English-Language Access for Philadelphia’s Spanish Speakers: A Simple Innovation to Reduce Juvenile Justice Placements?

Abstract

Language access plays a role in the high rate of disproportionate minority contact experienced by foreign language youth in Philadelphia’s juvenile justice system. As Philadelphia’s immigrant population expands, thousands of parents send their children to English-speaking schools, while the parents themselves have limited English skills. Without innovative approaches to reach foreign language speaking parents, we risk losing important allies who can help to keep young people in classrooms and out of courtrooms.

Despite legal mandates (see Appendix), schools and juvenile courts continue to struggle with the comprehensive translation of key documents. Verbal interpretation is scarce and not always available. Furthermore, while valuable resources exist, they operate in obscurity, and most people do not know how to utilize them. This lack of access can frustrate linguistic minorities, disengaging them from a child’s school and from the city’s juvenile justice system.

Language barriers are not the fundamental explanation for disproportionate minority presence in juvenile and truancy courts. However, compared to entrenched problems of poverty and crime, filling the language gaps would be relatively easy. Addressing language barriers would increase the participation of foreign language speaking parents in schools and the juvenile justice system, subsequently decreasing truancy and delinquency. With a campaign aimed at educating individuals with limited English proficiency (as well as society as a whole) on language rights, creating exposure for the resources that already exist, and advocating for targeted improvements within existing resources, language access barriers might crumble.