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At age 17, I was found guilty of three felonies and, in addition to this, tried as an adult in Idaho. Without having gone into the juvenile justice system I would be in prison or dead.
I spent time in a number of adult and juvenile facilities in the state. With experience in both adult corrections and juvenile corrections, I can tell you a few things that affected me throughout my incarceration.
To be honest, the adult side of corrections was much easier to handle in a number of different ways. In the Ada County Jail, in western Idaho, I was put in a single cell and was in the highest security part of the facility. My days were spent reading books, sleeping, watching TV, having one hour of exercise a day in a concrete courtyard and talking to other inmates, figuring out how to be a better criminal.
It came as a big shock when I was finally placed in the Juvenile Corrections Center, in St. Anthony, in eastern Idaho. I wasn’t allowed to sleep all day and my days were structured with school, chores, physical fitness and counseling. Instead of the jailers catching me for things that were against the rules my peers were the ones holding me accountable. At first, I resented my peers for this because in jail this was considered “snitching” and if you snitched you would be beaten up.

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner may not have broken any laws by texting lewd photos of himself to younger women he didn’t know.
In many states, however, teens who send pictures of themselves to their own girlfriends or boyfriends can be prosecuted for child pornography.
Allyson Pereira calls that hypocrisy. She should know. She’s spent six years dealing with the consequences of “sexting” one topless image of herself to an ex-boyfriend.
Allyson was 15 at the time, and the boy said he’d date her again if she’d send him the photo. But he was playing her. According to Allyson, he sent the private image to his entire contact list.
For the next three years at Wallkill Valley Regional High School in northern New Jersey, she was bullied and ostracized. Paint cans were thrown in her family’s pool. A tire was rolled down their driveway, smashing a glass door to the house.
“It’s actually made me stronger,” she said in an interview last with Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, “but there were times when I really was suicidal. If it hadn’t been for my family and one or two friends, I wouldn’t be here today.”
“I can’t even tell you what it was like to live with that,” her mother says. “These kids can be so cruel to each other.”
But Allyson and her family were afraid to report the situation to police because Allyson could have been prosecuted for sending child pornography — of herself.

[Testimony given April 2011 by John Roman, Ph.D., before the Council of the District of Columbia Committee on Human Services. Reprinted with permission from The Urban Institute. -Ed.]
Good morning. My name is John Roman and I am a senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where I have studied innovative crime and justice policies and programs for more than a decade. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today about integrating innovative practices to better serve juveniles involved with the justice system and to improve public safety.
Using Lessons from Recent Innovations to Create a Holistic Approach to Intervening with Juveniles
Over the last decade, across the United States, there has been tremendous interest in reforming juvenile and criminal justice systems to both improve their performance and to improve public safety by reducing crime and delinquency among adjudicated youth. What I would like to describe today is how those innovative practices—the Reclaiming Futures initiative, drugs courts and other alternatives to commitment, and Project HOPE—might be integrated to maximize their effectiveness and minimize costs.
In the first phase of Reclaiming Futures, begun in 2002, multidisciplinary teams in ten communities worked collaboratively to enhance the availability and quality of substance abuse interventions for youth involved with the juvenile justice system. All ten projects relied on judicial leadership, court/community collaborations, interorganizational performance management, enhanced treatment quality, and multiagency partnerships to improve their systems of care for youthful offenders with substance abuse problems.

Charles Taylor Gould (photo at right), a former co-worker of mine, is a juvenile probation officer in Multnomah County, Oregon, who's been hearing stories for fifteen years from teenage girls in the juvenile justice system who've been sexually exploited, or victimized by sex trafficking.
So what did he do? He did what anyone would do: he made a full-length documentary. And along the way, he interviewed people like U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and actress Daryl Hannah.
Your American Teen "follows three teens for approximately 2 years. All three girls suffered severe trauma as children and throughout their adolescence; all three had parents that were unable or unwilling to care for them." Gould and his fellow producers, Tyler Benjamin and Keith Murphy [the latter is also a juvenile probation officer and co-worker of Gould's], "interviewed survivors, detectives, organization executives, celebrities, lawyers, policy makers and many others in [a] quest to find out what is being done to prevent sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls" in the Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to make this documentary?
Mainly, it was that you see kids in deep pain ... I've been doing my work 15 years now. I work with all populations at juvenile justice because I lead skill groups [educational, cognitive restructuring, etc.], which means I get kids from all units - a girl who was trafficked and in our system because of that, a gang member, sex offender -- any of them. I hear their stories and they're almost unbelievable.
As a juvenile court counselor, your voice can be loud -- but only so loud, and the only other way I knew how to yell to Joe Public to hear these stories was to do the other thing I love, and that's making films. It's the best way to get people to hear these stories.

Editor's Note: The video links provided here are for informational purposes only; Reclaiming Futures and its partners are not endorsing the film or seeking financial support for it.  

On Thursday afternoon, I was busy calming the nerves of ten teenagers, who were about to step onto a stage and give the first of two presentations on their newly published recommendations about how to reduce youth crime in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a small community with one of the highest crime rates in New York City. These young people, members of the Center for Court Innovation’s Youth Justice Board program, had been preparing for this moment for ten months.  
The Board members completed a final read-through of their speaking parts and made their way onto the stage for the program to begin. During the welcome address, a Brownsville community leader shared some of her personal struggles growing up in the neighborhood, including a period during her teenage years when she decided to sell drugs -- or, at least, she tried to.
Neighborhood dealers that she approached with her plan took one look at her and said, “You’re a good girl. Go back to school.” One high-school diploma, one college diploma, and one law degree later, she addressed the crowd with the message that anything is possible.
Something else struck me during her speech—the underlying lesson that sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected places. Sometimes it is the people that we aren’t used to listening to who have the ideas that we most need to hear. 

• Does Your Youth Program Work?
  An OJJDP publication. Dates from 2000, but it provides a great introduction to evaluating success. (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)
• Reclaiming Futures in the News: "Drug Courts Restore Addicts"
  A great piece profiling the adult and juvenile drug courts and the accomplishments of Reclaiming Futures in Hocking County, Ohio. The article originally appeared in the Logan Daily News, but you can find the full article on the Reclaiming Futures website.
• Improving Educational Outcomes of Youth in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Systems Through Interagency Communication and Collaboration
  Maybe you read that headline and thought to yourself, "Got it covered: we're already collaborating and communicating as well as we can." I can tell you from experience with multiple sites implementing the Reclaiming Futures model that there's always room for improvement -- and investing time and attention in this sort of collaboration pays off big time for kids, families, agencies, and service providers. So be sure to check out this comprehensive, 20-page "practice guide" put out in May 2011 by the (deep breath) National Evaluation and Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Children and (don't forget to breathe) Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, or At-Risk (NDTAC). (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)

Reclaiming Futures just sponsored a webinar by Dr. Howard Liddle on the clinical importance of working with the families of teens in the justice system as well as the young people themselves -- follow the link to listen to the webinar or download the slides -- but family involvement is critical in other areas as well, from program planning to policy-making. 
And as it happens, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is seeking comments on its proposed changes to its block grants (including target populations) -- comments are due this Friday, June 3, 2011 -- so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that in 2009, SAMHSA convened a group of family members from all across the country to look at barriers to their involvement, opportunities for change, and to make recommendations for improvement. 

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."

[Although the post below focuses specifically on data from Oregon, it should resonate with communities all over the country. Drop us an email or leave a comment: do people in your community mistakenly believe crime is gong up? -Ed.]
Major violent and property crime rates have been consistently declining in the United States, but does the public believe crime is going down? 
This was the topic of “Do Oregonians Know about the Crime Drop?”, a research brief recently released by Portland State University’s Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute. 
In Oregon, like many states throughout the U.S., violent and property crime rates are at the lowest levels since the 1960’s. A steady decline in crime rates has been occurring for 15 years, with minor increases or leveling in some years, but the overall drop is significant. A national crime victimization survey also reports the same declining trend. 
Such declines should be cause for celebration. However, a recent survey of Oregonians conducted by the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute found that: