Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has announced the following funding opportunities:

• Family Drug Court Programs - The Family Drug Courts Program builds the capacity of states, state and local courts, units of local government, and federally-recognized Indian tribal governments to either implement new drug courts or enhance pre-existing drug courts for individuals with substance abuse disorders or substance use and co-occurring mental health disorders including histories of trauma, involved with the family dependency court as a result of child abuse, neglect, and other parenting issues.
  Deadline June 20, 2011
• National Juvenile Probation Census Project - This program supports the implementation and ongoing development and maintenance of two complementary national data collection programs that make up OJJDP’s National Juvenile Probation Census Project (NJPCP): the Census of Juvenile Probation Supervision Offices (CJPSO) and the Census of Juveniles on Probation (CJP).
  Deadline: June 29, 2011

>>More Information

Background: On May 18 and 19, 2011, Reclaiming Futures hosted its biannual Leadership Institute for its participating sites. Held in Miami, the Institute featured presentations from leaders in the fields of youth work and juvenile justice. 

About This Archived Webcast: On Wednesday, May 18, Susan Richardson, Reclaiming Futures' new national director, gave a 30-minute presentation on her vision for Reclaiming Futures, the North Carolina experience and what to look forward to in the next six months.
 

• Filmed Proceedings from Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice to Be Offered for Research, Training
  The Institute for Juvenile Court and Corrections Research (IJCCR), a partnership of the Indiana University Research and Technology Corp. (IURTC) and Calamari Productions of Austin, Texas, plans to offer thousands of hours of film from juvenile court and child welfare proceedings to researchers -- and to train probation officers, child welfare case workers, lawyers, and judges.  The film will be made available on a subscription basis. (Calamari Productions also created the six-episode documentary, "Lockup," about youth in the juvenile justice system in Lake County, Indiana, which aired on MSNBC.)

  >>Check out sample footage of juvenile corrections, child welfare case work and more from the new institute.

• Without A Smoking Gun: Chicago Hammers Kids with Adult Court, Adult Time 
  In an attempt to get a handle on rising gun violence, Chicago cracked down on youth found possessing guns, and automatically transferring them to adult court.  But an investigation by a Chicago paper (and passed on via The Crime Report) of 90 cases from 2009 (or 57 percent of the cases) showed that about 25% of the youth were never shown to have a gun at all; and police recovered weapons less than half the time. Yet 87 percent of the teens --overwhelmingly black -- pled guilty and were sentenced to a combined total exceeding 4,606 years in prison. 

 
The following post is reprinted with permission of the Vera Institute of Justice, which created the Adolescent Portable Therapy program, depicted in this video below, from 2006. - Ed.

 
I joined the Adolescent Portable Therapy program in 2001, just after its launch. At that time there was a total of four clients in the program. APT was created to fill a need for flexible substance abuse treatment for young people involved with the New York City juvenile justice system. Because that population is so fluid—kids moving between facilities and between city and state stakeholders—Vera’s innovation was to make the therapist portable. We began working with young people in detention shortly after their arrest, following them as they moved through the juvenile justice system and ultimately home to their families.

In Jordan Cox’s view, it was a waste of money. The high, he said, was more like the head rush he got taking his first drag off a cigarette in middle school; not at all like smoking weed.
Cox was smoking something his friends called “spice,” a mixture of dried herbs sprayed with a synthetic cannabinoid that mimicked the effects of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. At least, it was supposed to feel like smoking pot.
“It was fake and you could tell,” said Cox, a 22-year-old Georgia college student. “The high was delayed, but it was nothing intense or unmanageable.”
Spice is one common name for a whole range of products sold legally in head shops, gas stations, and smoking stores across the nation. The small, square pouches of dried plant matter bear names such as “K4,” “Spice Gold” and “Mojo.” Each package says the contents are incense, the absence of any scented ingredients notwithstanding. On the back of the pouch is a stark warning, the final brick in the wall surrounding the manufacturer from liability: “Not For Human Consumption.”

