juvenile justice system essay

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Critical Issues for Youth Involved in the Juvenile Justice System: Innovations in Prevention, Intervention, and Policy

This introduction to the themed issue presents a targeted review of historical and contemporary trends in the prevention, intervention, and policy response to juvenile justice system-involved youth. These trends underscore oft-overlooked ideological assumptions that implicate individual-level problem definitions, a pattern of victim blaming tendencies despite having a workforce increasingly trained in assessing context, and a system whose rehabilitative mandate is at odds with the social demand to maintain itself and its structures through keeping youth system-involved. Further, contemporary trends point to efforts that redirect blame from individual youth to families, and which ultimately ignore the broader sociopolitical context of mass incarceration that has selectively disenfranchised those same families. These and other critical paradoxes are underscored, with particular attention to the dilemmas raised by the invited articles within this issue – which push interdisciplinary frameworks in a direction that concretizes and advances solutions for critical issues in youth justice prevention and intervention.

Youth involved in the legal system comprise a largely underserved population despite multiple formal contacts with professionals over the course of their system-involvement. In the United States, about one million youth under the age of 18 are arrested annually, with Black youth arrested at two or three times the rate of their White counterparts for the most common offenses ( OJJDP, 2015 ). Juvenile courts process about 3,000 delinquency cases each day ( Hockenberry & Puzzanchera, 2017 ) and confine youth at a cost of $250 per day per youth ( Justice Policy Institute, 2009 ). In about one-quarter of cases, youth who are confined have not been formally charged with a crime (i.e., status offenders; OJJDP, 2015 ). Despite the costs, there is little evidence to suggest that initial crimes predict future offending, or that interventions-as-usual disrupt or predict offense patterns ( Sickmund & Puzzanchera, 2014 ).

Understanding the complexity of the juvenile justice system requires knowledge of the locality within which one is working. However, there are important commonalities useful for understanding the systems’ structure and function. Across contexts, the juvenile justice system constitutes both bounded (e.g., detention) and unbounded (e.g., probation) settings and spaces responsible for serving youth charged with committing illegal offenses (i.e., delinquency), or who constitute persons in need of supervision due to commission of status offenses, including truancy or running away from home. As with the adult criminal system, youth already involved in the legal system may also be monitored to examine the degree to which they comply with systems’ orders; non-compliance in turn heightens risk for technical violations, which can constitute separate charges ( Sickmund, & Puzzanchera, 2014 ).

Further, the population of youth who are at risk for juvenile justice system entry is large. Across most jurisdictions, youth can become involved in the legal system in a number of ways, each of which is important to understand for ecological research, prevention, and intervention. Specifically, youth can become legal system-involved: a) after police contact leading to or not leading to arrest, b) upon referral to community-based diversion services, c) after a court petition has been filed against them, d) through formal probation (often with multiple levels designating the intensity of supervision required), e) through detention in shorter term facilities often but not always at pre-sentencing (akin to adult jail), e) through placement in longer term facilities through sentencing (akin to adult prison)., and f) through formal aftercare services that are typically mandated after youth have been released from longer-term residential facilities.

This themed issue addresses key areas for youth across the spectrum of legal system involvement, and highlights innovative empirical work with direct implications for prevention, intervention, and policy; and employing a range of methodological approaches – including archival, focus group, interview, and longitudinal analysis. Moreover, the work described within this issue reflects and highlights contemporary ideological and institutional challenges necessary for understanding the structure and function of the juvenile legal system. This understanding is critical because it can serve to root any individual study in a systems’ change framework, and underscores the necessity of innovation within and outside of the legal system ( Krisberg, 2005 ). Further, the challenges and innovations described by each article reflect the historical context of the legal system by highlighting how the system is positioned to respond to youth, how the system actually functions and for whom, and what types of change are most attainable. To contextualize the empirical work within this issue, the next section describes contemporary patterns characterizing the response of the legal system. This is followed by a description of common themes and challenges highlighted across the empirical articles in this issue.

A Brief Overview of Contemporary Patterns of the Juvenile Legal System

Despite its seemingly common place in the United States and most western nations, the juvenile legal system is often de-historicized and assumptions are made about its necessity that are not reflective of its history ( Hawes, 1991 ). In the late 1800s, advocates, professionals, and community members organized to create a systematic response to protect children who were residing in unsafe living conditions or who were subject to abuse or neglect ( Hawes, 1991 ). With the formalization of child protection came a set of infrastructures that could allow the state to take custody of children, temporarily or permanently, and could house them for the primary purpose of ensuring their basic needs were met ( Garland, 1985 ). At its core, these efforts centered the rights of children to the most basic human needs, including shelter, safety, food, and basic material resources.

At the turn of 20 th century, adolescence and childhood were also increasingly viewed as distinct developmental stages, and efforts were launched to decouple youth crime from adult crime, leading to the first juvenile court in 1899 ( Binder, Geis, and Bruce, 2001 ; National Center for Juvenile Justice, 1991). One of the primary purposes of creating a legal system for juveniles was to focus on treating the “youthful offender” instead of focusing on the offense itself. This translated into a focus on rehabilitation of individual children and was followed by policy that mandated treatment as part of juvenile justice (e.g., Davis, 1974 ; JJDPA 1974; Simpson, 1976 ).

The tough on crime era described for criminal justice in the 1980’s and 1990’s translated into a paradigm shift for juvenile justice as well, with rehabilitation becoming a far less realized goal than child arrest and child confinement, which ultimately peaked in 2002 ( OJJDP, 2015 ; Sickmund & Puzzanchera, 2014 ). The past 15 years have brought substantial reforms for juvenile legal system-involved youth. Since the peak of tough on crime reform implementation in 2002, the population of juveniles in custody has been cut in half ( OJJDP, 2015 ). Federal and state-level mandates have called for the de-institutionalization of low level status offenses that are not considered criminal in the adult system (e.g., truancy) and which were bringing youth into the system in larger numbers prior to policy reform efforts. However, national data suggest that these reforms have not resulted in positive impacts for all populations of youth served by the legal system. In particular, the legal system’s reforms have been most pronounced for White, higher socioeconomic status youth that the system identifies as heterosexual, male, and largely non-gang involved or representing higher resourced communities (e.g., Kempf-Leonard, 2007 ).

A number of key national shifts are important to contextualize the current function of the legal system for the youth it continues to disproportionately arrest and confine. The first is related to what scholars have called the school to prison pipeline, with some noting that the term “pipeline” itself is a misnomer given that schools can themselves serve as liberation-restricting settings (e.g., Morris, 2016 ). While the first School Resource Officer (SRO; also called “school police”) program was implemented in 1953 in one county, there are currently an estimated 20,000 officers occupying public and private schools ( Thurau & Wald, 2009 ; Weiler & Cray, 2011 ). Since the emergence of school shooting incidents beginning with Columbine in 1999, a formalized workforce of school police now occupy 40 states in the US, contributing to selective peaks in sanctions for racial, ethnic, and sexual minoritized youth ( Theriot, 2009 ). In the decade prior to 2007, the presence of a formalized school police workforce increased by almost 40% ( Thurau & Wald, 2009 ; Weiler & Cray, 2011 ). School-based arrests for youth have disproportionality grown in tandem with the increased presence of school police ( Theriot, 2009 ).

Certainly, ideologies associated with the “War on Drugs” and “tough on crime” era permeate the institutional shifts that reframed schools as spaces in which students have a right to education, and transformed them into contexts enforcing “zero tolerance” policies ( Casella, 2003 ; Giroux, 2003 ). These institutional shifts are instantiated as policies and practices including school-based arrests, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions, often for minor misconduct. These policies disproportionately affect students of color and students with disabilities. In urban jurisdictions, an estimated 1 out of 4 new charges filed against youth are school-related and 1 out of 6 occur in cases where there was no underlying criminal behavior ( Theriot, 2009 ).

