Marsha Levick
Levick has been front and center for that growth. She is the organization's chief legal officer, overseeing litigation and authoring amicus briefs as part of the group's efforts to reform the juvenile justice system.
She has also been a major part of some of the Juvenile Law Center's key victories, including serving as co-counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court case Montgomery v. Louisiana. The justices in that case held that the court's prohibition against life-without-parole sentences for children could be applied retroactively to people already serving such sentences.
Levick sat down with Law360 to discuss the field of juvenile law, what keeps her motivated and how things have changed since the early days of her career.
How did you and your co-founders decide to start the center and start doing this work?
We were folks who had really come of age through high school, in college and then law school through the '60s and '70s. They were tumultuous times. They were also times of enormous progressive political activity. We believed that law could be used as a tool for social change, and we chose to work on behalf of children really because it was quite a nascent field in the mid-1970s.
We didn't know anything about how far we could go in 1975 — but we are coming up on our 45th anniversary in 2020. So it's been a pretty good ride.
How have things changed for the center since the early days?
When we started, we were local. We were really servicing southeast Pennsylvania. We saw ourselves as almost a storefront legal services office.
But over the course of time, as we began to do that kind of individual representation on behalf of kids, we also became attuned to the many systemic issues that affect children who come into contact with our legal system, both through the child welfare system and the justice system. We became involved in class action litigation very early on.
One of the first lawsuits we became involved in was a case that involved overcrowding and pretty horrific physical conditions at the juvenile detention center here in Philadelphia. But also, we became involved in a case challenging educational due process procedures having to do with suspension and expulsion of kids. I think that those two cases laid the groundwork for how we began to approach the work moving forward.
Everything we do involving kids always begins with one child's story. And sometimes the best way to address that one child's story is through direct representation, and sometimes it's to understand what's behind that story and look for opportunities to help not only that child but the many other children who are similarly situated.
How has the field in general changed since you began?
As we rounded the corner of the 21st century, there has been a very robust conversation about the developmental differences between children and adults. That of course led to the Supreme Court striking the juvenile death penalty in Roper [v. Simmons].
The 21st century approach that we've taken ... is to ground our work in research and in the developmental science and targeting our advocacy to ensure that our legal systems that deal with children are responsive.
Also coming out of that developmental research, we are now seeing that a lot of the developmental attributes that we associate with adolescence — impulsivity, susceptibility to negative peer influence, and of course capacity for change — don't suddenly cease when a person turns 18. It turns out that many of those characteristics really continue to the early-to-mid 20s, because the regions of the brain associated with those characteristics continue to develop into the early-to-mid 20s.
So as another aspect of how our work has changed, we also now are doing work on behalf of the 18-to-25 population, looking at how they are treated.
The third observation that I would make is our concern with racial justice.
Those of us who work in this space have always known that this system is racist. Now this is a conversation that is not happening in small groups behind closed doors, but happening out in the open. And we now feel the urgency of thinking about how we are using the law to create and achieve and motivate social change.
Are there issues that you find are persistent or that keep coming back?
One is the persistent racial disparities. Even as we have reduced the footprint of the justice system for kids — and that is absolutely a good thing — we are still generally seeing black and brown children in that system. That is frustrating, and deeply troubling. Thinking about the country today and the goals of our society — it can't be a system that is only designed for black and brown children.
The second piece is the punitive nature of our juvenile justice system. I think that it's really only within the last five or 10 years that we have really looked at ourselves in the mirror and looked at ourselves in comparison to our peer nations around the world. It's not just that we lock more people up, but it's the duration of the incarceration. Our willingness to incarcerate people for life far exceeds anything that our peer nations do, even in the most heinous crimes.
We can be grateful that we have struck those most severe penalties of the death penalty and mandatory life without parole for children, but they remain exposed to decades of incarceration.
For you personally, what keeps you motivated to keep doing this work? What has kept you going for the past 45 years?
It really is just my outrage. I think people who do this work are all motivated in different ways, and that's entirely appropriate. For me, I was outraged 45 years ago, and I'm no less outraged today at the way that we treat children in our society. It is a life's passion and a life's dedication. I can't imagine doing anything else, I can't imagine retiring. To me, there is so much left to be done.
--Editing by Aaron Pelc.
All Access is a series of discussions with leaders in the access to justice field. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
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