Despite record budget deficits, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice continues to spend enormous sums of taxpayer dollars on expensive residential institutions. These institutions hold thousands of children who could be better served in less expensive, more effective community-based programs — programs that hold youth accountable, protect public safety, produce better outcomes for children and families, and make it more likely that children go on to become productive and employable members of society.
All Publications
Dangerous Liaisons
This report examines how hard-line U.S. religious-right groups that have spent decades demonizing LGBT people are focusing their attention – and propaganda – on a legal battle over the criminalization of LGBT sex in Belize, the outcome of which could affect criminal statutes in as many as a dozen other Caribbean countries.
10 Myths About Gay Men and Lesbians
Dissecting the Claims Used by the Hard-Line Religious Right to Demonize the LGBT Community
Unsafe at These Speeds
Every day in Alabama, thousands of people report to work at vast poultry processing plants. Inside these frigid plants, workers stand almost shoulder-to-shoulder as chicken carcasses zip by on high-speed processing lines. Together, small teams of workers may hang, gut or slice more than 100 birds in a single minute. It’s a process they’ll repeat for eight hours or more in order to prepare birds for dinner tables and restaurants across America.
Easy Money, Impossible Debt: How Predatory Lending Traps Alabama’s Poor
This report contains stories of individuals and families across Alabama who have fallen into this trap.
Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States
This report, updated in February 2013, details the systematic exploitation of foreign workers who come to this country for temporary jobs under the nation's H-2 guestworker program. Based on dozens of legal cases and interviews with thousands of guestworkers, it documents how guestworkers are routinely cheated out of wages, forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs, and held virtually captive by employers.
Unlocking Your Community’s Hidden Strengths: A Guidebook to Community Asset-Mapping
This guide, to a process known as "community asset-mapping," rejects the habit of describing communities in which many of our children live by listing their problems. Instead of focusing on deficits, asset-mapping spotlights methods of tapping into the hidden wealth of knowledge in all communities for the benefit of children.
Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve
Our September 2011 report, Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011, was prompted by the news that American high school seniors knew little about the civil rights movement. We called for states to improve their standards and raise expectations of what students should learn. In this report, we offer models for improvement.
Alabama's Shame: HB 56 and the War on Immigrants
This report contains stories reported to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They illustrate the devastating impact HB 56 has had on Alabama Latinos, regardless of their immigration status. The stories also illustrate that HB 56 has unleashed a kind of vigilantism, leading some Alabamians to believe they can cheat, harass and intimidate Latinos with impunity.
Review of Services for Alabama Girls Charged with Delinquency
Alabama has made many important changes to the juvenile justice system. There is now an opportunity to create a statewide model for girls. Developing a statewide, locally run model system of care for girls will again demonstrate the state’s commitment to move away from a typical correctional institutional approach to troubled youth. Report by Marty Beyer, Ph.D. and Paul DeMuro.
The Anti-Gay Lobby: The Family Research Council, the American Family Association & the Demonization of LGBT People
Together, the Family Research Council (FRC) and the American Family Association (AFA) may comprise the most important anti-gay lobby in this country.
Teaching the Movement
The National Assessment of Educational Progress—commonly called “The Nation’s Report Card”—tells a dismal story: Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And it’s no surprise. Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history.
Attacking the Constitution: State Legislators for Legal Immigration & the Anti-Immigrant Movement
Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism
This report on the history of the Ku Klux Klan, America’s first terrorist organization, was prepared by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Klanwatch was formed in 1981 to help curb Klan and racist violence through litigation, education and monitoring.
When Mr. Kobach Comes to Town: Nativist Laws and the Communities They Damage
Access Denied: New Orleans Students and Parents Identify Barriers to Public Education
New Orleans families remember the hope they felt after Hurricane Katrina when education stakeholders promised a “world-class” public school system, “in which every decision focuses on the best interests of the children.” The pledge to rebuild New Orleans public schools hinged on a model in which quality schools would be accessible to all, while providing innovative education practices tailored to meet the long-neglected needs of students. Unfortunately, these promises remain empty for many New Orleans students.
Fiscal Responsibility: The Key to a Safer, Smarter, and Stronger Juvenile Justice System
Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry
This report is based on extensive interviews conducted with 150 immigrant women from Mexico, Guatemala and other Latin-American countries. They live and work in Florida, California, North Carolina, New York, Iowa, Arkansas and other states. All have worked in the fields or in the factories that produce our food. They are among the 4 million undocumented women living in the U.S.
Suspended Education
This report seeks to answer the issues of efficacy and fairness in the use of out-of-school suspension, the usage of which has increased dramatically as a form of discipline. In part, the higher use of out-of-school suspension reflects the growth of policies such as "zero tolerance," an approach to school discipline that imposes removal from school for a broad array of school code violations - from violent behavior to truancy and dress code violations.
Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism and the Hypocrisy of Hate
Sexual Violence Against Farmworkers: A Guidebook for Criminal Justice Professionals