Blog

Below you’ll find a selection of the latest grants, jobs, webinars and events posted to our Opportunity Board. Please share the Reclaiming Futures Opportunity Board with your colleagues in the juvenile justice, adolescent substance abuse and teen mental health areas. It’s free to browse and post!

Webinars

• A New Lens for Mentoring: Trauma Informed Care: March 19
• "The Real Costs of Confinement and 'What Works' to Improve Youth Outcomes": March 30

Events

• 3rd Annual Run for Recovery 5k & Kids Dash: May 16
• Coalition for Juvenile Justice Annual Conference: June 10-13
• Reclaiming Futures 2015 Leadership Institute: June 23-25
• 2015 Association of Recovery Schools Conference: June 24-25
• NCJFCJ 78th Annual Conference 2015: July 26-29

Grants

• System of Care Expansion and Sustainability: Closes April 10

Jobs

• State Campaign Coordinator, Campaign for Youth Justice

Though alcohol and marijuana top the charts as the two most-abused substances by young people, synthetic drugs—the highly-addictive and highly-threatening substances—are still popular and easily accessible.

Two Webinars Addressing Synthetic Drugs

Beginning April 8, the Office of National Drug Control Policy will host two webinars to discuss the dangers of synthetic cannabinoids (“Spice”) and cathinones (“Bath Salts”), and to provide details on Federal and local efforts to confront these threats. The first webinar, featuring representatives from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration, will introduce these substances, and share insight into the manufacturing, distribution and health risks associated with synthetic drugs. It will also explain the Federal regulatory provisions and enforcement actions. The webinar will take place on Thursday, April 8, from 1-2 p.m. ET. To register, click here.

The second webinar, taking place later this month, will highlight case studies that demonstrate successful community initiatives to prevent use and distribution of synthetic drugs. Watch for details on the second webinar in the next issue of ONDCP’s E-Newsletter Update. Sign up here.

Some Good News: Usage is Declining

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, use of spice products (sometimes called “synthetic marijuana”) is declining, with 5.8 percent of 12th graders using the substance in 2014, compared to 7.9 percent in 2013 and 11.3 percent in 2012. And, less than one percent of 8th, 10th and 12th graders combined use cathinones (“Bath Salts”), which have been reported to result in sometimes violent behavior and even death.

It’s easy to see these low percentages and think that these synthetic drugs aren’t cause for concern, but in fact the impact of these scarcer drugs can have greater negative impacts on young people’s futures. Webinars like this ONDCP series are instrumental in informing mental health and juvenile justice professionals on the latest medical information related to new drugs, which can inform treatment programs on how to adapt to best serve youth.

To register for this webinar, click here.

The National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) has released Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2014 National Report, the fourth edition of a comprehensive report on juvenile crime, victimization, and the juvenile justice system.

With seven in-depth chapters, the 2014 National Report provides an insightful view of young offenders and victims, and what happens to those who enter the juvenile justice system in the United States:

• Juvenile Population Characteristics
• Juvenile Victims
• Juvenile Justice System Structure and Process
• Law Enforcement and Juvenile Crime
• Juvenile Offenders in Court
• Juvenile Offenders in Correctional Facilities

This seven-chapter report, sponsored by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, provides sought-after answers to frequently asked questions about the nature of juvenile crime and victimization, as well as the justice system's response. Each chapter presents important and complex information in easy-to-understand, nontechnical writing with supplementary graphics and tables.

Key highlights:

• The juvenile arrest rate for Violent Crime Index offenses is at a historically low level.
• The number of murders committed by juveniles is at its lowest point in at least three decades.
• The juvenile court delinquency caseload reached its lowest level since at least 1990.
• Female juveniles account for a larger share of the delinquency caseload than at any point in the last two decades.
• The juvenile residential placement population reached its lowest level in nearly two decades.

The NCJJ encourages reading the full report when time permits, stating that “Each section offers something new, something that will expand your understanding, confirm your opinions, or raise questions about what you believe to be true.”

The goal of the report is to provide juvenile justice practitioners, policymakers, and the public with the information needed to react appropriately to the needs of youth in the system while also protecting the community. It successfully provides the context needed for debates regarding juvenile justice and the direction of its future.

View the full report on the NCJJ website.

Last week, global social media leader Facebook announced that it will roll out a new feature designed to enable friends to help friends struggling with suicidal thoughts. It stems from the knowledge that Facebook users often share deep, personal thoughts on the channel, and sometimes, this includes thoughts of despair or hurt.

The effort is in partnership with our friends at Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention, an interdisciplinary organization based in the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, as well Now Matters Now, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and Save.org.

How It Works

If a Facebook user posts something to the channel that signals that they may harm themselves or are in need of help, his or her Facebook friend now has the ability to “report” it for the social networking service. A team at Facebook will review the post for legitimacy and, if pursued, Facebook will offer to connect the person in need with a helpline worker, as well as recommend resources to learn how to get help.

The new suite of Facebook tools were created with expert input from the mental health organizations listed above, as well as from people who have lived through self-injury or self-hurt.

