The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018: Updating the Federal Approach to Youth Involved,and At‐Risk of Becoming Involved,in the Juvenile Justice System

On December 21, 2018, the Juvenile Justice Reform Act was signed into law, marking the first update in 16 years to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, as amended. The reforms reflect much of the knowledge that has been gained through research and science over the past decade and strengthen the Act’s core protections for youth in the juvenile justice system. The changes also expand the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s role in research, and technical assistance, and provide for additional oversight for related programs.     

THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION ADDRESSES THE NATIONAL PROBLEM OF YOUTH AT RISK

During the 2006–2007 American Bar Association (ABA) year, a special ABA Presidential Youth at Risk Initiative has addressed several important topics: addressing the needs of juvenile status offenders and their families; foster children aging out of the foster care system; increases in girls, especially girls of color, in the juvenile justice system; the need to better hear the voices of youth in court proceedings affecting them; and improving how laws can better address youth crossing over between juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Lawyers are encouraged to use their skills to improve the systems addressing at‐risk youth and their families and to help facilitate coordination of youth‐related community efforts. Learning how to effectively communicate with youth is an important skill attorneys must learn. Through the Youth at Risk Initiative, the ABA has held continuing legal education programs, hosted community roundtables among youth‐serving stakeholders, and developed projects on: juvenile status offenders; lawyer assistance to youth transitioning from foster care; educating young girls on violence prevention, conflict resolution, and careers in law and justice; and provision of useful information to youth awaiting juvenile court hearings. New ABA policy has addressed services and programs to at‐risk youth, assuring licensing, regulation, and monitoring of residential facilities serving at‐risk youth, enhanced support for sexual minority foster and homeless youth, juvenile status offenders, and improving laws and policies related to youth exiting the foster care system.     

Preventing Homelessness for System‐Involved Youth

Too many youth and young adults find themselves on the streets, couch‐surfing with friends, in emergency shelters or worse, after exiting the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. In some circumstances, youth have had court hearings until their exit from the legal system, but those hearings have not focused on long‐range plans of youth and emergencies youth may encounter. In other circumstances, there has been little or no planning prior to discharge, especially for young people who leave the juvenile justice system. Courts can and should prevent, alleviate or end youth homelessness for youth who appear before them through strategies that are enumerated in the recently‐passed NCJFCJ resolution. This article expounds on three of these strategies – coordinating transition and re‐entry plans, insisting on effective legal representation of youth, and utilizing sound judicial leadership. It also describes the concurrent efforts of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and the American Bar Association's Homeless Youth Legal Network to remove legal barriers and improve outcomes for youth and young adults experiencing homelessness.     

Exploring the Impacts of Racial Disparity Within the American Juvenile Justice System

The racial disparity in the American juvenile justice system impacts the lives of many youth of color. Youth of color constitute 34% of the U.S. population, however, they make up 62% of the youth charged in the juvenile justice system. The cycle of racial inequality and imprisonment are factors influenced by residential segregation and policing practices. Juvenile justice involvement leads to poorer physical and mental health in youth, stymied social outcomes, poorer familial relationships, decreased graduation and employment rates, increased rates in violence, and long-term negative future outcomes. The article advocates for mental health treatment and family services to be incorporated within incarcerated settings. Clinical strategies and future direction are discussed to begin to combat these various adverse impacts.     

Youth justice conferencing and indigenous over-representation in the Queensland juvenile justice system: a micro-simulation case study

Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. While there is some variation in the terms used to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing), there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances) than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders.     

Juvenile Mental Health Court: Rationale and Protocols

Under the sponsorship of the judiciary, the Santa Clara County, California Juvenile Court, in partnership with the Juvenile Mental Health Department and a technical assistance agency (SOLOMON), has pioneered a Juvenile Mental Health Court for seriously mentally ill children who have become involved in the criminal justice system. The judiciary, probation department, district attorney, public defender, county counsel, and service providers have collectively embarked upon the implementation of a modern approach to mental health diagnosis, triage, and treatment services for youth and families who come in contact with the justice system as a result of the combination of serious mental illness and juvenile delinquency. This article presents the court's rationale and protocols.     