Second, there has been a growth in family violence-based offenses, particularly for youth the system classifies as girls. This trend has gone hand in hand with “re-labeling”, a term used to describe a pattern in which minor and often-domestic actions (e.g., fighting with a parent) are “re-labeled” to encompass misdemeanor offenses at minimum (e.g., simple assault) and felony offenses at worst (e.g., aggravated assault). The most comprehensive reviews of research in this area suggest that family violence based offenses ( Sherman, 2009 ) and re-labeling ( Javdani, Sadeh, & Verona, 2011 ) have contributed to greater increases (or lower decreases) of arrests and confinement for girls during a time when overall juvenile arrest rates declined, as clearly outlined by Rosenthal in this issue. Further, this family violence pathway is coupled with a shift in ideology redirecting blame from youth to families who have experienced intergenerational poverty and disenfranchisement through mass incarceration ( Cunningham & Henggeler, 1999 ).

Third, recent evidence suggests a pattern through which youth are subject to greater accountability once they are in the system through the many mechanisms of formal monitoring that are implemented to track youth’s legal progress ( Espinosa, Sorensen, & Lopez, 2013 ). Specifically, the term “bootstrapping” has been used to describe a phenomenon wherein youth charged with lower level offenses are asked to comply with system orders and are charged with technical violations when their compliance is questioned. This process creates an opportunity for the system to consider youth who are not in compliance as more serious offenders and to increase sanctions even when youth’s original charges would not warrant as serious of a response ( Chesney-Lind & Shelden, 2013 ). As with other patterns described, these processes have disproportionate impact on girls of color ( Javdani et al., 2011 ).

In relation to this trend, there is increasing evidence that policy shifts at the state and national levels to promote de-institutionalization are implemented selectively in practice. One concrete way in which this is happening is through the creation of non-secure or limited secure residential facilities, which tend to be smaller group-home based settings that do not require the high security measures of secure facilities ( Costello & Worthington, 1981 ). As such, youth who do not have a juvenile delinquency petition (i.e., youth who have not committed a crime) can be housed in these facilities involuntarily even in cases where these facilities function as locked spaces in which youth do not have the freedom to leave or move with relative freedom (e.g., go to the bathroom; leave their locked rooms). This creates a structure through which youth who are brought to the attention of the legal system for issues such as truancy or violating parents’ curfews can be confined in spaces that ultimately function as small detention centers (Hockenberry & Puzzanchera, 2015). Given this infrastructure, youth of color and girls are impacted by this selective de-institutionalization most (Boshon & Frazier, 1995 ).

Finally, youth whose own safety is at risk and who are considered victims can at once be classified as offenders and be subject to the monitoring and accountability protocols that permeate all aspects of the legal system ( Acoca, 1998 ; Schaffner, 2006 ) This is possible because of exemptions in federal policy that allow for court orders to be filed with subjective discretion (i.e., Valid Court Order exemption of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act, 1974). Scholars have underscored the prominence of this pattern for youth classified as girls, describing a sexual abuse to prison pipeline ( Saar, Epstein, Rosenthal, & Vafa, 2015 ) through which girls are held accountable for survival behaviors ( Sherman & Balck, 2015 ) even when such behaviors occur in the context of severe trauma ( Covington, 1998 ) or through commercial sexual exploitation – a system in which youth ostensibly have no legal capacity to consent (e.g., Albanese, 2013 ; Greenbaum, Crawford-Jakubiak, et al., 2015 ). In essence, this reflects a process by which youth become part of the legal system “for their own protection” but do not receive access to viable options to enhance their safety ( Justice Policy Institute, 2009 ; Ratliff, 1999 ).

Cross-cutting Themes and Challenges

In part, the overview above underscores the tendency of systems to create self-sustaining infrastructures through which today’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems ( Rappaport, 2002 ). However, an important amendment to this rule is also evident; that socio-structural power disparities critically impact whether and how contemporary or historical solutions become particularly problematic for marginalized youth and families. Indeed, prior systems’ solutions may never have functioned as such for youth of color, girls, and increasingly, LGBTQ youth. The articles in this issue bring several themes and challenges to light, reflecting often overlooked ideological assumptions that implicate individual-level problem definitions and a highly resourced system not meeting its rehabilitative mandates.

First, the rehabilitative mandate of the juvenile justice system is seemingly at odds with the pressure to operate near capacity and maintain ‘enrollment’ – even when ambitious goals are within reach. This is a challenge most critically called into question by Rosenthal in their description of national patterns that have brought the number of girls confined in long term facilities to such lows that it seems unfathomable to keep girls’ facilities open; particularly when these youth’s histories of multiple traumas are increasingly documented. This is related to a theme alluded to across articles, underscoring that individual change in youth is sought over and above system reform, despite increasing attention to youth’s contexts.

Second, as articulated by Walden, Joseph, & Verona, the most underserved youth are also the least likely to be effectively treated when in juvenile justice custody. Indeed, this is due to the structure of the system itself, which can encompass youth for years but fails to provide consistent access to effective services and functions instead as a “revolving door” – even when evidence based practices are provided at no cost through university-community partnerships.

Third, the legal system is increasingly made up of a contemporary workforce that is trained and can readily identify multiple and complex traumas in youth’s lives, as Anderson and Walerych’s study clearly demonstrates. However, the ideological and attributional frameworks – as alluded to by Anderson and evidenced by Burson, Godfrey, and Singh – function to create social binds, particularly for girls, in ways that assume that youth are unable to change because of trauma-related damage, and simultaneously puts forth formal sanctions that require youth to change. This represents a cooptation of the term “trauma-informed” to describe care that may actually function to paint youth with trauma histories as inherently broken. Indeed, as described by Burson and colleagues, individual blame attributions are most readily made for youth with the greatest contextual pressures and who experience the least effective systems’ response.

Finally, youth’s literacies and strengths in virtual and “real” spaces are often overlooked – despite youth’s readiness to engage them and their power in predicting healing as described by Sichel, Javdani, Ueberall & Liggett; and Trawick, Aber, Allen, & Fitts, respectively. This final theme underscores the critical need to examine the function of research and intervention on the juvenile legal system itself, in order to ensure that its focus does not suppress youth’s strengths and reify the power of systems to subjugate them.

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juvenile justice

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• Cornell University Law School - Juvenile Justice
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juvenile justice , system of laws, policies, and procedures intended to regulate the processing and treatment of nonadult offenders for violations of law and to provide legal remedies that protect their interests in situations of conflict or neglect. Punishable offenses that are classified as criminal offenses for adults (e.g., murder, robbery, and larceny) are referred to as delinquency when committed by juveniles, whereas juvenile offenses mandating legal intervention only (e.g., alcohol and tobacco use, truancy, and running away from home) are referred to as status offenses. Children are also subject to specialized laws, procedures, and policies designed to protect their interests when parents or other legal guardians are unavailable, negligent, or involved in custodial disputes.

A controversial method of juvenile punishment has been the use of corporal punishment . Although such physical punishment is prohibited in many Western countries, it is still used in some parts of the United States and in much of the non-Western world. Historically, an increase in juvenile crime (such as the late 20th-century rise in juvenile gun offenses in the United States) has been followed by calls for the reinstatement of corporal punishment in those regions where it had been prohibited. Opponents of corporal punishment, however, argue that it is inhumane and that juvenile corporal punishment risks reinforcing the delinquent behaviour of those who receive it.

