Pacific Juvenile Defender Center

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.

Courses

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: March 28

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above.

Date & Time:

March 28, 2024 - 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: April 26

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above.

Date & Time:

April 26, 2024 - 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: May 30

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above.

Date & Time:

May 30, 2024 - 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: June 17 & 21

angle

This is a 2 part online course:

All topics noted above will be divided across the 2 sessions.

*Zoom link to follow

Date & Time:

June 17, 2024- 1:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

June 21, 2024 - 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: August 29 & August 30

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above over two days.

*Zoom link to follow

Date & Time:

August 29-30 2024 - 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: September 26 & 27

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above.\

*Zoom link to follow

Date & Time:

September 26, 2024 - 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: October 24 & 25

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above.

*Zoom link to follow

Date & Time:

October 24, 2024 - 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Register Now angle

Improving Community Safety Through Effective Advocacy in the Youth Justice System: November 21 & 22

angle

Each session will cover all topics noted above.

*Zoom link to follow

Date & Time:

November 21, 2024 - 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Register Now angle

Instructor: Brooke Harris

Brooke Harris is the Executive Director of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center. Brooke has over 14 years of experience in the criminal and juvenile justice field as a defense attorney and educator. Prior to joining PJDC as Executive Director, she was the Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Visiting Clinical Faculty at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. At Loyola, Brooke taught Juvenile Delinquency Law and Procedure and Advanced Criminal Litigation Skills, in addition to supervising clinical law students representing youth in delinquency court in Los Angeles County. Before her work at Loyola, she served as a public defender in Contra Costa County for five years and held a fellowship in Post-Disposition Reentry with the Gault Center, focusing on the civil legal needs of youth returning to the community after a local or state commitment in a juvenile facility. Brooke also serves as faculty with the Independent Forensic Gang Expert College, a project of the Center of Juvenile Law and Policy at Loyola Law School, which trains people in the community with former gang involvement to become independent forensic gang experts for at-risk youth charged with gang offenses and gang enhancements. Brooke has trained attorneys in California and nationally on issues racial justice, youth gang involvement and detention. From 2018-2020, she served on the Executive Steering Committee with the Board of State and Community Corrections for the Youth Reinvestment Grant. Finally, Brooke is a certified juvenile law trainer with the Gault Center.

Instructor: Abraham Medina

Abraham Medina is transitioning Director of CAYCJ and the day-to-day lead of the OYCR CBO Capacity Building Initiative. Prior to these roles he served as Executive Director of the National Youth Alliance on Boys and Men of Color (NYABMOC). Abraham left Mexico City when he was seven years old with his mother and younger brother as a result of domestic violence. During the ordeal, he and his brother were separated from their mother and crossed the U.S. border experiencing family separation. Abraham grew up an undocumented person of color in the U.S., impacted by and organizing with others to challenge and transform the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline and systemic approaches to justice as we know it, through Black and Indigenous concepts, approaches and models of justice. Abraham started organizing as an undocumented high school student and has almost 20 years of organizing experience in cultivating transformative collective power for personal, community and systems transformation. From 2014 - 2016 he partnered with SAUSD, OCDE and Project Kinship to lead a team of Community Violence Intervention Workers and a team responsible for the pilot implementation of restorative practices, violence prevention programming, and RJ at a continuation school adjacent to a gang injunction zone and at the community day school, now REACH Academy. Abraham earned his B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. In 2018, he also earned a Master of Legal and Forensic Psychology from the University of California, Irvine studying under the guidance and direction of Dr. Elizabeth Cauffman and Dr. Ray Novaco.