The Danville Center for Adolescent Females has been selected by Street Law, Inc. to participate in their 2003-2004 Juvenile Justice Re-Entry Program. The program is a national initiative to integrate law-related education into transitional programming helping young people move successfully from incarceration back to the community. The idea is to provide these youth, many of whom return to communities as legal adults, with important practical legal knowledge that they will need and the skills to use it.

The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and is being conducted in collaboration with the broader federal initiative that brought together over 10 federal agencies to focus on the issue of people returning to communities from the justice system.

The Danville Center will join sites from Minnesota, Florida, North Dakota, and West Virginia as new sites for this program. In February a team from Danville will join professionals from these sites and the eight other national sites in Washington, DC for the Street Law National Leadership Training. There they will learn about the content and teaching methods that make Law-Related Education effective in helping young people become successful adults. They will also create site-plans that detail how they will implement their Street Law program and how they plan to integrate community resources—an key part of Street Law programming.

An especially exciting element of this particular program is the breath of professionals involved. Educators, institution administrators, residential and treatment staff, probation officers and other law enforcement, and staff of community-based programming are coming together—and bridging the divide between the institution and community—to address the needs of the young people with whom they work.

In the spring, staff from Street Law’s national office will come to Danville to provide further training in teaching methods to the front-line staff, who will deliver the law-related education program to students, and the community resource people who will help make the program successful.

Street Law, Inc. is a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that works throughout the US and around the world to educate about law, democracy, and human rights. More information is available at www.streetlaw.org.

Contact: Matthew Kavanagh (301) 589-1130