History and operation

The specific mechanisms for administering juvenile justice have varied over time—among societies and even among jurisdictions within countries. The concept of delinquency, as well as special trials and institutions for confining and controlling youth, was established in the mid-19th century in Great Britain, where courts acquired the authority to intervene as parens patriae (Latin: “parent of the land”) to protect the property rights of children. Yet juveniles were tried in the same courts as adults until the Juvenile Court of Law was founded in Chicago in 1899. The first court dedicated to cases involving delinquent children was a success, which led to the creation of other juvenile courts , known colloquially as children’s courts or family courts, in other states. The model was soon adopted in other countries such as Canada and Great Britain (1908), France (1912), Russia (1918), Poland (1919), Japan (1922), and Germany (1923).

Early common law made no special provision for children who committed crimes. Provided that the child was over the minimum age for criminal responsibility (originally seven) and had “mischievous discretion” (the ability to tell right from wrong), the child was fully liable as an adult to the penalties provided by the law. During the 19th century, children who were criminally liable were regularly imprisoned, and there are records of children’s being hanged as late as the 1830s. In practice, however, age usually served as a mitigating factor in punishments accorded to children. In the 19th century the reformatory movement, which established training institutions for young offenders as an alternative to confinement in adult prisons, advanced the concept of treating juvenile offenders differently from adult criminals. The Children Act in 1908 created a special justice system for juvenile offenders—the Juvenile Court (renamed Youth Court in 1991), intended to handle both criminal and noncriminal cases.

The English youth courts exercise jurisdiction over offenders aged 10 (the minimum age of criminal responsibility) to 16. (Those under 14 are designated as “children,” and those over 14 and under 17 are classified as “young persons.”) Offenders aged 17 and over appear in the normal adult courts, though special sentencing provisions apply to offenders under the age of 21.

In addition to age, youth and adult courts are distinguished by the types of cases they handle, with youth courts hearing a much wider variety of offenses. Nearly all offenses committed by children are tried in youth courts, though the courts are not bound to deal with extremely serious offenses such as robbery or rape. On such charges, a young person will nearly always be tried as an adult. In most cases a youth also will be tried as an adult for murder or manslaughter. If he is charged jointly with an adult crime while being tried in juvenile court, he can be sent to an adult court for trial, though he is normally returned to the youth court for sentencing.

Youth courts also deal with children of any age up to 17 in what is called a care proceeding, which is based on the idea that the child is in need of court-ordered care, protection, or control because one of a number of conditions is satisfied. Reasons for care proceedings can include neglect or assault by parents, but they always stem from the fact that the juvenile has committed an offense. Thus, a juvenile who commits an offense will come before the youth court in one of two ways: criminal proceedings or care proceedings. This combination of two different roles in the youth court was a source of difficulty and controversy for many years, particularly because the court in its criminal jurisdiction was required by law to “have regard to the welfare of the child or young person” and, if satisfied that it was necessary to do so, remove the youth from unsatisfactory surroundings for his own good, irrespective of the gravity of the offense. In appearing before the youth court, a juvenile charged with a minor offense could be removed from parental custody and required to reside in an institution (known as a community home), perhaps for a period of several years and possibly under conditions of security. Under legislation passed in the late 1960s, a care order mandated by the youth court could effectively transfer parental rights to the local authority.

The care order is only one of many sanctions available to the English youth court and is used only in a minority of the cases that come before it. Another measure, the supervision order, places the juvenile under the general supervision of a social worker but sometimes requires participation in a wide range of organized, constructive activities as intermediate treatment. A supervision order can also include restrictive requirements prohibiting the juvenile from certain activities or a curfew in the form of a “night restriction,” a requirement to remain at home during the evening for a specified period. Juveniles can also be fined (though the court usually orders the parent to pay the fine) or be ordered to pay compensation for the offense.

In 1991 the Criminal Justice Act allowed the newly named Youth Court to handle cases involving 17-year-olds, and in 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act assigned stiffer punishments to juvenile offenders. It was followed in 2000 by the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act, which advanced the use of community service as a form of punishment.

Youth in the Justice System: An Overview

Since the establishment of the first juvenile court in Cook County, Illinois in 1899, states have recognized that children who commit crimes are different from adults; as a class, they are less blameworthy, and they have a greater capacity for change.  By the mid 1920s, every state in the country had established a separate system of criminal justice designed to acknowledge those differences called the juvenile justice system.

The juvenile justice system has grown and changed substantially since 1899. Originally, the court process was informal—often nothing more than a conversation between the youth and the judge—and the defendant lacked legal representation. Proceedings were conducted behind closed doors with little public or community awareness of how the juvenile court operated or what happened to the children who appeared before it. Rather than confine young people in jails with adults, the early juvenile courts created a probation system and separate rehabilitation and treatment facilities to provide minors with supervision, guidance, and education.

The lack of formal process and constitutional due process in the juvenile justice system – and potential for substantial deprivations of children’s liberty through extensive periods of incarceration even in juvenile facilities — came to light in the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision  In re Gault . In Gault , the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Constitution requires that youth charged with delinquency in juvenile court have many of the same due process rights guaranteed to adults accused of crimes, including the right to an attorney and the right to confront witnesses against them. Following Gault , the Supreme Court extended additional constitutional rights to youth, including the right to have the charges against them proven beyond a reasonable doubt and the right against double jeopardy. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that youth were not entitled to jury trials in juvenile court, but several states have judicially or legislatively elected to provide youth a right to jury trial.  

Following this shift to ensure process in juvenile court proceedings, an increase in juvenile crime rates in the late 1980s and early 1990s prompted legislators to adopt “tough on crime” policies, depriving certain youth of the juvenile justice system’s protections. States enacted mechanisms to move youth from juvenile to adult criminal court for trial and punishment. In some cases, these new laws saddled children with the most severe sentences—death and life without the possibility of parole. Many of the new state laws also exposed youth to the dangers and potential abuses attributed to incarceration with adult offenders—much like they had experienced before the creation of the original juvenile court more than a century earlier.

Since the 1990s, juvenile crime rates have steadily decreased, yet the harsh penalties of the 1990s remain in many state laws. With this shift, key distinctive and rehabilitative approaches of the juvenile justice system have been lost to the more severe consequences attendant to criminal justice system involvement.

Today’s juvenile justice system still maintains rehabilitation as its primary goal and distinguishes itself from the criminal justice system in important ways. With few exceptions, in most states delinquency is defined as the commission of a criminal act by a child who was under the age of 18 at the time; most states also allow youth to remain under the supervision of the juvenile court until age 21. In lieu of prison, juvenile court judges draw from a range of legal options to meet both the safety needs of the public and the treatment needs of the youth, although youth may be confined in juvenile correctional facilities that too often resemble adult prisons and jails, routinely imposing correctional practices such as solitary confinement, strip searches, and the use of chemical or mechanical restraints.

Youth are entitled educational programming while incarcerated. Educational and therapeutic programming may be provided in the child’s community or the child may be placed out of the home in a residential treatment program and ordered to attend school on-grounds. 

Unlike adult criminal proceedings, juvenile court hearings are often closed to members of the public and records in some states remain confidential, protecting children from stigma and collateral consequences when their records are publicly available. However, juvenile records have increasingly become more accessible, and in most jurisdictions are not automatically sealed or expunged when the young person becomes an adult. This creates barriers to obtaining employment, serving in the military, or enrolling in higher education programs.   

