History of Youth Justice Institute
The Girls Justice Initiative (GJI) began in 2002 as a United Way of the Bay Area (UWBA) project and was created to address the issue of young women and their representation in the juvenile justice system. GJI quickly detected gaps in services in San Francisco. These gaps contributed to young women’s cycles of incarceration and made it difficult for them to make meaningful change in their lives. GJI worked to connect girls with the appropriate services, strengthen the capacity of those services, and document each youth’s progress.
GJI’s success in providing gender-responsive intervention services for young women led to an understanding that boys also have gender-specific issues that need addressing. In 2007, the organization was renamed the Youth Justice Institute (YJI) to reflect the broader scope of our work. We wanted to build on the success of analyzing the individual challenges and strengths of each youth and make the juvenile justice system more responsive and rehabilitative to those targeted needs.
The Youth Justice Institute model focuses on data collection, direct services, and policy. Each of these components informs the other and is necessary in maintaining effective, rehabilitative outcomes. Data is critical to understanding the needs and strengths of the population and also informs the development of effective direct services. YJI's work with “in risk” youth has given the organization and its clients the ability to inform policy work in youth justice issues.
Gender Responsive
The term “gender responsive” has evolved in the past 10 years to generally mean that systems need to view working with young women in a new way. We believe the system is not responsive to the unique needs and strengths of young women, young men, or the growing transgender population. Our data is analyzed through a gendered lens by looking at the root causes of delinquency, developmental stages, effective strategies, and promising practices. Focusing on gender responsiveness with adolescents in crisis is especially relevant because of their biological, psychological and social differences. Any attempt to rehabilitate and reach out to youth can be thwarted by not acknowledging their unique developmental stages and related needs.
Without programs like YJI, many "in-risk" youth continue to cycle through the juvenile justice system more than once. According to the 2006 San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department Annual Report, 10% will return more than nine times. The Physicians for Human Rights’ Health and Justice for Youth Campaign reports that up to 92% of incarcerated girls have experienced one or more forms of physical, sexual and emotional abuse before entering the juvenile justice system. Similar statistics for young men remain undocumented or misunderstood. The need for intervention and treatment is dire if these youth are going to be successful, and detention-based work is key to assessment, linking them to appropriate services, and teaching self-advocacy and sufficiency skills.
For the past eight years, YJI has been successful in providing gender-responsive and culturally attuned violence, crime and delinquency prevention, and intervention strategies. Our direct service programs are implemented in San Francisco and Alameda County. We have data documenting the experience of more than 1,000 unduplicated young women. In all of our programs, we measure success by the ability of our youth to set realistic and meaningful goals that contribute to their self-sufficiency, improved outcomes, and exit from the juvenile justice system.