Juvenile Justice Reform

Charles Taylor Gould (photo at right), a former co-worker of mine, is a juvenile probation officer in Multnomah County, Oregon, who's been hearing stories for fifteen years from teenage girls in the juvenile justice system who've been sexually exploited, or victimized by sex trafficking.
So what did he do? He did what anyone would do: he made a full-length documentary. And along the way, he interviewed people like U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and actress Daryl Hannah.
Your American Teen "follows three teens for approximately 2 years. All three girls suffered severe trauma as children and throughout their adolescence; all three had parents that were unable or unwilling to care for them." Gould and his fellow producers, Tyler Benjamin and Keith Murphy [the latter is also a juvenile probation officer and co-worker of Gould's], "interviewed survivors, detectives, organization executives, celebrities, lawyers, policy makers and many others in [a] quest to find out what is being done to prevent sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls" in the Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to make this documentary?
Mainly, it was that you see kids in deep pain ... I've been doing my work 15 years now. I work with all populations at juvenile justice because I lead skill groups [educational, cognitive restructuring, etc.], which means I get kids from all units - a girl who was trafficked and in our system because of that, a gang member, sex offender -- any of them. I hear their stories and they're almost unbelievable.
As a juvenile court counselor, your voice can be loud -- but only so loud, and the only other way I knew how to yell to Joe Public to hear these stories was to do the other thing I love, and that's making films. It's the best way to get people to hear these stories.

Editor's Note: The video links provided here are for informational purposes only; Reclaiming Futures and its partners are not endorsing the film or seeking financial support for it.  

On Thursday afternoon, I was busy calming the nerves of ten teenagers, who were about to step onto a stage and give the first of two presentations on their newly published recommendations about how to reduce youth crime in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a small community with one of the highest crime rates in New York City. These young people, members of the Center for Court Innovation’s Youth Justice Board program, had been preparing for this moment for ten months.  
The Board members completed a final read-through of their speaking parts and made their way onto the stage for the program to begin. During the welcome address, a Brownsville community leader shared some of her personal struggles growing up in the neighborhood, including a period during her teenage years when she decided to sell drugs -- or, at least, she tried to.
Neighborhood dealers that she approached with her plan took one look at her and said, “You’re a good girl. Go back to school.” One high-school diploma, one college diploma, and one law degree later, she addressed the crowd with the message that anything is possible.
Something else struck me during her speech—the underlying lesson that sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected places. Sometimes it is the people that we aren’t used to listening to who have the ideas that we most need to hear. 

• Does Your Youth Program Work?
  An OJJDP publication. Dates from 2000, but it provides a great introduction to evaluating success. (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)
• Reclaiming Futures in the News: "Drug Courts Restore Addicts"
  A great piece profiling the adult and juvenile drug courts and the accomplishments of Reclaiming Futures in Hocking County, Ohio. The article originally appeared in the Logan Daily News, but you can find the full article on the Reclaiming Futures website.
• Improving Educational Outcomes of Youth in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Systems Through Interagency Communication and Collaboration
  Maybe you read that headline and thought to yourself, "Got it covered: we're already collaborating and communicating as well as we can." I can tell you from experience with multiple sites implementing the Reclaiming Futures model that there's always room for improvement -- and investing time and attention in this sort of collaboration pays off big time for kids, families, agencies, and service providers. So be sure to check out this comprehensive, 20-page "practice guide" put out in May 2011 by the (deep breath) National Evaluation and Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Children and (don't forget to breathe) Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, or At-Risk (NDTAC). (Hat tip to Paul Savery.)

Sharon Smith’s daughter Angela died in 1998 of a heroin overdose. She was 18 years old. For four years before her death, Angie (see photo, left) was in and out of 11 treatment centers, stood before a half dozen judges, and lived at one juvenile detention center. 
Sharon (shown at right) formed MOMSTELL in 2000 to advocate for more effective, accessible drug treatment and greater family involvement across the continuum of care and in the policy-making process. “Because no family should have to face the disease of addiction alone,” MOMSTELL is committed to identifying and removing barriers to treatment, many of which Sharon encountered when trying to find help for her daughter. 
Sharon was one of the organizers of the "national dialogue" sponsored in 2009 by SAMHSA for Families of Youth with Substance Use Disorders. Here, she illustrates some of those barriers specific to juvenile justice.