In recent years, research by the  MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice  led many states and courts to view juvenile crime — and juvenile justice —  through a scientific lens. Developmental psychology — which demonstrated youth’s developmental immaturity, particular susceptibility to negative peer influences, and a capacity for change and rehabilitation — is supported by neuroscience, which has shown that key areas of the adolescent brain continue to develop until the mid-twenties. This research has forced constitutional changes in how youth are sentenced when prosecuted in the criminal justice system, as well as required the adoption of new rules and standards for law enforcement interrogation of youth, youth’s competency to stand trial and the reliability of youth confessions, among other things.

Since 1975, Juvenile Law Center has worked to ensure that youth who are involved in the juvenile justice system have robust and meaningful rights, access to education and developmentally appropriate treatment, and opportunities to become healthy and productive adults. Juvenile Law Center works towards a world that affirms the unique and developmentally distinct qualities of youth, guarantees fair and equitable treatment, and ensures opportunities for successful adulthood.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Juvenile Justice System — Critical Analysis Of The Effectiveness Of The Juvenile Justice System

Critical Analysis of The Effectiveness of The Juvenile Justice System

• Categories: Criminal Justice Juvenile Justice System Punishment

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Published: May 14, 2021

Words: 2161 | Pages: 5 | 11 min read

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• Smith, David J. 'The effectiveness of the juvenile justice system.' Criminal justice 5.2 (2005): 181-195.
• Leve, Leslie D., Patricia Chamberlain, and Hyoun K. Kim. 'Risks, outcomes, and evidence-based interventions for girls in the US juvenile justice system.' Clinical child and family psychology review 18.3 (2015): 252-279.

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Juvenile Justice System Challenges Essay

1. introduction.

Juvenile justice is the branch of criminal justice that deals with persons not yet considered adults. As researchers point out, these young people are still developing neurologically, socially, and emotionally, and as a result, are immature and easily influenced by their environments. The United States has moved from an era when juveniles had few constitutional rights in the juvenile court process to one where minors' rights were almost equal to those of adult criminal defendants. During the 1990s, however, American politics began an abrupt shift to a punitive and often ineffective "tough-on-crime" policy. Views began to be heard which limited minors' rights in the juvenile justice process and increased the involvement of law enforcement in public schools and other socializing mechanisms. As argued by many, this tool of socialization was being used to criminalize the delinquent and socialize them into a correctional environment while limiting their constitutional rights. There are controversies about how juvenile justice jurisdictions should approach young offenders. It requires further research and a proper understanding of this unique population to address the various challenges faced by the juvenile justice system. We must highlight the challenges and issues related to a particular population of young offenders in the hopes of shedding light on areas that affect public policy, future research, and juvenile justice administration.

1.1. Background of the Juvenile Justice System

The concept of the juvenile court system was enacted in the United States of America with the 1899 founding of the country's first juvenile court in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to the establishment of the juvenile court, the justice system treated all offenders alike without regard to age. Juveniles and adults charged with the same offenses were equally subject to harsh penalties, including the death penalty and long periods of incarceration in mental or penal institutions. Societal attitudes had shifted, however, regarding the competence of juveniles compared with that of adults, and the development of a separate justice system was seen as necessary. The early founders of the juvenile court system theorized that it was necessary to provide a different kind of justice system for juveniles for two basic reasons. First, juveniles were generally less mature and had less developed reasoning and decision-making abilities than adults. Second, the early founders believed that children were simply less culpable for their behavior and consequently should be treated quite differently from the way society treated adults. The cornerstone of the juvenile court system was the doctrine of parens patriae, which gave the state the authority to act as "parent of the state" when the biological parent failed in his or her responsibility. This allowed the state to step in and not only protect the child's rights but also withhold from the child those rights and privileges the state felt were beyond the child's current developmental maturity. The juvenile court was to provide a less formal adversarial process for juveniles. Children were not to be considered defendants, and judges had to be ready to accept a variety of roles and responsibilities. During the next few decades, the juvenile court system came to be seen as the "system that failed" because it was the subject of more than a half dozen critical studies. The critics, primarily concerned with fairness and efficacy, reported widespread and repeated instances of abuse, bias, and unfair treatment, and by the 1970s, the juvenile court system was in a state of crisis.

2. Legal Framework

The regulation of juvenile offenders in Brazil is established by the Statute of the Child and the Adolescent, Law No. 8,069, of July 13, 1990, under which the principle of exceptionality, established by the International Covenant on Children's Rights, is also in force in the state. The jurisdiction of the judiciary in relation to minors is limited to the application of the laws and regulations of the Code of Children and Adolescents (ECA) and of the Penal Code, disregarding the treaty signed by Brazil before the United Nations. It is necessary to emphasize that the system of defense and protection of minor offenders is based on provisions contained in the ECA. In the face of student misconduct, the school usually resorts to Article 101, Chapter VIII, of this Law, which refers to the application of educational measures by a judge. The irony of life is transformed into an educational sanction, with the service entity imposing educational guidelines with the childish title "time out". If the entity arrives at proportioning an "activity" title with the modality of services that it requests, the solution will be an excellent service; otherwise, the service will consist in administering the "time out" until it is extinguished between cartoons and some toothless educational activity.

2.1. Laws and Regulations Governing Juvenile Justice

Let's start this module by addressing one of the first questions some may have when contemplating issues related to juvenile justice - what is meant by "juvenile justice?" Usually, when we use the term "juvenile justice system," we are usually referring to young persons caught up in a system of procedures and statutes which govern how to handle minors and children who are alleged to or have committed criminal acts. Unlike the criminal justice system, which essentially creates methods for judging adults in the country, the juvenile justice system operates from tenets which have as an underlying assumption that children are different from adults and must be treated in a manner entirely different from adults. In the adult system, the fundamental and underlying assumptions are that adults are accountable for their actions and therefore have to be punished when they commit criminal actions. This section and remaining portion of this chapter have only one purpose - to provide a brief statement as to what elements currently exist that make up the juvenile justice system in the United States. The procedures and protections inherent in the adult criminal justice system may vary significantly from one state to another. This may be due to the results of a new law being passed by the legislature or by the results of legal actions such as decisions handed down by state supreme courts and federal courts upon challenges to the laws. In addition, or in contrast to, the states and United States Congress and Federal Courts have over several decades also enacted statutes and regulations that govern what is now referred to as the juvenile justice system.

3. Challenges in the System

The challenges facing the juvenile court and its system are serious and now so well known that they need only brief treatment here. The first issue is that delinquency is today the major legal manifestation of serious maladjustment in adolescence and that the juvenile court has never been adequately equipped as an institution to deal with all the problems that it is called upon to solve. Its three educational, therapeutic, and police-disciplinary functions have never been sufficiently defined or adequately provided for. The court has never been able to order the kind of expensive, protracted rehabilitation, the short-term and long-term treatment that so many of its delinquent child clients truly need. It should be apparent that a system which lacks a needed resource cannot at one and the same time claim both that it is disposed of and that it is doing a good job of processing the cases it is called on to deal with. The day is long overdue when certain specific areas of juvenile court jurisdiction—such as the control of some kinds of runaways, some vandalism, and drunk driving by minors—should be reduced or eliminated. The second major challenge concerns the juvenile court's decision-making process—the exercise of its parens patriae authority. This is in effect a jurisdictional challenge. Critics argue that today's conditions justify an increased concentration upon police-disciplinary responsibilities by society as a whole or by the family or some other social institution. The critics seriously question if a court, particularly a specialized, seemingly outmoded, and much embattled one such as this, should continue to assert primary control over all children who violate important rules widely held by all segments of the community. This publicistic whole argument that people cannot decide what their behavior standards should be if some of the persons who must conform to those standards do not learn by experience that there are consequences for disobedience. The alternative would sacrifice both the promptness of police-disciplinary responses and the need that people learn by experience that there are limits to permissible legal behavior. Experience is overrated, the critics argue, as a deterrent. It is clear that decreasing the number of children subject to juvenile court to parens patriae jurisdiction would reduce the burden facing the family court as a whole.

