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Hazel Cameron -- a Reclaiming Futures Community Fellow -- knows a thing or two about recruiting mentors for youth involved in the justice system.
Her 4C Coalition has partnered with the Reclaiming Futures initiative in Seattle for years now, successfully pairing youth with caring adults.
The Coalition just made a splash in the Seattle Times, too. (You can also find a PDF of the story here.) Congratulations to Hazel and all her colleagues!
UPDATE: The 4C Coalition recently joined the National CARES Mentoring Movement, which states that it has "mounted the largest mentor recruitment effort in the history of this nation aimed at securing the lives of our young black boys and girls." CARES has mentor-recruitment circles in 53 communities across the country, including several other Reclaiming Futures sites: Anchorage, Chicago, Dayton, and Greensboro (Guilford County). Is your community part of the movement?

Physicians and Lawyers for National Drug Policy (PLNDP) has partnered with the National Judicial College to create Alcohol and Other Drug Problems: a Public Health and Public Safety Priority, A Resource Guide for the Justice System on Evidence-Based Approaches. (Order free copies for yourself and your team; download the PDF; or access it on the web.)

Dennis Reilly, Project Director of the Reclaiming Futures initiative in Nassau County, New York, writes:
On November 14, 2008, the Nassau County Reclaiming Futures site hosted a full-day site visit for Reclaiming Futures National Program Office leaders Laura Burney Nissen, Jim Carlton, and Reclaiming Futures Anchorage coach Tom Begich. We were very pleased with the results of this meeting, and thought we should share our planning process and site visit preparations with other sites.
 
(Shown here are the Honorable John G. Marks, who presides over the Nassau County Juvenile Treatment Court, and Warren Graham, who directs the  juvenile treatment court and co-directs the local Reclaiming Futures initiatve. Click on the image to enlarge it and see what they're holding.)

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of conducting focus groups with youth who were in various stages of recovery following treatment. The consistency of responses among the groups of youth I spoke with was overwhelming and pushed me to think about what we need to do for youth following treatment that might be different than for adults.
 
A major theme that came out of each group was that they felt abandoned after they completed treatment. They were told things like:

Michael L. Dennis, Ph.D.

As the first, five-year pilot phase of Reclaiming Futures came to a close, each of the participating Fellowships published a report that contains highly valuable information for any community attempting to improve the way its system deals with youth caught in the cycle of drugs, alcohol and crime. (Reclaiming Futures uses professional "Fellowships" of judges, probation officers, treatment professionals, community members, and local project directors to drive change in local communities. The Fellows from all participating communities gather several times a year to share what they're learning.)
These  Fellowship reports are available on the Reclaiming Futures website, but at the Project Directors' conference last week, I was asked to repost them in one place. And why not? After all, they're not just useful for Reclaiming Futures communities, they're useful for any community that wishes to change the way it does business for teens in the justice system who need addiction treatment. So, here they all are -- 

For those of you who liked our post listing resources for identifying evidence-based adolescent treatment models, here's another valuable resource.
It's a compendium of evidence-based treatment practices, compiled by the Southern Coast Addiction Technology Transfer Center (SCATTC) last February. (This guide contains both adult and juvenile practices - adolescent-related material begins on p. 42.)

We've had another response to our recent call for recommendations on good curricula on parenting training. (Other suggestions appear here.) A commenter wondered what other jurisdictions' experience has been with the Family Support Network (FSN) protocol, pictured here.
FSN is one of the five Cannabis Youth Treatment (CYT) protocols tested and promulgated by SAMHSA and CSAT. (You can download all of them here for free.)
So here's the questions:

A few quick links that crossed our desk today:

• Many of you probably saw this on Join Together, but it's worth repeating: according to a new national survey, 19% of teens surveyed say that it's easier for them to buy prescription drugs than beer, cigarettes, or marijuana. More info on the survey from the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) at the University of Maryland here.