Gault's Promise Revisited: The Search For Due Process

Fifty years ago, due process was introduced into the juvenile courts, but today children still do not have the guiding hand of counsel at every stage of the proceedings. In assessing the pre‐Gault world, Chief Justice Fortas observed that “[a] child receives the worst of both worlds:…he gets neither the protections accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children.” 1 Fortas opined that “Then as now good will and compassion were admirably prevalent. But recent studies have entered with surprising unanimity, sharp dissent to the vitality of this gentle conception. They suggest that the appearance as well as the actuality of fairness‐ impartiality and orderliness‐ in short the essentials of due process may be a more therapeutic attitude so far as the juvenile is concerned.” 2 The prescience of his observation has found resonance and reinforcement with the 2013 publication of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach 3 which was commissioned by the Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention (OJJDP). Reforming Juvenile Justice's emphasis on encouraging not only the perception but the actuality of fairness in all domains 4 connects directly to the essence of Gault's message. “Treating youth fairly and ensuring that they perceive that have been treated fairly and with dignity contribute to positive outcomes in the normal processes of social learning, moral development, and legal socialization adolescence.” 5 The research also demonstrates that public health oriented alternatives to traditional court processing promote social connection and positive youth development. 6 The OJJDP report provides a road map for promoting positive youth development and social engagement by demonstrating that supporting such policies improves public safety outcomes by reducing recidivism. In exploring whether Gault's promise of due process has been realized or is still aspirational, this article suggests that our inquiry requires us to think contextually by considering how children and families are treated in and out of the courtroom. This entails consideration of educational, child welfare and mental health services, as well as the scope of legal entitlements. Equity and fundamental fairness, euphemisms for due process, are what will truly effectuate Gault's promise and should be the benchmark for all courts and systems that engage with children.     

Violence exposure and health related risk among African American adolescent female detainees: A strategy for reducing recidivism

Juvenile crime and violent victimization continue to be significant social problems (Fitzpatrick, Piko, Wright, & LaGory, 2005); in that, adolescents, females in particular, are likely to participate in health related risk behaviors as result of having been victimized or exposed to a violent environment. Specifically, abuse, neglect, sexual molestation, poverty, and witnessing violence are well known risk factors for the development of trauma-related psychopathology and poor outcomes relative to delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, and HIV risk behaviors (Steiner, Garcia, & Matthews, 1997). HIV infection is a common public health concern disproportionally affecting adolescent African American female detainees. This unique population has a serious history of violence exposure, which subsequently tends to lead to engaging in risky sexual behaviors, mental health problems, and abusing substances. Also, as a result of little to no intervention, this population is recidivating at an alarming rate, a problem that may further exacerbate the expression of health-related risk behaviors among African American adolescent female detainees. The authors briefly describe a pilot program to be implemented in the juvenile justice system that is based on the Model of Accumulated Risk (Garbarino, 1996), Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Model (1994), and the Positive Youth Justice Model (Butts, Bazemore, & Meroe, 2009). The program proposes to reduce risky sexual behaviors, teach alternatives to abusing substances, treat mental health concerns, and reduce the rate of recidivism through "positive youth development", PYD (Butts, Bazemore, & Meroe, 2009). Tying elements of wraparound services and reeducation together, this program addresses salient concerns that may have an impact on an adolescent detainees' success following their release from prison in a holistic manner.     

Judges’ Perceptions of Screening,Assessment, Prevention,and Treatment for Substance Use, Mental Health,and HIV among Juveniles on Community Supervision: Results of a National Survey

Juvenile Justice‐Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ‐TRIALS) National Survey was funded in part to describe the current status of screening, assessment, prevention and treatment for substance use, mental health, and HIV for youth on community supervision within the US juvenile justice system. Surveys were administered to community supervision agencies and their primary behavioral healthcare providers, as well as the juvenile or family court judge with the largest caseload of youth on community supervision. This article presents the findings from the judges’ survey. Survey results indicated juvenile and family court judges were open to innovations for improving the court's performance, rated their relationships with collaborators highly, and appreciated the impact of screening, assessment, prevention, and treatment on judicial practices.     