3.1. Overrepresentation of Minority Youth

Racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system have been found at all decision-making points and at each level of processing, with minority youth overrepresented. National statistics on the disproportionate representation of youth of color in the system are stark. Youth of color are arrested, detained, prosecuted, and committed at higher rates and receive more punitive sanctions than white youth, particularly for the same offenses. It is widely recognized that these disparities are due to structural, community, family, and individual differences that limit access and create barriers to resources and opportunities. Laws and policies resulting from frequently shared negative views about minority youth and neighborhood social problems result in minority youth more frequently living in neighborhoods with little access to jobs and other opportunities. Sparsely served social needs, cultural factors, and minimal access to other safety net supports suggest that youth of color are overrepresented because they have fewer opportunities than white youth that enable them to resolve their problems and desist. In their encounters with the juvenile justice system, it is established that minority youth do not receive the same treatment as white youth. For similar delinquent behaviors, minority youth experience higher rates of arrest, are more likely to be detained or placed in an institution, are held longer, and are less likely to receive alternative dispositions than their white peers. Furthermore, minority youth have less involvement in the decision-making process whether they are arrested, tried, or touched in any stage of the juvenile justice system. Minority youth are more likely than white youth to receive a detention order rather than a counsel and release order, are held longer in detention, require more court case processing, and may receive a more punitive disposition. Minority youth then appear before juvenile judges, yet racial and ethnic differences are not consistent with the evidence showing that court or judge racial composition and decision-making are related.

4. Impact on Juveniles

One of our goals in examining first-time juvenile offenders is to provide information that can be applied in developing intervention and prevention efforts that might reduce the number of young people who engage in contact with the juvenile justice system. Initial involvement in the system increases the chances of continued problems via the labeling and coercive impacts. Public safety, the well-being of young people who come into contact with the juvenile justice system, and the prospects for effective, responsive reintegration of youthful offenders into the community demand serious attention to the individual characteristics, experiences, and needs of delinquent youth. Adolescents, regardless of their sociodemographic characteristics, are in a dynamic phase of development. To the extent that they engage in delinquent activities, this involvement interrupts their growth and can alter their basic life course. Official reactions to violations of the formal expectations of law adults, by contrast, send delinquent youth a message that often stops personal development. Indeed, this interruption contributes to a pattern that may result in an increasing lack of movement toward conventional goals. The negative consequences are based on the continued involvement, and possible escalation of involvement, in illegitimate activities that become more threatening as young people increase in age and physical capabilities. Such involvement continues to undercut the development of a young person who may already be floundering in a society that delivers highly differential opportunities and unwarranted derogation to its young citizens.

4.1. Long-term Effects of Involvement in the Justice System

Once youth become involved in the justice system, they are likely to have poor outcomes as adults. All youth in the justice system have below average literacy rates. In addition, they are more likely to experience mental health and substance use issues, drop out of school, earn less and be unemployed as adults, and engage in criminal activity. The results of a large national study of youth in the juvenile correctional system found that 70 percent of the youth were rearrested within a three-year period and 60 percent were returned to prison. Studies have also shown that reducing the number of youth in the juvenile justice system reduces adult criminal activity and returns significant savings to taxpayers. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the community to ensure that the public systems are operating effectively and reducing the inherent negative outcomes. The juvenile justice system needs to address certain factors to appropriately prepare youth for a successful return to their community. They include addressing criminogenic risk factors, providing individualized services to address the specific needs of each youth, and addressing the collateral consequences of justice system involvement. While these outcomes are not inevitable, and significant progress can be made to improve the life chances of most youth, the consistency of the negative outcomes experienced by multi-system-involved adolescents suggests that communities owe youngsters more than what they are currently providing. The importance of multi-systemic interventions and individualized attention that employ evidence-based approaches is the focus of the recommendations made in this paper. By ensuring that each and every youth is prepared for success as an adult, these best practices will save lives, prevent victimization, and create safer communities for everybody.

5. Recommendations for Improvement

In summary, the approach to the treatment of juvenile offenders should be grounded in the recognition that young offenders are specifically different from adult offenders. What is required is a system of youth justice that recognizes the unique place children occupy in every society. It should be a system that accepts that children are both assets and the most important investment any society should cherish. In this context, the modern-day approach to treatment in the youth justice system should bear the following cherished conditions in mind: a child-specific approach to decision-making, the adoption of restorative justice, and a belief in a multidisciplinary and multiagency approach. Given the inquisitorial nature of the process of decision-making within the context of children's issues, there is the need for various stakeholders or those multidisciplinaries that one-for-more reasons get to play a role in the treatment of juveniles in the youth justice system should take into consideration the prevailing conditions that apply to each juvenile as inserting breaches the trust that society has placed in the judiciary, the most powerful disposition by lawyers, or code officials who are generally involved in the treatment of children in the justice system. In view of the position taken, children have the emotional and physical make-up, which generally make them open to rehabilitation. Secure custody with specially trained staff will keep him or her away from the root causes of offending such as drugs and violent bullying. It will make him feel secure at a time when he may otherwise be in physical danger. It could present him with opportunities for education, appropriate association, external supports by a range of adults, perhaps for the first time in his or her life, to live in harmony with others. Indeed, the current legal framework establishing the least-onerous intervention principle is subject to a number of exceptions, which may well permit the continued imposition of more punitive interventions resulting in the creation of irreparable damage. These interventions include the setting up of a new justice system for the treatment of juveniles, with facilities being run giving priority to the duty of care to the juvenile in a 24-hour secure setting. It should be a facility that places emphasis on the treatment and reintegration of the young person into society as the paramount matter.

5.1. Community-based Alternatives to Incarceration

There is a growing consensus that juvenile offenders are more responsive to rehabilitation efforts than are adult offenders. Studies show that juveniles who remain in the community do not commit new crimes at a higher rate than those confined in institutions and that, as in the case of adults, institutionalization may actually result in increased criminality. Moreover, the costs of providing therapy in a community setting are far lower than the costs of placement in a secure institution. It has been further shown that when juveniles are housed communally in therapy groups rather than separately in cells, both institution maintenance costs and the problems caused by juveniles on an institution center floor are minimized. With the added costs associated with securing residential areas, mopping up violence, and disciplining and medicating the offenders eliminated, juveniles are more apt to complete their court-ordered therapy. In the event that immediate institutional placement is deemed necessary, a program might be implemented that utilizes the tenet of therapeutic community and is based on the life together principle, emphasizing the acquisition of social skills through group living. By promoting the willing cooperation of its members, the community can help young offenders to develop communication and decision-making skills as well as improve their awareness of the consequences of negative behavior and strengthen their understanding of the obligations and responsibilities of social life. These strategies are rooted not only in an ethical commitment to helping troubled youth, but also in a willingness to take a more pragmatic look at the economics of institutional care for young offenders.

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Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach (2013)

Chapter: 9 achieving reform.

Achieving Reform

During the past two decades, major reform efforts in juvenile justice have focused on reducing the use of detention and secure confinement; improving conditions of confinement; closing large institutions and reinvesting in community-based programs; providing high-quality, evidence-based services for youth in the juvenile justice system; reducing racial/ethnic disparities; retaining most offending juveniles in the juvenile justice system rather than transferring them to the criminal justice system; improving delivery of defense services; and developing system-wide juvenile justice planning and collaboration (see Box 9-1 ).

