We realize that many of our readers spent at least part of August traveling and spending time away from the computer. So, we've put together a little recap of our most popular juvenile justice blog posts of August 2012.

10. A Look Back on 11 Years of Juvenile Justice Reform
Earlier this summer, the National Conference of State Legislatures published a report detailing the progress made in the juvenile justice arena at the state and national levels.

9. Funding Opportunity: Improve Outcomes for Boys of Color
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced a new call for proposals for 10 grants of up to $500,000 each. The Forward Promise initiative is looking for innovative, community-based projects working to strengthen health, education and employment outcomes for middle school and high school-aged boys and young men of color.

Identifying the best programs for solving serious social problems is challenging for governments in the best of times, and all the more so in a constrained fiscal environment where every dollar must count. This is particularly true in areas like juvenile justice where the most effective interventions may involve combining approaches that governments currently support through separate funding streams—and where politicians’ personal views may steer disproportionate amounts of funds to programs that sound good on paper but don’t deliver results.

But an innovative new financing tool called Social Impact Bonds may help solve some of these challenges. Social Impact Bonds, or SIBs, take traditional government funding structures and turn them on their head. Instead of paying costs upfront for a prescribed set of services, SIBs allow governments to define outcomes they want to achieve—and not pay a dime if those goals are not met.

At their core, Social Impact Bonds are a straightforward concept. A SIB is an arrangement between one or more government agencies and an external organization where the government specifies an outcome or set of outcomes they want to achieve and promises to pay that external organization a pre-agreed sum if it is able to accomplish the outcome(s). For a SIB agreement to work, the contracting agencies must place few, if any, controls on how the external organization seeks to achieve the outcome. This allows the external organization to use a combination of approaches to achieve the outcome.

“Scared Straight”, the popular 1978 documentary by Arnold Shapiro, has been brought to television as “Beyond Scared Straight.” I avoided watching the new reality television series because all the research shows the scare tactics of taking kids to jail for a day does not work. I was hoping that after one season the show would die and just go away. Unfortunately, it is back for a new season.

How does “Beyond Scared Straight” work? It is easy. You handcuff a few kids, take them on a tour of a jail, and let guards and prisoners scream at them all day until they break. After, the kids go home and never commit a crime again.

Of course, this is the desired end result. In reality, the television series does a follow-up with kids after 30 days and finds that some of the youth report that they have changed, while others say nothing has changed. The show I watched followed up with four kids after 30 days; two said their behavior had improved and two said nothing had changed. Not a very good success rate for 30 days later. I would guess that another follow-up after 90 days might show even worse results.

After "Scared Straight" became popular in the 1970s, a number of research reports evaluated children who went through the program compared to control groups and found that many of the youth who attended “scared straight” programs were actually worse off than the youth who had no intervention.

Recently, I wrote about how locking up youth in juvenile hall only increased the chances that they would reoffend. This was based on the new study, “No Place for Kids.”

Another report that came out earlier this year, “Evidence-Based Interventions for Juvenile Offenders and Juvenile Justice Policies that Support Them,” takes a look at what works and what doesn’t. According to the study, only 5 percent of eligible youthful offenders are treated with an evidence-based service. Evidence-Based services are ones that have been demonstrated to be successful.

Many juvenile offender services are not effective and some methods, like “shock incarceration treatment,” such as Scared Straight, actually worsen anti-social behavior. Unfortunately, with TV reality shows touting such interventions, communities continue to support these high-profile, ineffective programs. The thinking is: ‘We will just scare them into changing their ways.’ Only by looking at the studies do we see that mixing youthful offenders with adult criminals, or with like-minded peers, only increases the chances that they will commit another crime.

What works to turn kids’ lives around?

Research shows that addressing key risk factors like improving family functioning, developing relationships with caring adults, and improving school performance in the youth’s natural environment decreases criminal behavior. Behavioral treatment such as multi-systemic therapy (MST) and Functional Family Therapy (FFT) not only improve outcomes for children but are less expensive. Unfortunately, time and time again, we see juvenile justice policy driven by communities that don’t like the idea of “coddling” juvenile offenders and want them locked up. Their focus is punishment, not change.

Digging through my files, I came across an article written by J. Edgar Hoover for the defunct The American Magazine in January 1955. In his article, “You Can Help Stop Juvenile Crime,” the former FBI director warned that the undermining of traditions, customs and a lack of respect was creating kids who did not recognize the difference between good and evil.