Why Juvenile Courts Should Address Family Violence: Promising Practices to Improve Intervention Outcomes

The prevalence of domestic violence in juvenile court cases justifies modifying our interventions to reflect this unfortunate reality. This article focuses primarily on juvenile victimization of parents and the model programs emerging in juvenile courts to address it. Part I examines family violence's prevalence in the juvenile court caseloads, despite its lack of consideration in most dispositions. Part II begins with a comparative analysis of the drug court trend and discusses the trend's applicability for specialized family violence applications in the Juvenile Court. The King County (Wash.) Juvenile Court's Step‐Up Program is introduced, which directly addresses family violence with intervention programs for youth perpetrators and abused parents, followed by the Santa Clara County (Calif.) Juvenile Court's Family Violence program, shown as a model worthy of replication. Part III details the process by which the Travis County (Texas) Juvenile Court is implementing a program similar to these models. Part IV concludes that juvenile courts must address family violence as an overt or underlying issue in many cases and must identify and address the danger to our troubled youths, whether offender or victim. I argue that the domestic violence community's treatment expertise must inform our juvenile courts' interventions with violent, often insular, families. In Travis County, we are committed to learning as much as possible about youth resilience–to identify and treat battered and battering teens to prevent the inter‐generational cycle from repeating itself while making our homes, communities, and schools safe.     

On the margins of two professions: Job satisfaction and stress among post-secondary correctional educators

A main purpose of Law-Related Education (LRE) programming in juvenile justice is to teach attitudes and perceptions that are inconsistent with delinquent behavior. This study examines the perceptions of juvenile offenders who participated in Kentucky’s LRE diversion program. Using a semantic differential instrument and a quasi-experimental design, pretest and posttest data were obtained on juveniles’ perceptions of themselves, their parents, their neighbors, their best friends, judges, teachers, and the police. Analyses of pre to post change and comparisons of the perceptions displayed by divertees with those displayed by a comparable group of high school students revealed some favorable outcomes associated with LRE participation. The recidivism of divertees over a one year follow-up period was also low. The limitations and implications of the study are discussed. The study concludes that LRE may be a viable diversionary option in juvenile justice. Funding for this project was provided in part by the State Justice Institute; the views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the funding body. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Criminal Justice Association, Charleston, South Carolina, October 8, 1993.     

Talk to Me: An Analysis of Statutes Regulating Police Interviews of Child Victims

Children can be unreliable witnesses, and they are especially vulnerable to questionable interview practices. However, in some crimes like child sexual abuse, children may be the only person capable of providing testimonial evidence. States must balance the needs of bringing criminals who target children to justice and ensuring that due process is upheld to reduce the chances of false convictions. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has published a set best-practices for the interviewing of children to achieve this balance. This article conducts a statutory analysis to determine if states are currently following the recommendations of the OJJDP.     

Characteristics of young children exposed to violence: the safe start demonstration project

The Safe Start demonstration projects, funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) under the first phase of the Safe Start initiative, are primarily designed to influence change at the systems or macrolevels to reduce the incidence of and impact of exposure to violence for children aged birth to 6 years; direct services are also provided to young children and their families who were exposed to violence. The data presented in this article come from 10 communities that submitted data regarding the characteristics of young children exposed to violence to OJJDP. These data represent families who are typically not represented in the databases of state child protective services programs but instead have been identified by domestic violence advocates, early care and education providers, family members, court personnel, police, and other social service personnel as families with young children in need of intervention due to violence exposure.The purpose of this article is to describe the characteristics of young children and their parents who seek help for psychosocial problems related to exposure to family and community violence. Results indicate that one quarter of the children and nearly half of their parents evidenced clinical levels of stress, suggesting the need to intervene at the family level as well as at the individual level when working with young children exposed to violence. The information presented, including the extent of exposure to violence, the multiple types of violence to which children are exposed, the impact of this exposure on young children and their families, and the multiple ways in which families exposed to violence come to the attention of service providers is useful for policy makers and service providers who are interested in breaking the cycle of violence by meeting the needs of the children exposed to violence and their families.     

The Balanced Approach [Revisited]

The authors of the original Balanced Approach, Dennis Maloney, Dennis Romig, and Troy Armstrong, outlined a philosophy of balanced attention to the principles of community protection/public safety, youth accountability, and competency development through individualized assessment and treatment and holding the system accountable to the community and the youth served. A majority of states’ juvenile code purpose clauses reflect this approach, later known as Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ). Presented here are excerpts from the 1988 Juvenile & Family Court Journal issue 39 (3) that first presented the Balanced Approach and a brief overview of key features of juvenile justice at the time to lay a foundation for the other articles in this special issue.     

Does Treatment Quality Matter?

