Juvenile Justice Reform

The American Bar Association (ABA) Criminal Justice Section's on-going effort to catalog the far-reaching effects of juvenile adjudications or convictions continues apace, with a large body of research already completed, and more data being collected every day. 
 
What Are "Collateral Consequences?

"Collateral consequences" are adverse results stemming from an arrest, prosecution, or conviction, but are not part of the sentence.
 
For example, although a juvenile who was adjudicated delinquent at 14 may have completed her sentence, she may be unable to gain admission to a professional school later on in life, or have difficulty finding public housing. Often, collateral consequences can impact a juvenile's family members; depending on the child's offense, for example, an entire family may be evicted from public housing.

National Mentoring Month in Reclaiming Futures Hocking County

Last Thursday was Thank Your Mentor Day, and the Reclaiming Futures site in Hocking County, OH was featured in the Logan Daily News for promoting it. Their goal is to promote mentoring for youth involved with juvenile court who have alcohol and drug issues.
Like many other juvneile courts, Hocking County has found a lack of local mentors and mentoring programs serving court-involved youth. So they've allocated $10,000 in grant money to promote one-on-one mentoring with teens in the justice system. The grant is from the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
But if you missed Thank Your Mentor Day -- I'm afraid I did -- it's not too late. The whole month of January is National Mentoring Month. Check out the website for ideas and information. 

Editor's Picks: Stories of the Week

 
New Federal Drug Control Strategy

• If you manage an adolescent substance abuse treatment agency or system, you won't want to miss this recorded webinar. The Obama Administration’s ambitious national drug control strategy, due out until February, could double or triple the number of people getting treatment by integrating addiction treatment into doctor’s offices. There will also be a new focus on treating offenders and an overall emphasis on recovery in addition to treatment. Check it out - it's completely worth your time.
   

From the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP):
 
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is seeking qualified consultants to serve as peer reviewers for its fiscal year (FY) 2010 discretionary grant applications.
 
OJJDP is committed to ensuring a fair and open process for awarding grants. Peer reviews, which provide an independent assessment of applications, play an important advisory role to that end.
 
OJJDP invites researchers and practitioners with expertise in juvenile justice to apply to serve as peer reviewers. Knowledge and expertise in the following areas would be particularly helpful and should be noted and described when applying:

The 2010 Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) conference is fast approaching: it'll be held April 9-13, in Washington, D.C. The theme? "Ensuring School Engagement and Success for Youth At-Risk."
Interested in presenting? CJJ will be selecting twelve 75-minute presentations for the breakout sessions. You can learn more here. Deadline for presentation proposals is February 19th. 
Also, we've created a web page about the conference that you can bookmark. It will be updated as more information about registration and the conference agenda becomes available.

How can you reform your juvenile court to cut down on juvenile crime?

1. Impose mild sanctions that are immediate and reliable.
2. Work with your community to improve the public legitimacy of your juvenile court. Recent research has shown that people are more likely to obey the law if they think the system is fair. 

Juvenile Justice Reform News

• The New York Times published a strong editorial arguing for immediate and decisive action on the part of the federal government to address shockingly high rates of sexual abuse in juvenile detention centers and prisons around the country. (Last week, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) published the first-ever report of its kind on the sexual victimization of teens behind bars.)
• James Bell of the W. Haywood Burns Institute seized on the BJA's report to deliver another eloquent, blistering column on the state of the juvenile justice system this week: "Captured by the Clueless." If you're interested in Bell's work on disproportionate minority contact, you should also check out his interview with John Kelly of Youth Today.
• Gotham Gazette published an excellent look at New York state's struggle to get rid of the "culture of violence" in its juvenile justice system. (Hat tip to @policy4results.) Staff-vs.-youth violence has been documented in reports by the U.S. Department of Justice, a task force set up by the governor of New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights Watch. The Gotham Gazette piece does a good job of explaining the frustrations of reformers as well as the counter-arguments of union representatives. But what resonated most strongly with me was this quote:

The 17-year-old who spent time in the state's facilities said the workers' attitudes varied. "Some staff was like, 'Let them be kids'; other staff was like, 'They did a crime.' Others were like, 'I just don't care 'cause I still get paid.' There was some staff that really helped me and there were others that didn't care," she recalled.

In Part 1 of this post, I talked about the need to have the child welfare and juvenile justice systems work together to more effectively reduce racial and ethnic disproportionality. I listed the five elements, or areas of practice and policy, that these two systems should address jointly to improve their results.
 
Today, I want to flesh out what it would take to make these elements a reality:

Moving Toward a Better Response to Disproportionality

For over two decades, there has been a great deal of concern about disproportionate representation of minority children in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Research has confirmed that this disproportionality extends in many jurisdictions across the two systems and across race and ethnicity.
 
Despite the broad interest in addressing disproportionality within these two systems, we have not seen a lot of effort by these two systems to learn from each other’s efforts and to work across service systems to confront it. These two systems are, however, particularly appropriate places to start this type of cross-system effort. After all, studies inform us that children and youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems are often the “same kids,” just seen at a different point in time. This research informs us that children and youth who are maltreated are more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system than those who have not been abused or neglected. So how can we get the systems to work together on this critically important issue?

Juvenile Justice Reform: A Recent Scholarly Paper Spotlighted

Last fall, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice's Justice Policy Journal published an interesting paper on juvenile justice.
It identifies four dominant "conceptual contributions" to the field. Most of these will be familiar to you already: punishment-as-deterrence, traditional rehabilitation programs for "troubled youth", and evidence-based programs. The fourth conceptual contribution is the recognition that reform inevitably fails if core services are not drastically rethought and reorganized. Otherwise, new programs and services are inevitably marginalized by the people in existing organizations.