Blog: Resources

With parity legislation and the changes that health care reform will bring, agencies that treat adolescents will need to adapt their business practices.
Reform expands available funding for prevention, treatment and recovery support services. It also opens the door to third-party reimbursement.
NIATx developed the NIATx Third-party Billing Guide to help agencies create or improve a system for billing third-party payers. The guide includes step-by-step instructions to implement a billing system, improve collections, and strengthen the business practices essential to stability and growth.

Download a copy of the NIATx Third-party Billing Guide today!

Want to partner with families on juvenile justice reform?
Been there, done that, but still struggling?
Do yourself a favor and check out "An Advocate's Guide to Meaningful Family Partnerships: Tips from the Field," from the National Juvenile Justice Network. 
Based on interviews with 26 advocacy organizations and in-depth interviews with eight juvenile justice advocacy groups (both family-led and non-family-led), the guide is a great primer / refresher on what works when partnering with families.
You'll find reminders about leveling the playing field so that professional advocates and family advocates can both contribute; the need to be frank about and work to address underrepresentation of people of color on the staff of advocacy organizations; and ways to help advocates celebrate their wins even when the legislative process falls short of their ultimate goals.
What's one of the biggest barriers to recruiting family members as advocates for juvenile justice reform? Often, they begin their journey as advocates because they care intensely about their own child, sibling, or relation; they're less interested in fighting for changes to the system on behalf of other people's children.
Here, the NJJN guide once again provides useful tips. None of the solutions are likely to surprise you, but they're often overlooked in my experience, especially when it comes to juvenile justice agencies seeking to give families voice.  
In addition, you'll also find capsule examples of organizations that have achieved success with recruiting family members, building their expertise, and benefiting from the ability of family advocates to push reform from outside the system: 

• Books not Bars; 
• Citizens for Second Chances (newsletters); 
• The Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana; and
• Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children.   

It's easy to focus on juvenile justice reform during good times; the real test comes with budget cuts.
But even wrenching cuts to staff and services can provide a chance to achieve lasting improvements to juvenile justice policies and programs.
Don't believe me? The National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN) has just provided us all with a road map that's concrete, helpful, and surprisingly inspiring. Titled, "The Real Costs and Benefits of Change: Finding Opportunities for Reform During Difficult Fiscal Times," it's a model of cool-headed resourcefulness.

Teens on Drugs - How We Talk About it Matters

• Hat tip to Outreach for this piece on heroin use by teens in the suburbs from Robbie Woliver, the journalist who broke the story a year ago: "These kids just don't think it's a big deal one way or another -- there is no stigma any longer, nor is it a badge of honor. It doesn't make them 'cool.' It's just what everybody does. No big deal."

This is scary stuff, no doubt, but the coverage is troubling. Woliver wants everyone to wake up because suburban teens are using heroin -- teens who are not just "the lowest-life dregs of society in skid rows and downtrodden ghettos in the worst parts of urban areas," but who "have the same family values." Which makes me wonder what Woliver would think of the teens in the justice system, where substance abuse and addiction has been a common problem for years. Maybe what's needed isn't just alarm about middle-class white kids dying from heroin, tragic though that is. Maybe we need to start caring about all our kids. 

• Want to know what works when it comes to talking to the public about teens with drug and alcohol issues who are in trouble with the law? Check out the recommendations in Solutions Storytelling: Messaging to Mobilize Support for Children's Issues. (Hat tip to sparkaction.)

 
Teens in Lockup - a Documentary and a Photo Project about Juveniles in the Justice System

• Click on the screen shot at right to check out four short clips from "Juvies," an award-winning documentary from 2004 focusing on youth in California's juvenile justice system who were tried as adults and received extremely harsh sentences (photo at right is of "Sandra). You might also be interested in the "syllabus" assembled by the filmmakers in response to frequent requests for additional classroom resources to supplement the film. 

• Photographer Ara Oshagan, who shot the B-roll for "Juvies," recently produced a documentary photo project called, "Juvies: a Collaborative Portrait of Juvenile Offenders," featuring youth in Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall, along with text written by the youth. You can learn more about Oshagan and how his experiences awakened an interest in juvenile justice reform here.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Ever wish you had a good guide to give parents of teens with alcohol and drug abuse issues about what treatment is, how to find the right treatment program, how to pay for it, and how to cope? Now you can link folks up with the Treatment Guide e-Book, a great guide from The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. A good supplement is the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment's (CSAT), "A Quick Guide to Finding Effective Alcohol and Drug Addiction Treatment" (via SAMHSA's Recovery Month).
• Now that teen heroin use has suburban parents all freaked out (or should), the media is finally discovering how big a barrier insurance (or lack of funds) can be to providing youth with addiction treatment they desperately need (via Portland Prevention).
• The annual National Youth Risk Behavior Survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control survey found that an alarming 1 in 5 high school students said they'd abused prescription drugs, i.e., taken them without a prescription. Nevertheless, alcohol (72%) and marijuana (37%) are still the favorites.

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• One of the two juvenile court judges involved in the Pennsylvania kids-for-cash scandal pleaded guilty on April 29th. (Missed the story? We linked to a story in The New York Times last year about the two judges who apparently accepted money to funnel kids into a private juvenile detention facility.)
• It doesn't really cover juvenile drug courts, but the Organization of American States (OAS), American University, and others have just published an overview of a survey of drug courts in 12 countries, giving an interesting (and positive) international picture of the intervention.
• Helping kids in trouble with the law be successful means helping them be successful in school and on the job. So you might be interested in this paper from The Urban Institute, "Improving Education and Employment for Disadvantaged Young Men: Proven and Promising Strategies."  It reviews the "evidence base on programs and policies such as youth development for adolescents and young teens; programs seeking to improve educational attainment and employment for in-school youth; and programs that try to 'reconnect' those who are out of school and frequently out of work, including public employment programs." Next, it reviews promising and proven strategies for helping affected youth. (Hat tip to @isaac_outcomes.)

This week, we've got a bonanza of resources, conference presentations, and toolkits related to the juvenile justice system, adolescent substance abuse treatment, and working with troubled youth generally. 
Presentations from Juvenile Justice Conferences You Missed

Still suffering heartburn because you weren't able to make it to that fantastic juvenile justice conference this year? No worries. You can find many of the presentations online. For example:

• Presentations from the Coalition for Juvenile Justice 2010 onference. (Hat tip to Mark Fulop.)
• The 2010 Blueprints conference can help update you on what really works in preventing youth violence.
• Even if you're not a grantee of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), you can find interesting material posted from a recent orientation OJJDP held for new grantees: for example, there's a presentation on how to evaluate your program, another that covers "tools to improve services and program performance," a review of the findings from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), and of course, an overview of OJJDP grant programs.

In mid-March, “CASPAR,” a treatment-improving system developed and evaluated at the Treatment Research Institute (TRI), was designated an evidence-based practice on SAMHSA’s National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP). 
 
This Computer-Assisted System for Patient Assessment and Referral (CASPAR) uses technology to promote validated assessment of substance abuse patients along with corresponding referral to community-based, free or low-cost services addressing various client needs. By “needs” I mean those needs that can’t be met on-site, such as medical and dental services, job training, getting a driver’s license reinstated and most any other type of service needed.
 
Although we pitch the system on the TRI website for use with adult clients, it can also be used to find referrals for adolescents with substance use/abuse problems. Criminal justice case managers, those providing brief interventions in physician offices, etc. can also use CASPAR.