Treating Teens in the Juvenile Justice System While Avoiding "Net-Widening:" VIDEO

The Reclaiming Futures model encourages participating communities to identify, screen, and track youth with alcohol and drug issues. And when you talk with people who work in juvenile court and in the juvenile justice system about doing a better job of identifying teens with alcohol and drug abuse issues -- and mental health issues -- they'll almost always say it's a good idea. Why? Because they genuinely want to turn these kids' lives around. 
But if you've got community representatives at the table -- for example, a parent advocate whose own child has been through the system, or a community organizer who sees kids in his or her neighborhood swept into the system on a regular basis -- they'll likely raise a critical question: "Why do these kids have to commit a crime to get treatment?"
That's a great question. In fact, it's a question everyone should be asking. The fact is, although the juvenile justice system has its victories, researchers say it often makes things worse for kids who get involved with it.  A recent 20-year Canadian study showed that involvement in the juvenile justice system made boys seven times more likely to commit crimes as adults.
On top of that, youth of color are disproportionately sucked into the juvenile justice system and sanctioned more frequently and more harshly while there.
[Brief video interview with Yolanda Perez-Logan below - click "read more."]

So here's the problem: if you implement an evidence-based screening tool at the door of the juvenile justice system, you're going to do a better job of identifying kids who have alcohol and drug issue and mental health issues. That imposes an ethcial obligation to try to address those issues, and it can mean that we unintentionally end up holding onto those kids longer, paying closer attention to see if they misbehave, and possibly doing more harm than good.
As you probably know, that phenomenon -- sweeping more kids into the juvenile justice system (and pulling them deeper into it) -- is called "net-widening."
How can you do a better job of identifying youth who need treatment and still avoid net-widening? Well, it's a balancing act, but it's do-able. Recently, I interviewed Yolanda Perez-Logan, from our Reclaiming Futures-Santa Cruz site, about how her team has done it: 
 

 
NOTE: You'll hear Ms. Perez-Logan refer to "The Seven Challenges," an evidence-based treatment program designed by Dr. Robert Schwebel. For more information, you can listen to a recorded webinar Dr. Schwebel did for Reclaiming Futures on The Seven Challenges in 2008 by going to the Reclaiming Futures webinars page and looking under the "Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment" category. Don't have time to listen to the presentation? You can also download his PowerPoint slides.