Assistance program
Indigent Defense
$14.4 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Office of Justice Programs, Justice, Department of
- Assistance
- Cooperative Agreements (Discretionary Grants);Project Grants (Discretionary)
- CFDA number
- 16.836
- What it does
- This program supports states and localities in developing and implementing strategies to ensure that youth involved with the juvenile justice system have fair and equal access to quality legal representation; ensure that offenders involved with the juvenile justice system have resources that address the collateral consequences of justice system involvement; and/or provide training for the juvenile indigent defense bar, including public defenders and court-appointed counsel working on behalf of juvenile indigent defendants. The objective of this program is to enhance the capacity to deliver high-quality, fair, and comprehensive legal services to youth who have come into contact with the juvenile justice system- by . (1) developing and implementing specialized training for staff and stakeholders involved with assisting juvenile offenders within the juvenile justice system; (2) improving juvenile courts’ data collection and reporting capacity, specifically relating to youth and their legal representation, and access to services pre- and post-adjudication; (3) analyzing the juvenile defense delivery system(s) with respect to juvenile offenders’ access to services by identifying critical program, practice, and policy needs and gaps; areas for improvement; and aspects that are working and may be replicable and/or scalable across jurisdictions; and (4) addressing an identified need or gap within the applicant’s juvenile justice system related to providing juvenile offenders with plenary access to high-quality juvenile defense services. The performance measures associated with these objectives are: PM 1: Percentage of a justice system’s decision points informed by the results of data analysis PM 2: Number of juvenile defense attorneys who completed training on topics pertinent to juvenile defense PM3:Percentage of a justice system’s decision points informed by the results of data analysis
- Who benefits
- individuals subject to juvenile court jurisdiction
- Who applies
- Applicants are limited to states (including territories and the District of Columbia), federally recognized tribal governments (as determined by the Secretary of the Interior), nonprofit and for-profit organizations (including tribal nonprofit and for-profit organizations) and institutions of higher education (including tribal institutions of higher education).
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments