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Editor's Picks: Stories of the Week

 
New Federal Drug Control Strategy

• If you manage an adolescent substance abuse treatment agency or system, you won't want to miss this recorded webinar. The Obama Administration’s ambitious national drug control strategy, due out until February, could double or triple the number of people getting treatment by integrating addiction treatment into doctor’s offices. There will also be a new focus on treating offenders and an overall emphasis on recovery in addition to treatment. Check it out - it's completely worth your time.
   

From the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP):
 
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is seeking qualified consultants to serve as peer reviewers for its fiscal year (FY) 2010 discretionary grant applications.
 
OJJDP is committed to ensuring a fair and open process for awarding grants. Peer reviews, which provide an independent assessment of applications, play an important advisory role to that end.
 
OJJDP invites researchers and practitioners with expertise in juvenile justice to apply to serve as peer reviewers. Knowledge and expertise in the following areas would be particularly helpful and should be noted and described when applying:

Recently, I was at an event where a recovery house advocate told a story about how local residents in a suburban Connecticut community banded together to prevent a recovery house from being sited in their neighborhood. 
This story is all too common for recovery supporters and advocates across the country – it makes me think of cell phone towers. Why? Because everyone wants cell service at their house, but nobody wants a cell tower in their neighborhood.
 
I get it: towers are ugly and may not be what you want to see out of your window every day. But sober and safe housing for young people is exactly the opposite.
 
I got to a recovery house just after my 18th birthday, and I believe to this day that it saved my life.

How can you reform your juvenile court to cut down on juvenile crime?

1. Impose mild sanctions that are immediate and reliable.
2. Work with your community to improve the public legitimacy of your juvenile court. Recent research has shown that people are more likely to obey the law if they think the system is fair. 

SAVE THE DATE: the 2010 Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness (JMATE) is scheduled for December 14-16, 2010, in Baltimore, MD. [UPDATE April 5, 2010: The JMATE website is now live. UPDATE December 13, 2010 - You can see the full agenda here; and a list of presentations given by Reclaiming Futures folks. - Ed.]
If you've never attended this (almost) annual conference, this is a big deal. So far as I know, it's the only national conference devoted solely to adolescent substance abuse treatment and recovery. If you're a professional in one of those fields, it's not to be missed. And I can say from personal experience that it's a great conference to attend for juvenile justice policy makers as well -- in fact, anyone who wants to learn more about the "state of the art" in adolescent treatment.
Reclaiming Futures is one of the sponsors, along with:

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
• Society for Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment Effectiveness (SASATE)
• Addiction Technology Transfer Center (ATTC) Network
• Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)

That's quite a line-up. A website will be put up where you can get more information. To be alerted when it's live, send an email to JMATE-info@jbsinternational.com.
[UPDATE: You can learn more about the conference here and you can follow it on Facebook. - Ed.]

Moving Toward a Better Response to Disproportionality

For over two decades, there has been a great deal of concern about disproportionate representation of minority children in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Research has confirmed that this disproportionality extends in many jurisdictions across the two systems and across race and ethnicity.
 
Despite the broad interest in addressing disproportionality within these two systems, we have not seen a lot of effort by these two systems to learn from each other’s efforts and to work across service systems to confront it. These two systems are, however, particularly appropriate places to start this type of cross-system effort. After all, studies inform us that children and youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems are often the “same kids,” just seen at a different point in time. This research informs us that children and youth who are maltreated are more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system than those who have not been abused or neglected. So how can we get the systems to work together on this critically important issue?

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• As of January 1st, Connecticut has begun handling 16-year-old youth who break the law as juveniles, not as adults. Similarly, Illinois has also changed its policies and will now handle 17-year-olds who commit misdemeanors as juveniles.
• About 1 in 3 youth reported being sexually victimized by their peers or by staff in 13 juvenile detention centers nationwide, according to a Justice Department survey. The survey is the first of its kind and was given to about 9,000 youth. On average, it found that about 12% of youth in detention centers report being sexually victimized. You can read more about it (and find a link to the report) on Youth Today, with even more information here about what action might be taken federally. Some jurisdictions dispute the federal findings, in one case because the numbers are so different from in-house surveys.

It's safe to assume that we'd all like to see youth violence reduced if not eliminated. And there's plenty of work going on in this area.
But there are some major obstacles to successfully addressing youth violence in a systemic, effective way, argue Lori Dorfman, DrPH, and Lawrence Wallack, DrPH, authors of a fascinating paper called, "Moving from Them to Us - Challenges in Reframing Violence Among Youth." [Dr. Wallack is a colleague of Dr. Laura Nissen, the national director of Reclaiming Futures.]
One of the most important obstacles: violence is almost always framed -- especially in the media -- as the responsibility of an individual. And while it's true that individual choice is part of the explanation, it's not the whole explanation. By talking about violence only in terms of individuals, we subtly suggest that there's nothing that can be done to prevent it. That makes it difficult for anti-violence advocates, who know that violence can be reduced and prevented by a broad-based focus on the environmental factors that contribute to it.

Only recently, I shared our 10 most popular posts, eight of the best resources published on this blog on improving adolescent drug treatment, and a list of positive activities for kids in the justice system. (That was all to celebrate the blog's first birthday, in November.)
But looking back over our posts for 2009, I see we never compiled a list of the most important stories of the year. Stories, in other words, that might herald major shifts in policy, breakthroughs in the research, or that were important enough to make the national news.  Those, then, comprise the 20 stories I've collected below.