Blog: No bio box

If it were up to you, what would you have the Obama Administration do in its next 100 days to help teens in the juvenile justice system struggling with alcohol and drug issues? 
You can submit your answers, using stories (100 words or less), pictures, and videos (no more than 2 minutes), to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "100 Days/100 Voices" campaign beginning April 30th. (Follow the link for info on how to participate.)
While the Casey Foundation's campaign has a broader focus, this is your chance to speak out on behalf of kids in the justice system caught in the cycle of drugs, alcohol, and crime -- and their families. 

Duke University has just launched a great website that allows policymakers and others to get information about teen alcohol and drug use in North Carolina.  It pulls from multiple public information sources about teen arrests for possession by drug, emergency room visits, and much more. County data can be compared to state data, data can be examined by county on a map of North Carolina ... and that's just the start.
The amount of information and possible permutations to explore on the Substance Abuse Among North Carolina Adolescents site are both impressive. Every state should have a tool like this.
Know of others? Let me know!
UPDATE: I've been informed that Duke created the website in partnership with the Center for Youth, Family, Community Partnerships at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, with a grant from the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT).Additional partners are listed on the splash page.

We in the youth services field should never let our desire to be "evidence-based" turn us into a "faith-based" movement. When we're searching for the most effective ways to help young people avoid trouble with drugs and stay out of the justice system, we should be agnostics — even the most attractive new answer should never stop us from asking important questions.

Below are four lessons in reforming the juvenile justice system that I gleaned from a recent interview with Bart Lubow, Director of the Programs for High Risk Youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation (pictured below). He’s best known for his pioneering work leading the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), which helps jurisdictions safely reduce unnecessary reliance on juvenile  detention and stimulate other reforms, notably reducing disproportionate minority confinement. --Ed.


Lesson #1: Be Specific About What You’re Changing
"The biggest reason why system reform efforts fail is that they don’t provide system players with an alternative set of policies and programs. Instead, they provide a lot of vague talk, such as, 'We’ve gotta collaborate,' or 'We’ve got to be different,' etc.  Without providing the guts of the new, re-engineered system, the status quo prevails. Though people are often critical of initiatives that are relatively prescriptive in terms of laying out the elements of the system reform, it’s a naïve proposition to expect the status quo to be overcome without a lot of operational detail. There can be lots of room for local adaptation, but within a fairly prescriptive framework."

Imagine: what if New York's Twin Towers had been filled with teens 15-19 years old? And what if they fell not once, but every year?

That horrific scenario -- minus the World Trade Center -- may be happening already.

Whoa. Here's news from Changing the Court that drug courts are being challenged in Maryland on the basis that they're unconstitutional.

Thanks to Join Together, we've got information about two new grants available from the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT): 

1. Family-Centered Substance Abuse Treatment Grants - These focus on treating adolescents in a holistic way. They are designed to "provide substance-abuse services to adolescents, their families/primary caregivers and older transition-age youth and where appropriate, any significant others/mentors or other appropriate adults." Grantees will be trained in and implement the Adolescent Community Reinforcement Approach (A-CRA) and the Assertive Continuing Care (ACC) protocol. Deadline April 24th.
2. Even more funds are available for the Offender Reentry Program grants, which seek to "expand and/or enhance substance abuse treatment and related recovery and reentry services to sentenced juvenile and adult offenders returning to the community from incarceration for criminal/juvenile offenses." Deadline May 21st.

• New Jersey's Office of the Child Advocate just released a great report on the state's successful detention reform efforts. For a truly compelling graph showing how juvenile arrests in New Jersey kept dropping even as use of detention was reduced, see the new (and interesting in its own right) Policy for Results website, an initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Policy that focuses on "better results for kids and families through research-informed policy."

As those of you who care about juvenile justice no doubt know already, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which sets standards for juvenile justice systems throughout the United States, is overdue for renewal.
The good news is that the JJDPA was reintroduced last week in the U.S. Senate, although Youth Today wondered about the JJDPA's fate in the House of Representatives. Even better: you can hear Nancy Gannon Hornberger, Executive Director of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ), explain the JJDPA and its core principles in a podcast posted by the Campaign for Youth Justice.