These reform efforts have been frequently driven by the need to remediate harmful conditions of confinement, improve poor quality programs and services, and reduce costs—problems that are not mutually exclusive. More often than not, they exist simultaneously in a jurisdiction. Sometimes we found that innovations were initially focused on one particular aspect of the juvenile justice system, such as reduction in the use of detention, but in the process of addressing a particular problem, the initiative took on a larger focus and was scaled up geographically or was broadened to address other issues (e.g., reducing racial/ethnic disparities) and components of the system. Sometimes the reform was intended to address a fiscal crisis or some specific element of unfairness or program quality. And for some, the effort was targeted from the beginning at system-wide reform changes to the juvenile justice system.

The changes in public policy that have occurred are the result of a complicated interaction among government agencies, policy makers, and the particular characteristics of the policy itself. With this complicated

BOX 9-1 Typology of Reform Activities

Developing system-wide juvenile justice planning and collaboration— Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington.

Reducing detention— By the end of 2012, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative will be active in 40 states plus the District of Columbia and 150 jurisdictions.

Improving conditions of confinement— Over the past four decades, as a result of 57 lawsuits in 33 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, states have initiated court-sanctioned remedies in response to alleged abuse or otherwise unconstitutional conditions in juvenile facilities (Mendel, 2011); 198 facilities in 27 states subscribe to the performance-based standards process (PbS Learning Institute, 2011).

Closing large institutions and reinvesting in community-based programs— These kinds of efforts may involve a shift to a network of small regional facilities (Massachusetts, Missouri, Utah) or a transfer of responsibility from the state to the counties (California, Illinois, Ohio).

Retaining juveniles in the juvenile justice system— Some states have raised the age of exclusive juvenile court jurisdiction (Connecticut, Illinois, Mississippi); 10 states have made changes to their transfer laws that keep more youth in the juvenile justice system (Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, Washington) (Campaign for Youth Justice, 2011).

Utilizing evidence-based programs that reduce recidivism— Several states have passed legislation or promoted state policies that require funded programs for youth be assessed for effectiveness (Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington) and/or that programs be evidence based (North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington).

Improving access to and quality of mental health services— Reforms include statewide mental health screening for all youth (Minnesota) and for all youth on probation (Texas); special mental health courts (Washington); omnibus mental health legislation (Washington); and statewide multijurisdictional crisis intervention teams (Colorado). Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington are pursuing mental health reforms as members of the MacArthur Mental Health Action Network.

Providing quality defense services— Reforms to improve access to and quality of defense services are under way in California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington—model sites in the MacArthur Indigent Defense Action Network. The National Juvenile Defender Center is working to promote a variety of reforms, such as standardizing indigence determination and statewide resource center (Pennsylvania), creation of a statewide system of defender offices (Massachusetts), and development of competency protocols and draft legislation (California).

Providing access to educational programs in detention and post release— Colorado requires local school districts to provide educational services during the school year to juveniles held in adult jails and to comply with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for all jailed juveniles with disabilities.

Reducing racial disparities— More than 40 jurisdictions have worked directly with the W. Haywood Burns Institute to undertake community-wide planning around reducing racial disparities. Specific initiatives have included reducing detention by developing alternatives to secure detention, reducing failure-to-appear rates, developing disciplinary policies that reduce referrals to law enforcement, and focusing on Latino youth initially detained by probation, available: http://www.burnsinstitute.org/article.php?id=56 [May 2013].

Modifying harsh sentencing laws for youth— Four states (Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Washington) have modified their sentencing laws. Colorado adjusted maximum sentences without parole that youth could receive; Georgia posed exceptions to mandatory minimum sentences for sex offenders; Texas abolished juvenile life without parole; and Washington eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for juveniles tried as adults (Arya and Ward, 2011).

Building multisystem approaches in child welfare and juvenile justice— Approximately 40 counties across the country are advancing the Crossover Youth Practice Model, developed by Casey Family Programs and the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute. The model is designed to reduce the flow of youth between the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system, the number of youth entering and reentering care, and the length of stay in out-of-home care (Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, available: http://cjrr.georgetow.edu/pm/practicemodel.htm [August 2012]).

interaction in mind, the committee was interested in identifying juvenile justice reforms that reflect a developmentally appropriate approach and in ascertaining how they had come about and what they had accomplished. We were interested in the lessons one might draw from these reforms— lessons that could be applied to future efforts to promote and sustain a developmental approach by the juvenile justice system.

We have focused on innovations that have been described in the literature or have made some effort to document their progress in moving the juvenile justice system from a punitive corrections model to a developmentally appropriate services model. See Box 9-1 for a broad typology of reform activities identified by the committee.

DRIVERS OF REFORM

A variety of organizations have provided the impetus for reform. We have organized the sequence of reform initiatives in a roughly chronological fashion. In identifying them and describing the changes they influenced, we are not suggesting that any driver by itself was the sole force for the particular change being described. Usually an innovation is affected by multiple forces, sometimes occurring concurrently and at other times sequentially. However, we think important lessons can be derived from this account.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

The federal government’s interest in preventing and addressing juvenile crime and juvenile offenders is vested in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). Its mandate is to provide the resources, leadership, and coordination to improve the quality of juvenile justice (Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, P.L. 93-415). OJJDP dollars have provided a strong incentive for communities to undertake several far-reaching juvenile justice reforms on a national scale. Primary among them are certain core requirements that states must fulfill if they are to receive funding. But as federal expenditures for domestic programs decline in the coming years, OJJDP’s approach for promoting juvenile justice reforms is likely to be weakened and may disappear altogether. Organizations and stakeholders supporting the re-authorization of OJJDP strongly advocate for its continued role in promoting reform and an increase in grant support to the states to carry out OJJDP’s mandated reform activities (Coalition for Juvenile Justice, 2008; National Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Coalition, 2011a, 2011b). These issues are described in detail in Chapter 10 .

OJJDP also offers a different financial incentive through its sponsorship of community-wide initiatives. During the 1990s, it sponsored several large

multisite demonstration programs that provided resources to communities willing to tackle large problems, such as school safety, exposure of children to violence, gang prevention and intervention, and delinquency prevention. Along with programmatic support, the agency offered communities extensive training and technical assistance (TTA). In return for federal dollars, communities were required to develop a matrix of services and to match youth to those services through the use of risk/need assessments. Some current state reform efforts (Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) and local ones (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and San Diego, California) also trace their beginnings to the partnerships established to implement this comprehensive strategy (Wilson and Howell, 1993; Howell, 1995a, 2003b).

OJJDP’s capacity to impact the juvenile justice field through support of large-scale demonstrations has dramatically declined. With this decline, state and local governments, foundations, and other youth-serving and advocacy organizations have taken on the challenge of reform.

Transformational State Models

Some statewide innovations originate and are propelled by state policy makers rather than by outside change agents. In two widely touted examples of major statewide innovations, in Massachusetts and Missouri, the impetus for change came from elected officials and state administrators with juvenile justice oversight.

The Massachusetts Experiment

During the early 1970s, Jerome Miller, director of youth services in Massachusetts, conceived and led an effort to close the state’s correctional training schools 1 and replace them with a network of decentralized community-based services and several small, secure units for violent juvenile offenders. His accomplishment has been described as “the most sweeping reform in youth corrections in the United States since the establishment of juvenile reformatories in the 19th century and juvenile courts in the 20th century” (Howell, 2003b, p. 200).

