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Since its founding, Reclaiming Futures has been dedicated to helping to build a balanced and restorative juvenile justice system that holds youth accountable, but breaks the cycle of crime and drugs by providing evidence-based substance abuse treatment to the kids who need it.
Along the way, we’ve connected with 29 communities across the country and received great feedback on the power of the Reclaiming Futures model and its ability to ensure that youth have access to treatment. Our model has 6 parts:

1. Initial screening: As soon as possible after being referred to the juvenile justice system, youth should be screened for substance abuse problems using a reputable screening tool.
2. Initial assessment: If substance abuse is indicated, refer for service coordination.
3. Service coordination: Intervention plans should be designed and coordinated by community teams that are family-driven, span agency boundaries and draw upon community-based resources.
4. Initiation: Service initiation is a critical moment in intervention.
5. Engagement: Youth and families must be effectively engaged in services.
6. Transition: Community coordination teams should specify how much of each service plan must be completed, after which agency-based services will be gradually withdrawn, as appropriate.

A New Mexico federal court judge recently received a complaint citing the following facts: a 13-year-old boy repeatedly belched in class. While this was amusing to his pals, the teacher found it disruptive.
Unable to get the 13-year-old to stop, the teacher called the school resource officer. The officer refused to arrest the boy for belching, but the teacher insisted. The officer arrested the boy.
The media indicted the officer. The boy, fearing the loss of his status as a nationally ranked baseball player, fell apart. The mother removed her son from the school.
This lose-lose scenario is not unusual. At Strategies for Youth (SFY), an advocacy and training organization dedicated to improving police/youth interactions, we hear of such cases two or three times a week.
For the adults involved, the result is frustration and defensiveness; for the youth involved, the result is trauma and distrust and the dangerous lesson that “might makes right.”
Some incidents are resolved in court; many receive big headlines but little follow-up in the media. There are often calls for investigation, questions about racial bias, and further entrenchment of adversarial attitudes that lead to expensive and usually unhelpful extensions of anguish for most of, if not all, the parties involved.
We can do better.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Obama announces intent to nominate new deputy director for ONDCP
  Join Together:
  President Obama this past week announced his intent to nominate Michael P. Botticelli as Deputy Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy.
• Kanawha to institute juvenile drug court
  Charleston Daily Mail:
  West Virginia’s Kanawha County aims to curb drug abuse soon after it starts by instituting a juvenile drug court program.
• Five questions with Mike Dansereau, formerly with the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice
  Ledger Enquirer:
  In this interview, Mike Dansereau explains the differences between the adult and juvenile courts and what he would like to change in the juvenile system.
• Iowa County sets aside $600k for juvenile justice system
  The Daily Iowan:
  Johnson County officials said they're worried minority youth are running into legal issues at a higher rate than their white peers. The county has set aside $600,000 for the Juvenile Justice and Youth Development Program and is now accepting applications for projects to use that money.
• Richmond making fixes to juvenile detention center
  Richmond Times-Dispatch:
  Richmond officials say the city's juvenile detention center will be repaired and its staff fully retrained by April to fix the problems that led the state to put the troubled facility on probation for the second time in three years.
• OP-ED:The true cost of high school dropouts
  New York Times:
  When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime.
• Opinion: Police need better access to juvenile records
  Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:
  Rep. John Richards and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett make a case for allowing police officers to access juvenile probation information when they encounter young suspects on the street.
• The price of prisons: What incarceration costs taxpayers
  Vera Institute of Justice:
  The full report provides the taxpayer cost of incarcerating a sentenced adult offender to state prison in 40 states, presents the methodology, and concludes with recommendations about steps policy makers can take to safely rein in these costs.
• Department of Juvenile Justice representatives address YDC upheaval
  The Augusta Chronicle:
  A representative from the Department of Juvenile Justice was in Augusta for the District Five Quarterly Breakfast meeting Saturday to speak about the changes and upheaval at the Augusta Youth Development Campus.
• Youth Fair aims to keep kids out of trouble
  NWF Daily News:
  Local juvenile assistance organizations gathered at the mail to share information with teens and concerned parents on a variety of local programs at the Okaloosa County Juvenile Justice Council’s Youth Fair.
• Editorial: Ensuring teen offenders can’t be rehabilitated
  Washington Post:
  The Washington Post Editorial Board takes a stance against two juvenile justice reform proposals championed by Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• The prescription drug epidemic: a federal judge’s perspective
  Join Together:
  Pills are the new drug of choice for kids. A recent survey revealed that young people 12 and older are abusing prescription drugs at greater rates than cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, and methamphetamine combined. Only marijuana abuse is more common. And, most troubling, every day approximately 7,000 young people abuse a prescription narcotic for the first time.

Tonight, PBS Newshour is taking a look inside the juvenile justice system with photographer Richard Ross. Over the past five years, Ross traveled to 30 states and interviewed over 1,000 youth in 300 juvenile detention centers. The kids ranged in age from 7 to 24 years old, because states decide how long an adolescent can legally be determined an adolescent.

While in detention, many of the kids spend 6.5 hours in school, where, as Ross explains, the teachers are prepared for at-risk and troubled students. They aren't able to ditch class and are often able to learn. 