Why It’s Important

The suicide prevention tools offered by Facebook will reach the channels 1.39 billion users worldwide. Not only does this bring mental health to the forefront as an important discussion as a whole, but it also identifies the need for mental health professionals to think more critically about the intersection of mental health and social media. It begs the question: How can we more effectively reach teens where they already are to improve mental health outcomes?

A recent study from BI Intelligence reports that Facebook remains the top social network for teens, with nearly half of teen Facebook users say they're using the site more than last year.

That being said, we’re also seeing smaller, growing social media channels emerge among teens. On Tumblr—a microblogging platform—46 percent of users are between the ages of 16 and 24. That demographic also dominates on Snapchat, a photo messaging app.

We admire Facebook’s initiative to partner with leading mental health organizations to develop a tool that may help our teens improve mental health, and encourage leaders to continue keeping their fingers on the pulse of social media tools and techniques that teens are using. Understanding their behaviors will help us develop strategies to more effectively reach teens and deliver support.

Last Thursday, WNYC—one of New York’s flagship public radio stations—and Vera Institute of Justice partnered to host the event: The Current State of Institutionalization: Addressing the Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars.

The event was part of WNYC’s current series “Breaking Point: New York’s Mental Health Crisis” which is a four-part series, hosted by WNYC reporter Cindy Rodriguez, examining the connection between poverty, mental health and the criminal justice system.

Thursday’s event kicked off with opening remarks from New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray and included a panel of experts to discuss the following key topics:

• Systemic issues driving the over-representation of people with serious mental illness in courts, jails, and prisons in New York and across the nation
• The impact of mental health on public health and safety
• Types of reforms to the mental health and justice systems necessary to address the crisis

The event was livestreamed and is now available to view in full. Watch it now to hear from the panel, moderated by Rodriguez and featuring the following experts:

• Ezekiel Emanuel and Dr. Dominic Sisti, authors of the recent commentary “Bring Back the Asylum” in the Journal of the American Medical Association

• Francis Greenburger, founder and president of the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice

• Robert Bernstein, director of the Bazelon Center

• David Cloud, leader of Vera’s Justice Reform for Healthy Communities initiative

Have you heard of adverse childhood experiences? Known as simply “ACEs,” this approach is rapidly gaining attention among the medical community and public health professionals alike. The issue is spanning boundaries and becoming increasingly pressing as studies unfold that early adversity—ACEs and toxic stress—dramatically impacts health outcomes.

A recently released TEDMED talk from Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explores this issue deeply. Her interest in ACEs began with a study led by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which evaluated more than 17,000 adult patients. The study appointed each adult an ACEs score—a number that documented how many adverse childhood experiences each person had, such as abuse, neglect, exposure to domestic violence, and parents who were divorced, mentally ill or incarcerated.

The results were striking. The study found that the higher the ACEs score, the more likely adults suffered from dire health outcomes. Specifically:

• Those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer.
• Those with four or more adverse childhood experiences are four times more likely to become depressed, and
• Twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.

Even more, the study revealed that these health outcomes aren’t just a result of high risk behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, that are spurred by toxic stress. These health outcomes result directly from toxic stress. Burke Harris explains that when a young person is exposed to ACEs, his or her stress system is activated over and over, wearing down the system and affecting brain structure and function. Children are particularly sensitive to the impacts of stress activation since they are still developing, and high doses of adversity can also affect developing hormonal systems, immune systems, and the way DNA is read and transcribed.

To tackle this issue, Burke Harris opened the Center for Youth Wellness in California, where her focus is to prevent, screen and treat children with high ACEs scores. The approach is interdisciplinary—a collaboration across health professionals, families and treatment providers—something that we echo here at Reclaiming Futures.

While our focus at Reclaiming Futures is providing substance use and mental health treatment to teens, and mitigating involvement in the juvenile justice system, it’s valuable to understand how ACEs may impact these teens that we work with daily. It’s our approach—the intersection of treatment, family and mentor involvement, and community reintegration—that has the potential to identify those teens who have high ACEs scores, and identify solutions for getting them back on track to bright futures.

Watch Burke Harris’ full TEDMED talk below to hear more on the ACEs impact on futures:

The most recently available national data tells us that more than 116,000 status offense cases were processed in court in 2011, and young people in more than 8,000 of those cases spent time in a detention facility.

While status offenses are non-criminal in nature, they can often jumpstart a cycle in the juvenile justice system that organizations and groups like The Status Offense Reform Center (SORC) believes can be stopped with the right means.

The SORC has a mission to “help policymakers and practitioners create effective, community-based responses for keeping young people who commit status offenses out of the juvenile justice system and safely in their homes and communities.”

In recognizing how challenging transforming a complex and long-lived system can be, the SORC developed a toolkit to help pave a course ahead for those in positions of authority: A Toolkit for Status Offense Reform. The toolkit addresses many common questions state and local officials have when attempting to make changes to this system:

• Who should be involved?
• What should our new system look like?
• How will we know if it’s effective?

