2018 Carliner Award Presentation at #ACS2018

ACS is proud to honor Lauren Fine and Joanna Visser Adjoian, Co-Founders and Co-Directors of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), with the David Carliner Public Interest Award. The award, given annually, honors a mid-career public interest attorney whose work best exemplifies David Carliner's legacy of fearless, uncompromising, and creative advocacy on behalf of marginalized people.

YSRP works to keep children out of adult jails and prisons, and to bring home people who were sentenced as children to live in prison without the possibility of parole ("juvenile lifers"). Since founding YSRP in 2014, Lauren and Joanna have applied creative and effective strategies to Pennsylvania's unjust juvenile justice system. Their team represents young people who face charges in the adult criminal justice system and in 92% of their cases, YSRP has prevented their clients from going to adult prison. Additionally, they have led a successful campaign to end Philadelphia's practice of charging parents for the cost of their children's incarceration, created a multi-disciplinary pro bono project at the University of Pennsylvania (the Youth Advocacy Project) that has trained and supervised some 70 law and social work students to wrk in teams on behalf of youth charged as adults in Philadelphia, and created an infrastructure for providing mitigation and reentry planning for juvenile lifers in Philadelphia.