About NYU Blueprints for Progressive Change in Juvenile Justice
Children face profound and predictable disparities in their encounters with the legal system. Eliminating these disparities, and accompanying social inequality, requires innovative, multidisciplinary, and responsive solutions – solutions that bridge education, mental health, public safety, child welfare, and the law.
NYU Blueprints for Progressive Change in Juvenile Justice involves faculty working across disciplinary boundaries to address these disparities. In collaboration with policy and practice leaders, we develop and test research-based solutions to create meaningful and long-lasting change in the lives of children and their families.
Blueprints is co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC) and Strategies to Reduce Inequality (SRI) initiative, and advances NYU’s mission to leverage rigorous scholarship toward social impact. If you are interested in Blueprints, please contact Chris Barker, Associate Director, IHDSC.
NYU Schools:
NYU Faculty Members:
Carly Baetz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone School of Medicine. Her work examines the impact of trauma on justice-involved youth and the effectiveness of implementing trauma-informed services for youth, families, and staff in juvenile justice settings. Previously, she represented youth in child protective and juvenile delinquency cases as a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, Juvenile Rights Practice in New York, NY.
Elise Cappella is Vice Dean for Research at NYU's Steinhardt School and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU. Her scholarship examines and promotes mental health and academic achievement among students in school and out-of-school settings. In partnership with community and policy agencies, she studies school climate, teaching practices, peer relationships, and social-behavioral interventions that influence the learning and development of students experiencing risk due to poverty and/or behavioral problems.
Erin Godfrey is Director of NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU’s Steinhardt School. Her research examines how individuals interact with, understand, and are influenced by the systems in which they are embedded, including schools, juvenile justice settings and other social service contexts. She explores how individuals perceive and justify social and economic systems and hierarchies, the psychological consequences of these inequalities and ways to counteract adverse effects. She also uses these perspectives to describe and improve upon contexts of social service delivery.
Sireen Irsheid is an Assistant Professor at NYU Silver School of Social Work. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow for Juvenile Justice, Education, and Mental Health at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Dr. Irsheid is a clinician and critical race scholar whose research and practice focus on the complex interplay between race, education, mental health, and structural violence. Specifically, her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine and disrupt the multidimensional aspects of systemic racism and contextual processes that lead to mental health, education inequities, and the school-prison nexus.
Shabnam Javdani is Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. The overarching goal of her scholarship is to understand and reduce the development of inequality-related mental health and legal problems and study community and institutional responses to these complex challenges. Her research hopes to identify meaningful solutions, with a focus on promoting equality for underserved families, girls, women, and gender-expansive individuals.
Michael Lindsey is Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. He is a child and adolescent mental health intervention services researcher whose work focuses on children with depressive disorders and the provision of school based mental health services. He specializes in engagement factors that improve connections to treatment among vulnerable youth with serious psychiatric illnesses.
Luis A. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Education Leadership in the Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology at NYU. His areas of expertise include K-12 education reform with a particular emphasis on issues of teacher policy and teacher leadership. His research primarily examines policies and practices capable of sustaining an equitable distribution of diverse and highly qualified teachers and seeks to better understand how teachers impact education outcomes and experiences of traditionally marginalized youth.
Vincent Southerland is Executive Director of the NYU Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law. Prior to joining NYU's School of Law in 2017, he was a state and federal public defender, and a Senior Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). His work there included the successful representation of children sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