Underage drinking is an issue that doesn’t get much in attention in most communities…until there is a tragedy. And even in the face of an underage drinking tragedy, most communities find it difficult to develop a comprehensive strategy that will continue to be implemented effectively once the initial fervor has passed.
For the most part, efforts to address underage drinking have been centered on reducing youth access to alcohol (i.e. “sting” operations at convenience stores). While these programs have been successful, they have not addressed the other side of the issue – the underage drinkers themselves. Typically the responsibility for implementing effective youth-centered underage drinking responses falls to the probation and diversion programs in a community. The American Probation and Parole Association (APPA) and Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) recently released “Underage Drinking: Intervention Principles and Practice Guidelines for Community Corrections,” in order to provide the field with a comprehensive guide to addressing the underage drinker.
The Underage Drinking: Intervention Principles and Practice Guidelines for Community Corrections focuses on implementing appropriate screening and assessment tools and evidence-based practices. The Guidelines are incredibly practical and user-friendly providing case studies with sample case plans that are easy to follow and understand. Complex concepts like Stages of Change are distilled to their functional application and come across as common-sense solutions.

Juveniles transferred to adult corrections systems reoffend at a higher rate than those who stay in the juvenile justice system, according to a new report from the National Institute of Corrections (NIC). The report also found insufficient evidence that trying youths as adults acts as a crime deterrent.
Entitled “You’re an Adult Now,” the report published in December 2011 is based on the findings of three-dozen juvenile justice and adult corrections experts convened by the NIC in 2010 to identify challenges when youth are transferred to adult court.
Highlighted in the report, written by Jason Ziedenberg, director of juvenile justice at M+R Strategic Services, was research by the Centers for Disease Control that found youth transferred to the adult system are 34 percent more likely than youth who remain in the juvenile justice system to be re-arrested for violent or other crimes.
The safety of juveniles in adult prisons is also a serious concern, according to the report, which cites a Bureau of Justice Statistics study that found, 21 percent of the victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence in jails in 2005 were under the age of 18. The same study reported 13 percent were victims in 2006. However, the report notes only one percent of inmates are younger than 18.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Federal ruling: Youth sex offenders must report for 25 years
  San Francisco Chronicle:
  Juveniles convicted of serious sex crimes in federal court can be required to register as sex offenders for at least 25 years, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

• DOJ, MacArthur Foundation provide $2 million for juvenile justice reform
  OJJDP and the MacArthur Foundation each will provide a total of $1 million over two years to four organizations who will in turn offer states and local governments training and technical assistance to improve mental health services for youth, reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system and better coordinate treatment and services for youth involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

• Juvenile violence in Baltimore continues to decline
  Baltimore Sun:
  Violence against juveniles has declined significantly in Baltimore in recent years as juvenile arrests have dropped and student graduations increased — a trend that the city schools chief said stills lags behind perceptions of the city's young people.

• Police to get access to juvenile probation records
  Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: 
  Milwaukee police officers will now be able to quickly find out if a juvenile they are stopping is on probation under a new agreement between the city and Milwaukee County.

• Paying a price, long after the crime
  New York Times:
  In 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.

• Local Boys & Girls Clubs receive $600k to help juvenile offenders
  Ventura County Star:
  The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Oxnard and Port Hueneme aims to reduce repeat crimes among juvenile offenders in Ventura County by merging two pilot projects into a new program. The nonprofit received $609,232 from the Department of Justice to create RAMP, a Reentry Aftercare Mentoring Program, which will provide mentoring to incarcerated teens in the group’s Juvenile Justice Facility program so they are prepared to reenter the community and avoid committing further crimes.

• Kansas juvenile inmates lack vocational training
  The Topeka Capital-Journal:
  A joint legislative committee recommended expansion of vocational training for juveniles in state custody and action to prevent mixing violent and nonviolent offenders in community residential facilities.

• Black males need school to stay out of jail
  Hartford Courant:
  A few years ago, the national dropout rate for African American males was 70 percent. Today, the high school graduation rate for black boys is about 50 percent. Stan Simpson says, "It is no urban legend that many for-profit prison systems base their population projections on third- and fourth-grade reading scores."

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Bath salts linked to child abuse
  Midland Daily News: 
  The latest Kids Count in Michigan report shows a strong link between the number of child abuse and neglect cases and poverty, and a local judge points to another local factor not uncovered in the study -- the designer drug called bath salts.

Feel good story of the day: incarcerated teens in South Carolina recently partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build a house for a family in need. The kicker? They actually built it in a juvenile detention center and had it transferred out by a huge crane. 

Margaret Barber, the director of South Carolina's Department of Juvenile Justice, explained, "we want [the houses] to be built behind this razor wire, we want this message to continuously get out, that we build back, not just tear down."

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York recently unveiled his budget plan to policymakers, and included significant juvenile justice reforms in the plan.
After previously closing some of the state’s juvenile lockups due to their ineffectiveness, Governor Cuomo is now asking lawmakers to close additional facilities and to send lower risk youths from New York City to facilities back in their hometown.
New York’s juvenile facilities are expensive and they often don’t work. Right on Crime has previously noted the extraordinary recidivism rates for youth exiting state lockup facilities in New York: over 80% return to a facility of some sort within ten years, and costs stretch over $250,000 per year.
Under Governor Cuomo’s plan, youth currently in non-secure facilities would begin receiving programming closer to home in the next biennium; in the 2014-2015 biennium, youth in limited-secure facilities would be transitioned closer to home.