Blog: Resources

Curious about the presence, extent, or characteristics of local youth gang problems?
No worries - the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has your back. An updated version of OJJDP's National Youth Gang Survey (NYGS) is now available on the web site of the Institute for Intergovernmental Research. Available data include annual numbers of gangs and gang members from 1996 through 2007, the change in the number of gang-problem jurisdictions from 2002 to 2007, and gang member demographics.

Want help implementing evidence-based practices in your adolescent substance abuse treatment system?
1.  Check out The Change Book (available free from the ATTC); and
2.  Get a copy of Implementing Change in Substance Abuse Treatment Programs, a new free publication from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Is your jurisdiction engaged in reforming its juvenile justice system? Want to make sure everything goes as planned?
Then check out a new guide from the Center for Court Innovation and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, titled Avoiding Failures of Implementation: Lessons from Process Evaluations.

When it comes to the juvenile justice system and adolescent substance abuse, there's always something cooking. Check out this week's bonanza of resources and new stories:

• Washington, D.C.'s juvenile justice agency is offering a free service to the elderly: lawns mowed by teens doing community service.
• Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in The New York Times, argued that it makes little sense -- financial or otherwise -- to prioritize prisons over health care. 

One of the key parts of the Reclaiming Futures model is "beyond treatment":  connecting kids in the juvenile justice system with a network of positive adults, services, and activities that will sustain them when they leave probation, incarceration, or treatment.
No problem, right? Well, as anyone who's ever wrestled with this problem knows, it's a huge problem. It can be hard for probation officers and treatment counselors to keep up with what's available. Then, too, there's the always-tricky issue of what services or activies are appropriate for which kids. 
So here's an idea from Community YouthMapping (CYM): ask the kids to help you map the services; together, you can canvass neighborhoods in search of places to go and things to do. It's a great opportunity to harness their energy, given them skills, and model pro-social behavior, and you'll often find resources you wouldn't find otherwise. 

I'm a huge fan of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program, now run by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). The program tracks, as you might imagine from its name, drug use among arrestees. Because data is taken from multiple cities around the U.S. -- and variations from city to city can be quite large -- the data's used to track and predict drug use trends over time.
The program was axed in 2003 because of budget constraints, so I was pleased to learn today that ADAM was reinstated in 2007, this time as ADAM II.

• Interested in what restorative justice looks like when it's implemented in juvenile court? Here's a long article about two restorative justice programs in Oakland: one uses a peer court to address low-level offenders; the other works with kids leaving detention after many months.
• Want data on the well-being of kids in your state? Want to know how your state ranks compared with others? Check out the KIDS COUNT Data Center just launched by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which also released its KIDS COUNT Databook for 2009.

When it comes to treating adolescent substance abuse, providing culturally-appropriate care is critical -- though easier said than done.
Here's two culturally-specific resources that might prove useful: 

"Guys like me don't make it."
That's how the arresting introductory video on the Connecticut Turning to Youth and Families (CTYF) website begins. And what the young man means is that no one expected him to make it. But in spite of his own addiction, he found a way through. (July 15, 2009 update: a different video now greets new visitors to the CTYF site. The video pictured above is here.)