Evidence-Based Practices

Shay Bilchik (founder and Director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute) is at Portland State University this afternoon to discuss the juvenile justice system. I'll be liveblogging his talk here, so tune in!
"If We Knew Then, What We Know Now: Implications for Juvenile Justice Policy in America"
4:45pm Dr. David Springer (upcoming Dean of PSU's School of Social Work): I've had the pleasure of serving with Shay on a juvenile justice panel in Austin about a year ago, and we're all in for a real treat.
4:50pm Bilchik: We're launching work with Multnomah and Marion counties' juvenile justice systems...
Oregon has demonstrated a vision that shows the possibility of serving children and families in a great way. The multi-system juvenile justice system here is the best in the country. 
4:55pm Bilchik: We're primed to build a better and smarter juvenile justice system. It's no longer just the juvenile justice field, youth development field, education fields.. we're now working across systems. As Dr. Laura Nissen says, "these are boundary founders" who are working across multiple fields. To put it simply, we want to provide love, opportunity and hope to the children who come in contact with the juvenile justice system.
5:05pm Bilchik: We need to make sure that none of our children fall through the cracks and too often we don't do that. Too often these kids are without power (living in impoverished communities) and kids of color.
So what would we have done differently if we knew then what we know now?

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the Reclaiming Futures Cherokee Nation site in Oklahoma. I am especially impressed by how committed the team members are to not only serving the youth of the Cherokee Nation, but also to helping them connect with their cultural heritage.
I had a couple of key takeaways:

• Cultural sensitivity is key: As Treatment Fellow Lori Medina mentions in her video, the Cherokee Nation site has unique cultural challenges in working with local teens. Being able to fully understand and relate to Native American culture has allowed the site to truly connect with troubled kids and make sure they are on the path to rehabilitation and success. There is a particular focus on learning how to make Native American crafts and participating in cultural events, which not only teaches the kids a marketable trade, but also helps them to connect to their heritage and community.
   
• Evidence-based practices are crucial: Project Director Jennifer Kirby is a big supporter of using evidence-based practices to improve treatment for troubled teens. As Jennifer explains in her video, the Reclaiming Futures model provides them with the tools to better assess troubled youth at intake. This allows them to make better-informed recommendations for treatment and services, which leads to stronger outcomes.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Georgia bill would make smuggling cell phones, cigarettes into youth detention centers a felony
  JJIE
  Smuggling cellphones or cigarettes into a Georgia youth prison would become a felony under a bill approved without opposition Thursday by the Georgia Senate. Under the bill, which still must pass the House of Representatives, violators could be sentenced to up to four years in prison upon conviction.
• Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice conducts comprehensive needs assessment
  SurfKy News Group
  The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice recently completed an 18-month study of its training academy, thought to be the country’s first comprehensive job task analysis and needs assessment of a juvenile justice training program.
• Los Angeles City Council unanimously approves changes to daytime curfew law
  KPCC radio
  L.A. City Council unanimously voted this morning in favor of changes to the city's daytime curfew law to improve how the city deals with its truant students.
• Opinion: Make youth justice a safer situation
  Austin Statesman
  Recent Texas Tribune-New York Times revelations of ongoing safety concerns in Texas' juvenile justice system only confirm what the leading national research shows: Secure juvenile facilities are a taxpayer burden, work against rehabilitation and can make youths' problems worse.
• California Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to end juvenile justice division faces fight San Francisco Chronicle:
  A group of criminal justice leaders are preparing to fight a plan by Gov. Jerry Brown to entirely phase out the state's Division of Juvenile Justice over the next three years and return the most violent and troubled youths to county facilities, despite support for the proposal by some experts.
• Recent increases in drug arrests were for possession, not sales
  Jeffrey A. Butts
  Between 1991 and 2006, arrests for drug sales and manufacturing actually dropped 6 percent while arrests for possession climbed 139 percent. The same pattern was observed for arrests involving offenders of different ages, but the growth in drug possession arrests was sharpest among juveniles.

Adolecscent Substance Abuse Treatment

• Teens driving under the influence of marijuana
  Join Together at Drugfree.org
  According to a recent study, nearly one in five (19 percent) of teens say they have gotten behind the wheel after smoking marijuana.

• New National Poll: Strong Support for Youth Rehabilitation Over Incarceration
  Poll highlights critical and timely information on youth in the justice system, showing overwhelming public support for treatment and rehabilitation of youth over incarceration and automatic prosecution in adult criminal court. This survey, a sample of 1,000 American adults, was commissioned by the Campaign for Youth Justice.
• Sustainability: Impact Beyond Grant Programs
  These slides and guides from Pennsylvania State University are very helpful for juvenile justice programs and prevention work. (Hat tip to Paul Savery)
• Feds Tell California Marijuana Dispensaries to Shut Down
  U.S. attorneys say they will prosecute landlords who rent space to operators of medical marijuana dispensaries. The attorneys said they suspect these dispensaries of using the state’s medical marijuana law to profit from large-scale drug sales.

• Why Are All the Black Kids in Special Ed?
  Minority students (and especially Black students) are disproportionately diagnosed with disabilities and placed in special education or lowest-level courses. The Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia makes the case for seeking a second opinion.
• Lasting Drop in Smoking, Delinquency, Drug Use
  Study shows that tenth-graders in towns using Communities That Care, a prevention system developed by University of Washington researchers, are less likely to have tried drinking or smoking compared with teens living in towns that had not adopted the system. Delinquent behavior, including stealing, vandalism and physical fights, decreased too.
• Kids-for-Cash Sentencing Set for November 4
  Robert J. Powell, the former co-owner of two juvenile detention centers in Pennsylvania who testified he paid kickbacks to two judges, may serve 21 to 27 months in prison for failing to report a felony and abetting tax evasion.

