Does the juvenile justice system really work? 

Reading comments from readers on news stories about youth in trouble, you'd think the juvenile justice system was designed to mollycoddle dangerous kids, turning them into super-predators.

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Among other reasons, we know this because of "Pathways to Desistance," a research study led by Edward P. Mulvey, Director of the Law and Psychiatry Program at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. (Dr. Mulvey and Carol Schubert contributed a post to us on their findings in April 2010.)

The "Pathways to Desistance" research study is a unique study of what works in the juvenile justice system. This large, multi-site research project followed 1,354 serious juvenile offenders for seven years. An informative brief on the study findings was released in 2009 by the MacArthur Foundation; now, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has released another fact sheet, titled, "Highlights From Pathways to Desistance: A Longitudinal Study of Serious Adolescent Offenders."

Here's what the study found:

I often work with juvenile justice programs and their staff, advising them on research and evaluation issues. I recently learned that people need to be reminded that using pre-/post-outcome comparisons to judge the effectiveness of a program can be misleading.

In a recent meeting I attended, a program director was defending the effectiveness of his agency's intervention approach. He described what he believed were solid measures of impact by first describing the rate of offending among his program's clients prior to intake (in terms of average arrests per year). 

Then, he told us how that number was cut in half during the first year after a youth completed the program. According to him, this meant that the program had been proven effective.

For emphasis, he added, “With such good before-and-after data, we don't need any more evidence to know that we’re effective.”

Eeek, I thought to myself. 

He clearly didn't realize that his assertion of effectiveness was risky and possibly flawed.

Many people believe that agencies can assess their effectiveness entirely with pre/post comparisons of youth outcomes, such as recidivism or drug use before and after treatment.

Apparently, they do not know about the statistical bias present in that sort of comparison.

• Should Teen Girls Be Arrested for Prostitution? The median age for girls entering prostitution in the United States is 12 to 14; they often come from histories of abuse and are frequently coerced into prostituting themselves. Several states have moved to decriminalize the offense.  What do you think?  Leave a comment. (Hat tip to the Campaign for Youth Justice.)
• New York Times: Close More Juvenile Prisons. After reforms have left 10 of New York state's 25 juvenile prisons half-empty, the Times called for Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo to shut more down for being wasteful and ineffective.

[The following is reposted with permission of the author from his website, Selected Papers of William L. White. -Ed.]

Every one seems to have an opinion about the need for or appropriateness of adolescent involvement in recovery support groups. One doesn’t have to go far to hear that such groups are inappropriate for adolescents or that adolescents do not do well in such groups. But what do we know about such involvement from the standpoint of science?

Listed below are the latest scientific findings related to such involvement. It should be noted that nearly all of these studies have evaluated adolescent involvement in 12-step groups and almost exclusively adolescents who have been treated in inpatient settings. There is scant scientific literature on the effects of adolescent involvement in secular or religious alternatives to 12-step groups. Here’s what is known about adolescents and 12-step involvement: