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The Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice has released an annual report documenting its mandates, responsibilities, challenges, progress, and outcomes.

CHICAGO — A summer jobs program that engaged mentors to help troubled kids stay on track is linked with a big reduction in youth arrests for violent crimes.

Students break the rules and when they do there's a punitive system in place in most schools. But other schools are handling discipline problems a different way and Springfield District 186 is looking into those practices to see how it could work here

A final roadblock to a chance at freedom for Illinois’ juvenile lifers is now gone. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that anyone sentenced to mandatory life without parole as a juvenile should be resentenced.

Cook County’s juvenile justice system is broken and even more, its main work should be turned over to community-based programs targeted to help troubled youth. That's what a new report says, parts of which are being released today by Roosevelt University and the Alder School of Psychology.

I've written a fair amount about restorative justice — RJ — over the last few years. It's a movement about healing and sanity, truth, dignity, respect, wholeness. It's catching on in Chicago, where I live: in the schools, in the juvenile justice system, in the broken 'hoods. RJ is about repairing harm, not punishing wrongdoers and, in the process, saddling them with a lifelong identity as criminals. It's also about telling the truth, and building relationships with truth as the bedrock. It's about connecting.

The records of juvenile offenders are not nearly as confidential as they should be, and the records are also not easily sealed or expunged, a report shows. Illinois ranks below the national average in how it protects confidentiality and facilitates expungement of juvenile records.

Why aren’t there truant officers, riding around like they used to?

"They've taken responsibility for their actions, and it's a group of kids somewhere right around their age saying, 'Hey, listen, you did really kind of screw up, here's why we think you screwed up.' … I think having kids your own age tell you that is a little more impactful than just an adult," Carlson-Webb said.

"You can give a child advice as an adult, but coming from a teenager their own age, it really makes an impact on them. That's the point," said Laura Maglio, a Kane County Assistant State's Attorney assigned to the juvenile unit.