Juvenile Justice - What Works and What Doesn't (A Roundup)

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."

Other material of general interest (not necessarily about juvenile justice):

• SAMHSA Releases School Toolkit for Suicide Prevention
• U.S. Attorney General Chairs Meeting of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
• Six of Every 10 Texas High School Seniors Have Been Suspended, Expelled or Arrested
• Daring to Fail: First-Person Stories of Criminal Justice Reform