Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

Juvenile Justice Reform

• The polarized debate over Illinois’ youth prison closures
  WBEZ 
  Advocacy groups are applauding Illinois Governor Pat Quinn's proposal this week to close two youth prisons. But strong opposition is coming from the union representing prison workers and some local leaders.
• Radio host Dave Iverson: Phasing out juvenile justice
  KQED
  Governor Jerry Brown has proposed phasing out the state Division of Juvenile Justice over the next three years -- a move which the Legislative Analyst's Office says could save the state more than $100 million; but what's the real cost?
• Giving detainees access to outdoor recreation
  The Bay Citizen 
  How many adults does it take to supervise a playground? Too many, apparently, if the playground is at San Francisco’s Juvenile Justice Center.
• Teaching life skills to help troubled teens
  Cov-News 
  The Newton County Board of Commissioners approved Tuesday a contract with resident Melissa Tice to teach life skills courses to jail inmates who are serving terms of six months or longer in an effort to help them avoid returning to jail. The program will be paid through 2011 State Criminal Alien Assistance Program monies.
• Jerry Davich: Return visit to “Juvies” finds fewer kids, fewer dollars
  Post-Tribune 
  A recent visit to the Lake County Juvenile Justice Center in Crown Point, featured on MTV, found fewer kids and a dedicated staff.
  

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment - from Join Together, The Partnership at Drugfree.org

• Study: Alcohol in movies may lead to underage drinking Watching movies with scenes that feature alcohol consumption doubles the likelihood that teens will start drinking alcohol, according to a new study published in the journal BMJ Open.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Time is ripe for reforms in juvenile justice
  New York Law Journal
  Important lessons from New York about reforming complex government systems. This is not the time to consider scaling back our commitment to community-based services for troubled youth.
• New Georgia juvenile code advancing in state legislature
  Juvenile Justice Information Exchange
  A long-planned overhaul of Georgia’s juvenile justice code got its first official nod of approval Wednesday, but backers still haven’t figured out how to pay for it.
• Youth Court Proposed for New York
  StarGazette
  The state's chief judge Tuesday proposed to create a new youth court that would adjudicate cases involving 16- and 17-year-olds who are charged with non-violent crimes.
• Kentucky House approves task force to overhaul juvenile code, decrease jailing for “status offenses”
  The Republic
  Kentucky lawmakers in the House on recently approved a measure to create a task force to rewrite the state's juvenile code. The task force also would look for overall ways to reduce the incarceration of juveniles, ways to provide more treatment in the community and ways to use any savings for more services for juveniles.
• Georgia eyes ways to keep teens out of lockup
  New England Cable News
  Georgia law allows adolescents who wind up in the juvenile court system for infractions such as skipping school or missing curfew to be treated similar to juveniles who commit crimes and are locked in detention centers, said Dr. Sandra Stone, vice president of academic affairs at Dalton State and a researcher on juvenile justice reform.
• Virginia Senate committee rejects administration-backed bill to try more juveniles as adults
  The Republic
  A Senate committee on Monday rejected legislation backed by Gov. Bob McDonnell that would have resulted in more juveniles being tried in adult court.
• New York Governor wants incarcerated juveniles ‘close to home’
  Legislative Gazette
  Gov. Andrew Cuomo continues to build on reforms to the state's juvenile justice system by proposing the "Close to Home" initiative which would allow New York City's youth to be treated in facilities near their homes.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• The strange lessons of Whitney Houston's addiction
  The Atlantic
  When writer, Elizabeth Wurtzel, was in the rehabilitative treatment center she heard that one in 35 addicts will get and stay clean and sober.

A new study found that teens with "pathologic internet use" are more likely to have used illicit substances. The research also points toward "some common personality characteristics" among adolescents who are addicted to the internet and have a history of substance abuse.
Published in the March issue of the Journal of Addiction Medicine, Greek researchers surveyed all of the adolescents on the Greek island of Kos regarding internet use, substance use and personality factors. They found that as the severity of the internet addiction increased, so did the likelihood of substance abuse.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• California activists calling for changes to state’s juvenile justice system
  Juvenile Justice Information Exchange:
  Last month, California’s Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice(CJCJ) released a policy brief recommending phased juvenile justice realignment beginning later this year.
• Judge Daley retires after helping transform juvenile court
  MyCentralJersey.com:
  New Brunswick Judge Roger Daley exited his courtroom for the last time in his 15-year tenure on the bench last week. He took off his black robe and took a seat behind an ample desk smothered with items including a “Thank You” from a grandmother of a teen, who appreciated his work to rehabilitate her grandson.
• Bill would raise high-school dropout age to 18
  The Arizona Republic:
  State Rep. Daniel Patterson, D-Tucson, has introduced a bill that would increase the age at which high-school students could legally drop out from 16 to 18.
• Should Orange County’s juvenile hearings be opened to news media?
  OC Register:
  Last week, the presiding judge of Los Angeles County's Juvenile Court ordered dependency proceedings there to be opened to the media, saying secrecy had allowed problems to fester, but is that the best way to protect children?
• Budget cuts would lead to closure of several juvenile justice facilities
  The Salt Lake Tribune:
  Budget cuts could lead to the closure of several juvenile justice centers across the state, making it harder for youth offenders to be treated in their own communities or earn back the money they need to pay restitution to their victims.
• Editorial: Well-deserved honors
  The Commercial Appeal:
  The efforts by the leadership team at Shelby County Juvenile Court to change the face of juvenile justice in Memphis and Shelby County continues to garner national recognition.
• MacArthur Foundation, OJJDP announce private-public partnership
  Philanthropy News Digest:
  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) have announced a private-public partnership that includes a $2 million commitment to support innovative reforms in treatment and services for youth involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Drug use among florida youth drops
  Miami Herald:
  The 2011 Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey showed less than 10 percent of students tried drugs other than marijuana within 30 days of the survey. Twelve percent of students reported using marijuana, a decline from 2010.