• Taking the "Anonymous" out of A.A.
  Increasingly, adults in Alcoholics Anonymous are coming out of the closet and talking about their addiction and their membership in A.A. Is this a healthy sign that the stigma around addiction is decreasing, or does it threaten something that's critical to recovery -- and does all this look different when it comes to teens? Leave a comment below.
• Computer-Based Interventions for Drug-Use Disorders: a Systematic Review According to a research survey published in the April 2011 issue of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, "Compared to treatment-as-usual, computer-based interventions led to less substance use and higher motivation to change, better retention, and greater knowledge of presented information. Computer-based interventions for drug use disorders have the potential to dramatically expand and alter the landscape of treatment." (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)

From the Council of State Governments' Criminal Justice/Mental Health Consensus Project comes news of a webinar you might be interested in. Here's the press release:
 


Webinar - Maximizing The Impact Of Juvenile Justice Interventions: The Importance Of Risk/Needs Assessment

 
Emerging research demonstrates that punishment and sanctions do not deter juvenile reoffending and, in some cases, may even increase it. This research shows that juvenile justice agencies are more effective when they base interventions on a youth's level of risk for re-offending and specific "criminogenic needs" (factors that contribute to the youth reoffending that can change over time), and apply these interventions in a way that is responsive to individual learning styles. This is known as the "Risk-Needs-Responsivity" principle. To promote this principle, agencies should identify youths' level of risk for reoffending and specific criminogenic needs by adopting and properly implementing an evidence-based risk assessment tool.
 
This webinar will review the foundational concepts of risk assessment and its implementation in juvenile justice agencies. Topics to be covered include how to select a tool, how risk assessment differs from mental health screening, how the approach should differ depending on the juvenile justice setting, and some key points for effective implementation.
 
 
Presenter
Gina M. Vincent, Ph.D. Dr. Vincent is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Co-Director of the National Youth Screening and Assessment Project. Dr. Vincent has received funding from NIDA, NIMH and the MacArthur Foundation for studies relevant to youth risk for reoffending, mental health problems, and substance abuse. She has published, lectured, and presented research at over 100 international and national conferences and juvenile justice facilities in the areas of juvenile callous-unemotional traits, implementing risk/needs assessment, and mental health symptoms in juvenile justice.
 
 
Date: Thursday, May 5th, 2011, 2:00-3:00pm EST
 
To register, please click here.
  

Most people need to feel included -- for young people in recovery from alcohol and drug use or living with mental health issues, it's critical for them to feel that they can contribute to their communities. 
But how can your community promote this? Check out this free teleconference from SAMHSA's Resource Center to Promote Acceptance, Dignity and Social Inclusion Associated with Mental Health (ADS Center).  It will be held May 9, 2011, from 12pm-1:30pm PST / 3pm-4:30pm EST.
In the spotlight will be three innovative programs "that are improving lives, changing communities, and transforming systems through social inclusion practices." Here are the details, quoted from the press release:

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) issued a national action plan to address prescription opiod abuse, titled, "Epidemic: Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Abuse Crisis."  The key elements are education, tracking and monitoring (using prescription monitoring programs), drug disposal programs, and law enforcement.
Prescription painkiller abuse has hit Ohio particularly hard, according to The New York Times.

“We’re raising third and fourth generations of prescription drug abusers now,” said Chief Charles Horner of the Portsmouth police, who often notes that more people died from overdoses in Ohio in 2008 and 2009 than in the World Trade Center attack in 2001.

“We should all be outraged,” Chief Horner said. “It should be a No. 1 priority.”

And the impact isn't just on adults:

“Around here, everyone has a kid who’s addicted,” said Lisa Roberts, a nurse who works for the Portsmouth Health Department. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a police chief, a judge or a Baptist preacher. It’s kind of like a rite of passage.” 

>>Full story.

I doubt that there is an influence on the development of antisocial behavior among young people that is stronger than that of the family. (Steinberg, 2000)[i]
 
The most successful programs are those that emphasize family interactions, probably because they focus on providing skills to the adults who are in the best position to supervise and train the child. (Greenwood, 2009)[ii]
 
Thanks to many independent reviews, consensus documents, and meta-analyses of the evidence base on how to work effectively with juvenile offenders, there are numerous signs that the specialty has achieved a certain level of maturity.[iii]
 
A significant part of this new generation of work in the field pertains to the accumulated and rigorously derived findings about the role of families, family relationships, and parenting practices as key aspects of the creation and maintenance,[iv] as well as the reversal of antisocial and other problem behaviors.[v]
 
For some time, we’ve “known” that it can be beneficial to involve families more substantively and consistently in working with juvenile offenders, as evidenced in this quote: “In this era of an increased focus on public sector accountability, one of the important questions posed to policymakers and elected officials may be ‘Why are you waiting so long to support families?’ ” (Duchnowski, Hall, Kutash, & Friedman, 1998[vi]).