Blog: Juvenile Justice Reform

Isn't it great when you see a young person beat the odds? You know what I mean -- you'll read a story or see a video about a teen who struggled with drugs, alcohol, and crime, and somehow overcame all of that (and probably more) ... and it just makes you feel fantastic, doesn't it?
Well, it should. But Karen Pittman, CEO and Founder of the Forum for Youth Investment, has an even more inspiring idea, which she shared in an interview at the Reclaiming Futures Leadership Institute held in Miami in May:
 

 
You can also see Karen's full presentation at the Reclaiming Futures Leadership Institute here. 

This week, I've got a monster roundup of news, grant opportunities, and conferences related to the juvenile justice system and (a little) about adolescent substance abuse treatment and behavioral healthcare for kids. Here goes:

• Reclaiming Futures Nassau County: Football Star Andrew Quarless Speaks to Juvenile Drug Court Graduates
• U.S. Supreme Court Says Age Matters When it Comes to Miranda Warnings
  Miranda warnings must be given by police when a suspect is being interrogated in a custodial setting. What's considered custody or the degree to which a suspect is being restrained are what matters here: in this case, a 13-year-old in North Carolina was interrogated on school grounds by a police officer about alleged crimes committed off-campus. He was not read his Miranda rights; his lawyers argued that his subsequent confession was therefore inadmissible. North Carolina's Supreme Court said his age wasn't relevant -- arguing, as I understand it, that the youth was not in a custodial situation and could have left. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, writing that, “It is beyond dispute that children will often feel bound to submit to police questioning when an adult in the same circumstances would feel free to leave.” (Hat tips to the Juvenile Law Center and the National Juvenile Justice Network.)

[NOTE: The date and time of the webinar have been changed to June 27th at 2 p.m. EST. -Ed.]
Via the National Reentry Resource Center:

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) recently released the solicitation for Second Chance Act grant applications to state and local governments and federally recognized Indian tribes for juvenile reentry planning and demonstration projects (Section 101 of Public Law 110-199). This funding is available to help jurisdictions plan and implement programs and strategies to reduce recidivism and ensure safe and successful reentry of juveniles released from prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities back to the community.
The deadline for submitting an application is July 11, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. ET.
To download the solicitation, click here
To help potential applicants respond to this solicitation, the National Reentry Resource Center will hold a free webinar on Monday, June 20th at 3:00 p.m. ET. June 27th at 2:00 p.m. EST. Representatives from OJJDP will explain the details of the solicitation and answer questions from applicants. To register for the webinar, click here.

[Testimony given April 2011 by John Roman, Ph.D., before the Council of the District of Columbia Committee on Human Services. Reprinted with permission from The Urban Institute. -Ed.]
Good morning. My name is John Roman and I am a senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where I have studied innovative crime and justice policies and programs for more than a decade. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today about integrating innovative practices to better serve juveniles involved with the justice system and to improve public safety.
Using Lessons from Recent Innovations to Create a Holistic Approach to Intervening with Juveniles
Over the last decade, across the United States, there has been tremendous interest in reforming juvenile and criminal justice systems to both improve their performance and to improve public safety by reducing crime and delinquency among adjudicated youth. What I would like to describe today is how those innovative practices—the Reclaiming Futures initiative, drugs courts and other alternatives to commitment, and Project HOPE—might be integrated to maximize their effectiveness and minimize costs.
In the first phase of Reclaiming Futures, begun in 2002, multidisciplinary teams in ten communities worked collaboratively to enhance the availability and quality of substance abuse interventions for youth involved with the juvenile justice system. All ten projects relied on judicial leadership, court/community collaborations, interorganizational performance management, enhanced treatment quality, and multiagency partnerships to improve their systems of care for youthful offenders with substance abuse problems.

Charles Taylor Gould (photo at right), a former co-worker of mine, is a juvenile probation officer in Multnomah County, Oregon, who's been hearing stories for fifteen years from teenage girls in the juvenile justice system who've been sexually exploited, or victimized by sex trafficking.
So what did he do? He did what anyone would do: he made a full-length documentary. And along the way, he interviewed people like U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and actress Daryl Hannah.
Your American Teen "follows three teens for approximately 2 years. All three girls suffered severe trauma as children and throughout their adolescence; all three had parents that were unable or unwilling to care for them." Gould and his fellow producers, Tyler Benjamin and Keith Murphy [the latter is also a juvenile probation officer and co-worker of Gould's], "interviewed survivors, detectives, organization executives, celebrities, lawyers, policy makers and many others in [a] quest to find out what is being done to prevent sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls" in the Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to make this documentary?
Mainly, it was that you see kids in deep pain ... I've been doing my work 15 years now. I work with all populations at juvenile justice because I lead skill groups [educational, cognitive restructuring, etc.], which means I get kids from all units - a girl who was trafficked and in our system because of that, a gang member, sex offender -- any of them. I hear their stories and they're almost unbelievable.
As a juvenile court counselor, your voice can be loud -- but only so loud, and the only other way I knew how to yell to Joe Public to hear these stories was to do the other thing I love, and that's making films. It's the best way to get people to hear these stories.