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.

A new study published this week in Science, suggests that addicts have inherited abnormalities in some parts of the brain, which interfere with impulse control.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge examined 50 pairs of biological siblings (in which one sibling was addicted to cocaine or amphetamines and the other was not) against a control group of 50 healthy, drug free and non-related volunteers. First they tested the self-control levels and then performed brain scans. What they found could have big implications for the prevention and treatment of substance abuse and addiction. 
From Science:

Much to the researchers' surprise, the siblings who didn't use drugs performed as poorly on the test as the ones who did. All of the sibling pairs did worse than the healthy controls, the team reports in the 3 February issue of Science.
Brain scans also showed that both members of the sibling pairs had abnormal interconnections between parts of the brain that exert control and those involved with drive and reward. Some individual brain structures were abnormal as well; the putamen, which plays a key role in habit formation, was larger in the siblings than in control subjects, as was the medial temporal lobe, which is involved in learning and memory. Because these anomalies appeared in the siblings but not in the unrelated controls, Ersche believes the finding provides a measurable, biological basis for vulnerability to addiction.

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.

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.

The Partnership at Drugfree.org recently teamed up with Energy BBDO to release a new set of PSAs warning about the harmful effects of drug and alcohol abuse by adolescents. Unlike previous campaigns, these videos focus specifically on parents' behavior and call on parents to intervene instead of enabling their child's destructive behaviors.
"Denial"

Juvenile Justice Reform

• New juvenile court guidelines to help struggling students
  The San Fernando Valley Sun:
  Los Angeles' Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash has issued new guidelines to eliminate fines and unnecessary court time for students who were late to school and for other minor offenses. The court will also direct students who miss school to seek out school- and community-based resources that are shown to improve academic achievement and get struggling students back on track.
• Report: Move mentally ill youth from state lockups CantonRep.com:
  The state should transfer mentally ill juvenile inmates to psychiatric facilities as soon as possible and find money for their treatment, according to a new report on the status of Ohio’s youth prison system.
• Pennsylvania court amending waivers for juveniles
  The Times Leader:
  New statewide rules regarding legal representation of juveniles in court were sparked by the judicial scandals that first rocked Luzerne County three years ago.
• Despite weak economy, crime in Los Angeles County still declines
  LA Times:
  There have been dire warnings that crime would rise since the economy began stalling several years ago. But in Southern California, crime continues its long decline despite the weak economy. Indeed, 2011 brought new worries about a "double dip recession," yet streets in many parts of the region were the safest they've been in decades.
• New California bill goes after parents of truant teens
  Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:
  California Assembly Bill 177, which took effect on January 1st, expands the number of reasons for which parents or guardians can be ordered to take anti-gang parenting classes if their child is convicted of a crime.
• Board of Juvenile Justice retains ban on discrimination based on youths’ sexual orientation
  Washington Post:
  Virginia’s Board of Juvenile Justice again has retained a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation at its residential centers.
• Richmond Juvenile Detention Center has been placed on state probation
  Richmond Times-Dispatch:
  For the second time in three years, the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center has been placed on state probation because of ongoing safety concerns.
• New Illinois laws include shifts in juvenile sentencing process
  A new state law requires that Illinois judges sentencing minors to state juvenile prison ensure that incarceration is the least restrictive option and that efforts to find alternatives to secure confinement were unsuccessful.
• Alabama’s Lauderdale County shutting down detention center
  Weeks after the Justice Department announced its investigation into Lauderdale County's juvenile justice system, county officials are moving to shut down the youth detention facility a grand jury described as unfit to house dogs.
• After jail, youth with disabilities need special support to stay out
  When young people with disabilities end up in the juvenile justice system, they're less likely to return to youth prisons after their sentence is up if they have jobs or go to school quickly after being released, a new paper says.

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Pennsylvania Senator calls for closing of loopholes in law on synthetic drugs
  Join Together:
  U.S. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to close loopholes in a synthetic drug law that allows makers of the drugs to slightly alter their ingredients to avoid federal and state bans.