positive community resources.

How to Write Reports and Speak in Court
This module will focus on writing reports to the court, as well as public speaking. We will cover the ethics of candor to the court as well as loyalty to transformative relationship building principles.

Ethics + Hypotheticals
In the final model, workshop participants will have an opportunity to work in small groups to go over hypothetical situations and ethics, all with a lens of viewing each youth as sacred and with the framework, values and principles of transformative relationship building. Participants will also have an opportunity to share and reflect on how they will incorporate these principles and lessons in their work moving forward.