Editor's Note: The video links provided here are for informational purposes only; Reclaiming Futures and its partners are not endorsing the film or seeking financial support for it.  

• Does Your Youth Program Work?
  An OJJDP publication. Dates from 2000, but it provides a great introduction to evaluating success. (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)
• Reclaiming Futures in the News: "Drug Courts Restore Addicts"
  A great piece profiling the adult and juvenile drug courts and the accomplishments of Reclaiming Futures in Hocking County, Ohio. The article originally appeared in the Logan Daily News, but you can find the full article on the Reclaiming Futures website.
• Improving Educational Outcomes of Youth in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Systems Through Interagency Communication and Collaboration
  Maybe you read that headline and thought to yourself, "Got it covered: we're already collaborating and communicating as well as we can." I can tell you from experience with multiple sites implementing the Reclaiming Futures model that there's always room for improvement -- and investing time and attention in this sort of collaboration pays off big time for kids, families, agencies, and service providers. So be sure to check out this comprehensive, 20-page "practice guide" put out in May 2011 by the (deep breath) National Evaluation and Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Children and (don't forget to breathe) Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, or At-Risk (NDTAC). (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)

British-based Prevention Action posted a series of three posts on evidence-based programs in juvenile justice (well -- three of them, anyway), what's necessary to encourage the adoption of evidence-based practices in the field, and barriers to their adoption:

• Juvenile Justice: what works & what doesn't
  Glosses an article by Multi-systemic Therapy (MST) co-creator Scott Henggeler and Sonja K. Schoenwald summarizing the evidence base.
• Juvenile Justice: making "what works" a reality
  Continues to gloss the article by Henggeler and Schoenwald, in which they make recommendations to researchers and policy makers on ways to foster the spread of evidence-based practices.
• Juvenile Justice: policy experts speak back
  Several U.S. experts respond ["speak back"--?!] to the points raised by Henggeler and Schoenwald, talking about barriers to the spread of evidence-based practices in juvenile justice. 

(Don't be too dazzled by these articles' insistent focus on MST, Functional Family Therapy (FFT), and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care. While these three have good research backing, Mark Lipsey and his colleagues have found that locally-grown programs, if well-implemented, can also achieve great results. And a while back, I also linked here to an excellent, broader-based international review of evidence-based practice in juvenile justice.)
UPDATE: Jeffrey Butts, Ph.D., left the following comment on Facebook in response to a link to the "Juvenile Justice: what works & what doesn't" post: "This summary of general principles is welcome, but the writers go too far when they imply that the programs they promote are the end result of some protracted, impartial search for effectiveness. Research on therapeutic programs like MST is just the beginning. We have a lot of work to do before we can say 'what works.' For now, all we can say is "this approach seems to work better than that approach." We should not imply that the hunt for effectiveness is over."

[Although the post below focuses specifically on data from Oregon, it should resonate with communities all over the country. Drop us an email or leave a comment: do people in your community mistakenly believe crime is gong up? -Ed.]
Major violent and property crime rates have been consistently declining in the United States, but does the public believe crime is going down? 
This was the topic of “Do Oregonians Know about the Crime Drop?”, a research brief recently released by Portland State University’s Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute. 
In Oregon, like many states throughout the U.S., violent and property crime rates are at the lowest levels since the 1960’s. A steady decline in crime rates has been occurring for 15 years, with minor increases or leveling in some years, but the overall drop is significant. A national crime victimization survey also reports the same declining trend. 
Such declines should be cause for celebration. However, a recent survey of Oregonians conducted by the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute found that:

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has just ruled that it's constitutional to sentence juveniles to life imprisonment without the possibility parole for intentional homicide. The defendant in that case, Omer Ninham, was 14 years old when he was charged with killing a 13-year-old boy. The case will very likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
The Supreme Court hasn't yet decided whether sentencing a juvenile to “death in prison” is cruel and unusual punishment. It has, however, indicated that how we sentence juveniles has to be different from how we sentence adults. In both Roper v. Simmons and Graham v. Florida the Court relied on scientific evidence about the adolescent brain. Ultimately that evidence allowed the Court to conclude that extreme sentences—respectively, death penalty in cases of homicide and life imprisonment in cases short of homicide—violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.