In a retrospective account of his experiences in Massachusetts, Miller freely admits that at first he had only hazy ideas about how to improve the harsh conditions (Miller, 1991). His effort to close the training schools grew out of the realization that his veteran staff, many of whom had received

____________________________________

1 The term “training school” is one of several used to refer to facilities that house youthful offenders, usually those adjudicated for serious crimes. Originally these facilities were conceived of as places where youth would be educated or trained to be model citizens, hence the name “training” school.

their jobs through a patronage system, would vehemently oppose any steps to change the status quo. But as the notion of closing the schools began to take hold, he began to work in a more systematic way to bring a “therapeutic community” philosophy to one institution at a time, expanding training, structuring new kinds of programs, and setting up community-based alternatives. He gained the support of influential people and groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Massachusetts Council on Crime and Delinquency, gradually finding allies among the staff. Within a two-year period, he succeeded in closing all seven training schools, which housed approximately 1,000 youth, and replaced them with two 30-bed facilities, in-home services, group homes, and residential placements (Krisberg and Austin, 1998).

The Missouri Model

The Missouri model is a therapeutic treatment model for all youth in institutional placement. Its key elements include

• continuous case management, from postarrest processing to aftercare;
• small, decentralized residential facilities (no more than 50 youth with an average population of 20) within 50-75 miles of their homes;
• peer-led services for small groups of 10-12 youth who remain together for all activities, meals, and treatment throughout their stay; and
• a rehabilitative treatment approach in which no specific treatment model is used but each youth has his or her own treatment plan that stresses group processes.

The Missouri model has had a long history of acceptance and support by the Missouri legislature. Small-group staffing of residential facilities was piloted during the late 1950s and early 1960s. After the Department of Youth Services, a free-standing agency within the Department of Social Services, was established, the idea of regional treatment was expanded and two large training schools were closed during the 1970s and 1980s. A major milestone occurred in 1987, when the legislature created a bipartisan Youth Services Advisory Board composed of local and state lawmakers and experts with responsibility for planning the state’s juvenile treatment and placement services. Credit for refining and sustaining the Missouri model also goes to its unusually stable leadership. Mark Steward led the Department of Youth Services from 1988 to 2005, and its current director, Tim

Decker, worked under Steward for nine years prior to returning to the agency to assume the directorship in 2007.

More than two dozen states have visited Missouri to learn about the model, and Louisiana, New Mexico, two counties in California, New York, and the District of Columbia, are actively engaged in adopting the model to their jurisdictions. Despite the public attention given to the Missouri model and many replication efforts, the committee found little scientific evidence supporting the model’s effectiveness. Recidivism data, on which many claims are based, are purely descriptive and correlational in nature. An outside assessment of the Missouri model (Mendel, 2010), which compared Missouri’s recidivism rates to those of other states, was also flawed methodologically. (See Appendix B for a detailed description of the methodological issues.) Similarly, there has been no systematic process evaluation to determine which aspects of the model contribute to its success.

Key elements of the Missouri model reflect a developmental perspective. Its strong and stable leadership, as well as legislative and stakeholder support, appear to be important strategic conditions for transformative changes. In the absence of better documented models, it has been embraced by the juvenile justice field. 2 But the case for its adoption would be strengthened if the model and its elements were systematically and rigorously evaluated.

Civil Rights Litigation

Traditionally, litigation has been a major tool for ameliorating unfair and harmful conditions of confinement. As the first step in what later may become a broader systemic effort, litigation or even the threat of litigation often serves as a powerful incentive for states and local jurisdictions to make significant changes in their juvenile justice systems. During the early 1970s and 1980s, litigation was primarily brought by juvenile law centers supported by private foundations, such as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. From 1979 to 1981, OJJDP also provided start-up funding to juvenile law centers. Two current legal centers funded during this period

2 The committee acknowledges that there may be other statewide juvenile justice reform efforts that are more extensive or have had a greater impact than that of the Missouri model. We chose to highlight this reform because of the amount of documentation that exists, the favorable support it has received from the juvenile justice field and the efforts to widely replicate it. We note, however, that the model has not been objectively and independently supported with empirical research. Appendix B provides a review of the research to date and describes the requisites of a rigorous process and outcome evaluation.

are the Youth Law Center in San Francisco and the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 3

The Youth Law Center

Established in 1978, the Youth Law Center has brought more than a dozen lawsuits aimed at removing youth from jails and improving conditions of confinement. The lawsuits are based on constitutional requirements relating to provision of health, mental health, and education services to youth in confinement. They were also aimed at excessive use of force, restraining devices, and other safety issues. Through the early 1990s, the Youth Law Center worked in close conjunction with OJJDP. After the center filed a suit, OJJDP would provide technical assistance and guidance as to how the defendant facilities and agencies could improve conditions and meet the demands of any settlement eventually negotiated. This partnership resulted in removing youth from jails and in several cases closing public training schools that had abusive practices (Soler, personal communication, South Dakota case). 4 Its work also has impacted private training schools ( Milonas v. Williams , 1982), with the court ruling that even private facilities require state oversight and involvement.

Two recent cases involving the Youth Law Center demonstrate the broad impact a case can have on a state’s juvenile justice system. L.H. v. Schwarzenegger (2007) was brought against the California Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) for its practice of routinely imposing, without proper or timely notice, lengthy parole periods when juveniles violated their initial paroles. The suit also alleged that juveniles were not allowed to have witnesses testify on their behalf, to present evidence, or to have an attorney. As a result of the settlement, DJJ was required to hold timely parole hearings, to desist from holding youth in “temporary detention” if they were continued on parole, to provide accommodations for mental and physical disabilities, to allow youth to present evidence and witnesses at their prob-

3 There are numerous organizations throughout the country that litigate on behalf of youth who come in contact with the juvenile justice system. Some, like the National Youth Law Center in Oakland, California, receive support from their state bars; others are funded privately and work primarily within their own states. The Prison Law Office in San Francisco was responsible for bringing the Margaret Farrell v. Mathew Cate lawsuit, which resulted in a far-reaching consent decree requiring the state to implement six different remedial plans. The work of the Juvenile Law Center and the Youth Law Center is highlighted in this report because of their longevity and the scope of their activities.

4 Telephone interview with Mark Soler, former executive director of the Youth Law Center and now current executive director, Center for Children’s Law and Policy, June 13, 2011. Information on the Youth Law Center’s legal activities is available from http://www.ylc.org [April 2013].

able cause and revocation hearings, and to provide a prompt administrative appeal process. 5

The second case, S.H. v. Reed (2011) (formerly S.H. v. Taft ), against the Ohio Department of Youth Services (ODYS) charged the department with abusive, inhuman, and illegal conditions, policies, and practices. According to the Youth Law Center’s website, the settlement

creates a long term investment in Ohio youth by infusing new resources into DYS operations, overseeing reform in the process for determining when youth should be released from DYS custody, and supporting evidence-based community programs for low-risk offenders. Changes included hiring up to 115 juvenile correctional officers. The agreement also supports improved mental health services, enhanced educational, medical and dental services and a capacity goal on the youth population. 6 , 7

Juvenile Law Center

The Juvenile Law Center was established in 1975 to deal with issues affecting juveniles and dependent children. 8 Originally a walk-in clinic for any youth up to age 21 needing a lawyer, over the years it has broadened its scope to include not only on the juvenile justice system but also on the dependency and foster care systems, with a particular emphasis on youth aging out of foster care. Like the Youth Law Center, its litigation has addressed detention of youth ( Youth Study Center, 1976; A.M. v. Luzerne County Detention Center, 2001); conditions of confinement ( D.B. v. Casey, 1991); loss of liberty ( Coleman v. Stanziana, 1981; T.B. v. City of Philadelphia, 1988); and access to such services as education ( D.C. v. School District of Philadelphia, 2004) and health and mental health services ( Scott v. Snider, 1991). Several cases have set important precedents regarding the use of isolation and lack of access to counsel and other postdispositional due process issues for incarcerated youth ( Troy D. and O’Neill S. v. Mickens et al. , 2010). Most recently, its strong advocacy paid off in a class action suit brought on behalf of children and families of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania ( H.T. et al. v. Mark A. Ciavarella, Jr. et al ., 2009) who were involved in the “kids-for-cash” corruption scheme. Judge Ciavarela was one of two judges who sentenced about 2,500 children during 2003-2008. Many were sent

5 Available: http://www.ylc.org/viewDetails.php?id=69 [September 2011].

6 Available: http://www.ylc.org/viewDetails.php?id=63 [June 2012].

7 Ohio is an interesting example of a state that has been sued for poor conditions of con finement while at the same time it has been engaged in statewide efforts to lower the number of youth in state facilities and to provide quality community-based alternatives for them. See Box 9-4.

