JUSTICE SYSTEM REFORM

How We Advance Youth Justice

SCSJ supports communities of color and grassroots organizations working to end the over-criminalization of youth. We represent young people and their families who seek justice and accountability from schools and legal systems that too often disregard and punish youth rather than provide services and support. We provide communications, messaging, and policy support to shift narratives criminalizing youth — efforts which include developing and disseminating advocacy toolkits that empower and support community organizing efforts. We also work to lift up the voices of justice-impacted youth, who are too often ignored, to inform future policy decisions about resource allocations and ways to better support young people. Centering the most impacted and allowing them to tell their own stories is essential to our work.

Young diverse friend group smiling together

Youth Justice Project

The Youth Justice Project (YJP) is a youth-led group of Durham Public School (DPS) students of color who are committed to ending the school-to prison pipeline and achieving educational justice.

The YJP envisions a future in which young people of color attend schools that lift them up, not pat them down; live in communities that follow their lead, not suppress their voice; and are served by governments that invest in their future, not their incarceration. We believe in a world where no child is criminalized and all Black and Brown youth receive the education and support necessary to thrive in their full dignity.

We believe all youth:

  • Possess value, potential, and unique strengths and needs;
  • Are fundamentally different from adults, and should be treated as such;
  • Are rights-bearing persons who should be meaningfully involved and heard in matters affecting them;
  • Deserve to be free of racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination;
  • Deserve supports and services necessary to be healthy, well-educated, safe, and economically secure;
  • Deserve systems and communities that are warm, welcoming, loving, caring, and safe;
  • Deserve laws, policies, and practices impacting them to be based on research, data, and principles of cooperation and positive youth development, not based on profit, competition, and control;
  • Deserve a high-quality education that enables them to both develop skills and knowledge and become critical, courageous, creative thinkers in a self-governing democracy; and
  • Should be protected and rehabilitated when they encounter the juvenile and criminal systems.
Youth Justice Project logo

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YJP Capstone Project

In 2022, SCSJ sponsored a community-led, group-based, mentored service-learning Capstone course as a vital part of the Youth Decriminalization Campaign. Capstone participants conducted community-based research that contributed to the larger network of resources used by organizations, academic institutions, and others, in understanding the effects of youth criminalization both in and outside of North Carolina.

Youth Steering Committee Capstone Project Meeting, where a young man is writing on a large paper taped to the wall

Youth Justice Resources

Invest In Our Children, Invest In Our Youth Report spread on a green gradient background. The report shows a young Black teenager with glasses looking hopefully into the sky.

Invest In Our Children, Invest In Our Youth Report

This report calls for a reinvestment in community-led alternatives that support and nourish young people and their communities.

Learn More about Invest in Our Children, Invest in Our Youth
#LiberateToEducate Policy Platform report booklet and infographic

#LiberateToEducate Policy Platform

The Youth Justice Project created the #LiberateToEducate Policy Platform recommendations aimed to effectively end the school-to-prison pipeline in DPS.

Learn More About #LiberateToEducate
"Police brutality doesn't just happen in the streets, it happens in our schools too."

#CounselorsNotCops Campaign

This campaign calls for the removal of all school resource officers (SROs) from Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) schools.  

Learn More About #CounselorsNotCops

Youth Justice in the Community

Youth Justice Voices Series

A series of interviews with community members committed to youth justice about issues with the juvenile justice system.
Listen to their Stories

Youth Justice News

Justice System Reform

Warnings About Police in Schools: SCSJ Releases Memo to Fayetteville City Officials 

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (July 10, 2024) — Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) recommends Fayetteville keeps its schools police-free in a memo addressing the city’s proposal to replace school resource officers with members of Fayetteville Police Department ahead of a Thursday City Council vote.  After the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office pulled its officers out of its…

Read More Warnings About Police in Schools: SCSJ Releases Memo to Fayetteville City Officials 
School Resource Officer standing in an empty school hallway