British-based Prevention Action posted a series of three posts on evidence-based programs in juvenile justice (well -- three of them, anyway), what's necessary to encourage the adoption of evidence-based practices in the field, and barriers to their adoption:

• Juvenile Justice: what works & what doesn't
  Glosses an article by Multi-systemic Therapy (MST) co-creator Scott Henggeler and Sonja K. Schoenwald summarizing the evidence base.
• Juvenile Justice: making "what works" a reality
  Continues to gloss the article by Henggeler and Schoenwald, in which they make recommendations to researchers and policy makers on ways to foster the spread of evidence-based practices.
• Juvenile Justice: policy experts speak back
  Several U.S. experts respond ["speak back"--?!] to the points raised by Henggeler and Schoenwald, talking about barriers to the spread of evidence-based practices in juvenile justice. 

(Don't be too dazzled by these articles' insistent focus on MST, Functional Family Therapy (FFT), and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care. While these three have good research backing, Mark Lipsey and his colleagues have found that locally-grown programs, if well-implemented, can also achieve great results. And a while back, I also linked here to an excellent, broader-based international review of evidence-based practice in juvenile justice.)
UPDATE: Jeffrey Butts, Ph.D., left the following comment on Facebook in response to a link to the "Juvenile Justice: what works & what doesn't" post: "This summary of general principles is welcome, but the writers go too far when they imply that the programs they promote are the end result of some protracted, impartial search for effectiveness. Research on therapeutic programs like MST is just the beginning. We have a lot of work to do before we can say 'what works.' For now, all we can say is "this approach seems to work better than that approach." We should not imply that the hunt for effectiveness is over."

Georgetown University Public Policy Institute’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR) is delighted to announce the release of Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities, a paper co-authored by Joan Pennell, Carol Shapiro, and Carol Wilson Spigner, with commentaries by Kordnie Jamillia Lee and Trina Osher. The paper was released at a symposium held at Georgetown University on May 13, 2011. 
Connections to family and community are often severed, at least temporarily, as a result of a youth's involvement in the juvenile justice, child welfare, and/or mental and behavioral health systems. Ensuring that these connections are not severed permanently, or are maintained in the first place, begins by engaging families and communities in a more constructive and respectful manner. This paper recognizes that such connections must be supported in a manner that allows families and communities to provide a sense of stability and permanency in a youth’s life and the life-long connections that youth will need as they transition into adulthood.

[Although the post below focuses specifically on data from Oregon, it should resonate with communities all over the country. Drop us an email or leave a comment: do people in your community mistakenly believe crime is gong up? -Ed.]
Major violent and property crime rates have been consistently declining in the United States, but does the public believe crime is going down? 
This was the topic of “Do Oregonians Know about the Crime Drop?”, a research brief recently released by Portland State University’s Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute. 
In Oregon, like many states throughout the U.S., violent and property crime rates are at the lowest levels since the 1960’s. A steady decline in crime rates has been occurring for 15 years, with minor increases or leveling in some years, but the overall drop is significant. A national crime victimization survey also reports the same declining trend. 
Such declines should be cause for celebration. However, a recent survey of Oregonians conducted by the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute found that:

The Third National Conference on Restorative Justice will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, June 8-10, 2011. (Apologies for the short lead-time; I just heard about this from Paul Savery.) 
The agenda's full of all kinds of fascinating presentations and workshops -- so many, it has my head spinning. Even better, a surprisingly large number have to do with working with teens, juvenile justice, and the schools.
Here's just two that jumped out at me (I quote from the agenda):

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has just ruled that it's constitutional to sentence juveniles to life imprisonment without the possibility parole for intentional homicide. The defendant in that case, Omer Ninham, was 14 years old when he was charged with killing a 13-year-old boy. The case will very likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
The Supreme Court hasn't yet decided whether sentencing a juvenile to “death in prison” is cruel and unusual punishment. It has, however, indicated that how we sentence juveniles has to be different from how we sentence adults. In both Roper v. Simmons and Graham v. Florida the Court relied on scientific evidence about the adolescent brain. Ultimately that evidence allowed the Court to conclude that extreme sentences—respectively, death penalty in cases of homicide and life imprisonment in cases short of homicide—violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

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

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