Research Summary

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has implemented a process to evaluate the treatment quality of interventions provided statewide in all long‐term residential programs. In the current study, we examine the predictive validity of this treatment quality component in the prediction of recidivism of youth (N = 2,397) who completed juvenile justice residential programs from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014. We use hierarchical linear modeling to assess the effects of treatment quality (as youth are nested within programs), controlling for demographic and criminal history factors. The results indicate that higher average treatment quality scores of interventions received within a residential program decreased the likelihood of subsequent arrest, conviction, and reincarceration, whereas the highest treatment quality score of any specific intervention provided within the program decreased the odds of reincarceration only.

Policy Implications

In this study, we confirm the importance of fidelity and implementation quality in the provision of crime prevention treatment interventions to serious, deep‐end juvenile offenders. Additionally, our results shed light on the ability of a juvenile justice agency to measure treatment quality in a substantively meaningful way with the use of limited additional resources. The services provided to keep communities safe, prevent future offending, and rehabilitate juvenile offenders must be held accountable for producing such outcomes, and one method of measuring such compliance is to evaluate the quality of the interventions with respect to staff training, fidelity adherence, evaluation, and corrective action processes.     

Improving Outcomes for a Juvenile Justice Model Court: A Realist Evaluation

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the Erie County, New York, Juvenile Justice Model Court on court improvement and improved case outcomes for youth and families. A quasi‐experimental design was used within a realist evaluation paradigm, with four independent groups in four years. Court improvement was measured by the number of days between appearance and disposition, and improved case outcomes by the extent to which penetration into the juvenile justice system was reduced. Both outcomes were significantly improved, and it was found that the Model Court intervention was the main predictor for their improvement. Youth with reduced penetration had lower levels of recidivism.     

Evaluating the Juvenile Breaking the Cycle Program's impact on recidivism

This article presents findings from an evaluation of the Juvenile Breaking the Cycle (JBTC) Program, an intervention that was designed to provide criminal justice system monitoring and individualized treatment and services to substance-using youth who were assessed as high recidivism risks following an initial police encounter. Results from logistic and negative binomial regression models, using repeated data measures, indicated that JBTC participants, relative to baseline and a sample of comparison youth, were significantly less likely to be arrested and had significantly fewer arrests in the six to twelve months after entering the program. The JBTC Program appears to be one that jurisdictions should consider replicating in an effort to address the needs of juveniles who are at risk for delinquency and substance use in their communities.     

Differential Police Response to Black Battered Women

Abstract

Dorothy Bracey has spent her entire academic career at one institution located in her home town of New York City, but her intellectual pursuits have crossed many boundaries and taken her around the globe. Her scholarship and her life have been influenced by her interest in the overlap of law and justice and have led to her studies of police corruption, juvenile prostitution, the Chinese justice system and Native American legal contradictions. A woman of many interests, in addition to her work as a scholar, she has held a variety of leadership positions in both the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and the American Society of Criminology and has served as the editor of two professional journals.     

Evidence-based practice in group work with incarcerated youth

As a result of the Youth Criminal Justice Act's increased focus on restorative justice, treatment, rehabilitation, and reintegration of youth, many more juvenile offenders require mental health services while resident in youth detention facilities [Youth Criminal Justice Act (2002, c.1). Ottawa: Department of Justice Canada. Retrieved September 19, 2008 from http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/Y-1.5]. Several common characteristics such as violence, aggression, and other antisocial behaviors, associated with criminal behavior, have been identified among male and female offenders. Dialectical behavior therapy, originally developed by Linehan [Linehan, M. M., 1993a. Cognitive–behavioural treatment of borderline personality disorder. New York: Guildford Press] for chronically parasuicidal women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, has been successfully modified for use with other populations, including violent and impulse-oriented male and female adolescents residing in correctional facilities. The intent of this article is to encourage the wider use of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) with young offenders. It includes an extensive review of the evidence-base to date and describes some of the creative modifications that have been made to standard DBT program format to meet the particular needs of various groups in both Canada and the United States. In keeping with the movement toward more evidence-based practice, the authors argue that DBT is a promising approach in group work with incarcerated adolescents and should be more widely used.     

Responding to ADHD youth in the juvenile justice system

Juvenile justice professionals are increasingly faced with the task of understanding the role of psychiatric disorders in contributing to the behavior of juvenile offenders. Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one such disorder that presents at a rate well beyond chance levels in youth in the juvenile justice system. This article provides an overview of the current symptom profile, diagnosis, cause and risk factors for ADHD. The interface of the juvenile justice system and youth with ADHD is described in all aspects beginning with detention through adjudication and disposition.