• Messaging Brief: Human Needs on the National Radar Screen
  This brief from the National Human Services Assembly provides a great summary of framing messages effectively to support human services; includes worksheets.
• Video: "What's Your Elevator Speech?"
  Youth workers give their best pitches telling viewers what their organization does to help youth -- and why viewers should support it. Thanks to National clearinghouse on Families and Youth.

Evidence-based practices and how to implement them is a priority for many substance abuse treatment organizations, including those treating adolescent.  
To help with this priority, NIATx has launched a new project, the Building a Sustainable National Infrastructure for Research and Dissemination of Improved Behavioral Treatment Practices, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The informal title for this project is “The Network of Practice.”
Its aim? To build an internet-based community focused on adopting evidence-based clinical practices. The resulting tool may include features such as virtual cafes, a step-by-step guide to implementing an evidence-based practice, a library of practical information, and a cost-benefit calculator.
More than 500 organizations have completed an online survey for this project (and that number is growing). You can still complete the survey (which takes about five minutes to complete) by visiting: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/infra_survey
For more information about the project or to get involved in its development, please contact:
Anna Wheelock at anna.wheelock@chess.wisc.edu or
Kim Johnson at Kimberly.johnson@chess.wisc.edu

At a  training of Massachusetts MBTA Training Academy recruits in July, a police officer said to the group, “What I am telling you today we did not get when we were in the academy. Now you’ve got a leg up in dealing with kids by knowing this stuff.” The officer had been trained in a train-the-trainer capacity building effort by Strategies for Youth. “Knowing this stuff about kids makes working with them easier and less stressful and believe me, they can be stressful,” he told the recruits.
The newly released findings of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) survey on juvenile justice and youth training needs suggest this officer is both right and unusual. Training in best practices for working with youth is helpful, but remains the exception to the rule across the country.
The IACP’s survey, the “2011 Juvenile Justice Training Needs Assessment,” found that police chiefs want training but lack funding and agency resources to provide it to their officers.  They wanted their officers to have the skills to work with the increasing and challenging demands posed by youth. The top 5 areas in which chiefs want their officers trained are:

1. substance abuse;
2. physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse;
3. dealing with chronic juvenile offenders;
4. bullying/cyber-bullying; and
5. gangs. Other topics included internet offending, runaways, and school safety. 

The survey is notable for the unusually large size of the sample: over 672 law enforcement officers in 404 law enforcement agencies in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The agencies represented the gamut of departments, from small and rural, to suburban, to large and urban; 77% were police departments.  
Demands on  Law Enforcement:
While officers have always dealt with children and youth, arguably today they are asked to deal with them more than ever. Cuts in youth serving programs, the increased placement of officers in schools, and the common reaction of calling the police for any youth-related issue, combine to make police the first responders to incidents involving youth. 

The other day I watched the A&E program Beyond Scared Straight for the first time. I'm familiar with the original 1979 Academy Award winning documentary, Scared Straight!, that inspired many states across the country to institute similar programs in an attempt to deter juveniles already involved with the criminal justice on some level from a future life of imprisonment. These kids are taken on a tour of a jail and introduced to prisoners who recount horror stories of their time behind bars. The hope is that once given a taste of the grim reality of prison life, these 13-19 year old kids will want to go "straight" and avoid incarceration. Executive produced by the director of the original, Arnold Shapiro, this new "reality" series is the highest rated original program in A&E's history.
The show has been met with harsh criticism. In an op-ed for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, director of Justice Programs at Governor's Office for Children and Families in Georgia, Joe Vignati wrote: "The scared straight approach is an inappropriate and unacceptable means for disciplining children. This approach has been shown to cause short -and long-term harm and actually INCREASES the likelihood of re-offending among some participants."
A January op-ed for the Baltimore Sun titled "Scary -- and ineffective," written by Laurie O. Robinson and Jeff Slowikowski, two Justice Department officials, sites research that says those who participated in a scared straight type program were 28 percent more likely to offend than youths who had not participated. The Campaign for Youth Justice is calling for the show to be pulled from A&E.
In the episode I saw, there was a young man named Brandon who lived in Detroit. Brandon sported a tattoo on his right forearm of a skull and the word "Heartless" underneath and said he lived by the creed "MHD," which stands for "Money, Hoes, Drugs." Money brings women, and drugs bring money, Brandon explained. The worst he had ever done, he admitted, was shoot someone.

• Health and Human Services Awards $40 million
  Grants were awarded to 39 state agencies, community health centers, school-based organizations and non-profit groups in 23 states for efforts to identify and enroll children eligible for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. (Hat tip to Rob Vincent.)
• Study Finds Drug Testing in Schools Has Only Small Effect in Reducing Substance Use
  “This study sends a cautionary note to the estimated 20 percent or more of high schools that have joined the drug testing bandwagon,” study co-author Dan Romer said in a news release. “We find little evidence that this approach to minimizing teen drug use is having the deterrent effect its proponents claim.”
• Fact Sheet: Understanding Child Welfare and the Courts
  Families involved with the child welfare system may have some involvement with the court—in most States, this occurs in a family or juvenile court. This fact sheet is designed to serve as a quick guide to the general types of court hearings that a family may experience, and it traces the steps of a child welfare case through the court system. (H/t Paul Savery.)