Professor Sara Goodkind, co-author Beth Sondel, colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work, and other collaborators have just completed work on the report Post-Shuman Visioning: Reimagining Safety for Young People and Communities. Pittsburgh’s Shuman Juvenile Detention Center was closed due to unsafe conditions in September 2021, and in the aftermath Allegheny County leaders have been faced with difficult decisions about what comes after Shuman. In response, local systems professionals, academics, and other community members came together to discuss and collectively vision future options that address the problems that led to Shuman’s closure and are the least restrictive and most supportive possible. As part of this project, the team, including faculty members Sara Goodkind, Jeff Shook, and Leah Jacobs, interviewed young people who had spent time at Shuman and met with teachers, staff, and students from the Free L.A. School to learn from their experiences. This brief report shares what they learned and offers a set of collaboratively developed questions for local decision makers to consider as they determine next steps for ensuring safety for young people and communities.
As a part of this project, the team held listening sessions with young adults who had spent time at Shuman and met with people from the Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles to learn from their efforts to close their juvenile detention facility and open a liberatory educational program, the Free L.A. School, in its place. They then shared and discussed what they were hearing in Black Girls Equity Alliance Juvenile Justice Workgroup meetings, which led to conversations involving juvenile court judges, abolitionists, and people from a variety of positions and perspectives in between. “The process has been powerful, productive, and hopeful,” said Dr. Goodkind. “The report is the culmination of our conversations and learning. We hope that it helps to enable continued conversations among systems leaders, policy makers, and community members about how we can collaboratively support our young people and work to end youth incarceration.”
The team listened to the young people who were incarcerated at Shuman, as well as students, teachers, and staff at the Free L.A. School and concluded that policy makers need to reimagine safety, support, and inclusion for young people and communities in Allegheny County by focusing on mutual accountability and healing rather than punishment. Researchers found that an overarching goal should be to create a path to end youth incarceration by investing in supports that will render youth detention obsolete. To do this, leaders must create safe and nurturing spaces for young people who have been determined to pose an imminent risk to their community so as to avoid the current practice of sending them out of the county or to the county jail. The report suggests that to promote the safety of young people and communities, we must recognize that these goals are connected rather than in opposition to each other.
The team also advocates for ensuring that all youth-serving programs and institutions have excellent staff and careful oversight, and that funds and efforts are reallocated to mental health supports and to the development of a liberatory school for young people who have been incarcerated, pushed out, or excluded from other spaces, which can provide an important means to care for and reintegrate them, and thus prevent future violence.
In addition to professors Shook and Jacobs, contributors included alumna Miracle Jones, who was involved in many of the conversations and discussions, and alumna Morgan Overton, whose art graces the cover of the report. Doctoral student Cortney VanHook was also one of the people who conducted listening sessions with young people who spent time at Shuman.
Read Post-Shuman Visioning: Reimagining Safety for Young People and Communities.
Funding for the interviewers and those who shared their experiences was provided by the FISA Foundation.