Additionally, there are four sections, or “modules,” included in the toolkit that tackle four key areas to help make the positive changes necessary to divert youth from the system:

1. Structuring System Change

This module describes how to productively engage stakeholders in a system change effort.

2. Using Local Information to Guide System Change

This module describes how to use data to conduct an assessment of your system.

3. Planning and Implementing System Change

This module describes how to develop and implement a well-informed plan for system change that can be sustained over the long term.

4. Monitoring and Sustaining System Change

This module describes how to monitor, assess, and modify your reform plan following its implementation.

For more information, explore the SORC website which includes a library of case studies of successful system reforms in different areas to help determine potential roadblocks and how to overcome them.

Image from SORC website

On March 4, 2015 at 3 p.m. EST, the National Juvenile Justice Network (NJJN) and the Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) will host a webinar for juvenile justice professionals sharing best practices for protecting youth confidentiality. This includes recommendations for making the process of sealing and expungement accessible to youth. The consequences of poor confidentiality results in obstacles for youth in areas of employment, education and housing.

According to the co-sponsors, you will learn two key takeaways from this webinar:

• Recommendations to protect your state's youth, drawn from the Juvenile Law Center's recent report - Juvenile Records: A National Review of State Laws on Confidentiality, Sealing and Expungement
• Examples from the work that Delaware Center for Justice (a NJJN member) has been doing to improve expungement laws in their state, and how they are addressing challenges and obstacles.

In order to best protect juvenile justice-involved youths and improve outcomes for them in the future, it’s necessary to take these extra steps and follow best practices for confidentiality.

Webinar Details

• Protecting the Confidentiality of Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth: Access to Records, Expungement, and Sealing
• When: Wednesday, March 4th, 2015 at 3 PM EST
• Presenters:
  • Riya Saha Shah - Staff Attorney at Juvenile Law Center.
  • Kirstin Cornnell - Director of Operations at the Delaware Center for Justice.
• Register here

A recent article on JJIE, written by The National Crittenton Foundation’s President Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, examines how the juvenile justice system impacts girls who have committed status offenses, as well as the stigma that surrounds them.

Pai-Espinosa first calls out three grim facts about girls in the juvenile justice system:

• “The percentage of girls in the juvenile justice system has steadily increased over the decades, rising from 17 percent in 1980 to 29 percent in 2011.”
• “Girls are more likely than boys to be arrested for status offenses — behaviors that would not be considered offenses at the age of majority — and often receive more severe punishment than boys.”
• “Victimization of girls typically precedes their involvement with the system.”

As it’s often hard to understand the impact of these facts, Pai-Espinosa shares the story of Tanya, a girl who suffered trauma starting at a young age and continually ran away from home to escape the cycle of abuse she was trapped in. Her time homeless on the streets led her to a juvenile detention facility—something that the author says is not uncommon: “Simply put, behaviors such as running away, breaking curfew, skipping school and possession or use of alcohol places girls at increased risk of entering the juvenile justice system.”

Once in the juvenile justice system, many girls are marked by society as a “bad girl” for not meeting gender role expectations to be, as the author says, “sugar and spice and everything nice.” This “bad girl” image can prevent young girls from seeking the help they need and cause them to continue on a troublesome path, in and out of the system for minor offenses that Pai-Espinosa refers to as cries for help, not criminal behaviors.

These cries for help that result in crime are commonly a means to escape abuse and other traumatic experiences. According to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement, 42 percent of girls in custody reported past physical abuse, 44 percent reported past suicide attempts and 35 percent reported past sexual abuse.

Pai-Espinosa describes how the juvenile justice system can be a harmful intervention, causing more trauma for Tanya and the many other girls like her who need a safe place to recover and heal.

The author believes there are several necessary steps that have the power to eliminate the “bad girl” stigma and shift the treatment of these girls to instead recognize their strength and resiliency and help them get the support they need, including the following:

• “Promote universal assessment for girls and boys involved in the juvenile justice system to better understand their exposure to violence, abuse and neglect.”
• “Advocate that girls in or at risk of entering the juvenile justice system receive gender and culturally responsive, trauma-informed, developmentally appropriate services to heal from the violence and abuse they have experienced.”
• “Push for the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act, with a focus on preventing detention for status offenses and the importance of gender-responsive and trauma-informed services.”
• “Endorse and advance the important work of organizations like the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and the National Standards for the Care of Youth Charged with Status Offenses.”

Pai-Espinosa concludes with a quote from Tanya describing how the support she eventually received was a bridge to a different kind of life for her:

“I had no way of knowing at the time, that self-love would be something that I would have to first learn that I was missing, and then fight like heck to reclaim it in order to be happy … I have come to learn that life and its successes unfold incrementally, so that in each moment we can see some measure of success. Some days this may simply mean that I decide to keep moving forward, on other days, I may have honored my personal truth a little more. Healing does not EVER happen overnight, but incremental success does.”

For more information, read the full story on JJIE.org.