8 Available: http://www.jlc.org [April 2013].

to a privately run juvenile facility in return for cash kickbacks. More than half of the youth lacked counsel, and 60 percent of them were removed from their homes. In December 2011, the plaintiffs were awarded partial settlement of more than $17 million subject to the court’s approval. 9 The Juvenile Law Center regards its most importance contribution to be the attention it has brought to the need for systemic change. 10

Prison Litigation Reform Act

Since the mid-1990s, privately funded juvenile law centers have found it more difficult to sue on behalf of their youthful clients (Mendel, 2011). In 1996, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was passed. This law amends and supplements the U.S. Code in a number of ways that restrict and discourage litigation by prisoners. Detained and adjudicated delinquents held in both public and private juvenile facilities are considered prisoners under the act (42 U.S.C. § 1997e(h); 28 U.S.C. § 1915(h); 28 U.S.C. § 1915A(c)) (Boston, 2004). According to Mark Soler, the 1995 act makes it more difficult to sue and to negotiate agreements. 11 Parties must have exhausted all administrative remedies before bringing the suit and must agree to the least restrictive measures that can be used to resolve the problems. The act also sets very low limits on fees for attorneys and expert witnesses, thus discouraging attorneys from taking on cases.

CRIPA Litigation

Starting in the mid-1990s, the special litigation division in the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) began stepping up its investigations of juvenile facilities. Its authority to litigate is derived from the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980 (CRIPA), Section 14141 of the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994, and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 12 Advocates point to U.S. v. Georgia (1998) as a particularly significant investigation that reflected a more activist role for the Department of Justice. It addressed systemic practices as well as specific conditions of confinement. A total of 16 remedial measures were proposed to address the lack of health, dental, mental health, suicide prevention, and

9 Available: http://www.jlc.org/current-initiatives/promoting-fairness-courts/luzerne-kids-cash-scandal [April 2013].

10 Telephone interview on June 12, 2011, with Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center. Information on the Juvenile Law Center’s activities is available from http://www.jlc.org [April 2013].

11 Telephone interview with Mark Soler, former executive director of the Youth Law Center and now current executive director, Center for Children’s Law and Policy, June 13, 2011.

12 Available: http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/cripa.php [September 2011].

education services; harsh disciplinary practices; poor access to recreation and visitation; and lack of training and supervision of staff.

According to a recent analysis of monitoring or enforcement actions pending as of September 1, 2010, juvenile facilities in 35 states have been investigated or sued by the Department of Justice since 1971. Eight distinct categories reflect the kinds of problems that the responsible states or facilities have agreed (or been ordered) to improve. In addition, these categories include problems documented in a federal CRIPA investigation whether or not a case settlement has been reached:

• abuse or excessive use of force;
• excessive use of restraint and/or isolation;
• failure to protect youth from harm;
• failure to provide therapeutic environment and rehabilitative treatment;
• failure to provide required services (education, mental health, health);
• inadequate staffing or staff training;
• environmental safety issues (fire safety, crowding); and
• failure to provide opportunity for communication (mail, attorney, telephone).

Of these categories, failure to provide required services and excessive use of restraint and use of force were the most common problems. Although some lawsuits deal with specific facilities, others target the statewide juvenile justice system (e.g., Georgia, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, and Puerto Rico). 13

Impact of Litigation

Depending on the timing, litigation can spark system reform or lend additional support to changes that are already under way. A DOJ investigation of two training schools in Louisiana in 1996 sparked the beginning of an effort to address the high rates of confinement of juveniles in Louisiana and the violent conditions under which they were held (U.S. v. Louisiana, 1998). Through several settlement agreements, the state addressed numerous safety, education, and medical remedial measures. 14 Of great

13 From information compiled by the Youth Law Center in May 2011 and made available to the committee in July 2011. Similar information is contained in Mendel (2011, p. 7)

14 Settlement agreement (education) filed November 1, 1999; U.S. Jena Agreement filed April 1, 2000; settlement agreement for medical, dental, mental health, rehabilitation, and juvenile justice issues filed August 8, 2000; settlement agreement filed December 31, 2003; settlement agreement filed January 1, 2004. (Information provided to the committee by the Youth Law Center, May 2011.)

significance was the closing of the Tallulah Youth Correctional Center for Youth in 2004, a facility that had received national attention for being “an institution out of control” because of rampant violence and staff brutality (JI-LA-0001-0009 June 18, 1997). The DOJ consultants encouraged the state to seek major foundation support to improve its operations, and it subsequently became a MacArthur Foundation Model for Change site. Louisiana officials have also worked closely with the Annie E. Casey Foundation. (A fuller description of the foundations’ initiatives is provided in the next section.) As a result of numerous changes in law and juvenile detention and corrections policies, the number of juveniles in secure care has been reduced to 350 from approximately 1,900 youth when the investigation first began in 1997. 15

DOJ also initiated legal action against New York ( U.S. v. New York , 2010), in the midst of efforts by the state’s Office of Children, Youth, and Family Services (OCYFS) to carry out a reform agenda that included (among other things) closing numerous large residential facilities located in upstate New York and relocating juveniles to smaller community-based facilities. According to committee member Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of OCYFS:

In New York State, the DOJ lawsuit served to buttress our transformation efforts that were already underway. In many ways, it gave legitimacy and confirmed what we were saying about the system’s shortcomings and the approach to remedy the conditions. DOJ affirmatively lauded our efforts to reform the system and their intervention heightened the awareness and sense of urgency to implement change. It helped to widen the universe of interested parties and prompted Legal Aid to sue. To an extent, it muted the opposition that now had to address the DOJ findings and forced them to find other objections to the changes we were pursuing…. It required the investment of additional state resources in targeted areas for multiple years. Without DOJ, given the state’s dire fiscal situation, it is doubtful the system would receive additional dollars and in fact would have faced substantial cuts…. Overall DOJ has given us political cover to make fundamental change that probably would have been much harder to undertake, freed up money to support the reforms and made it difficult for people to continue to support the status quo. 16

DOJ’s action did not aim to effect change across the entire system (e.g., pretrial) because the investigation involved only four facilities. It also focused narrowly on mental health and conditions of confinement and did not address inadequate educational programs or lack of compli-

15 Telephone interview with Judy Preston, staff attorney, special litigation unit, civil rights division, U.S. Department of Justice, June 29, 2011.

16 E-mail exchange with Gladys Carrión, commissioner, New York State Office of Children, Youth, and Family Services, September 6, 2011.

ance with federal law regarding special education and special needs youth. Often when a lawsuit focuses on one institution, DOJ’s involvement ends once the institution is closed, and ongoing DOJ review and oversight are limited. 17 In the case of New York, however, DOJ continued to monitor youth after their facility was closed and they were moved to a different one. Furthermore, DOJ is requiring New York City to carry out the settlement and policies developed prior to it, after the city assumes responsibility for city youth in state custody. 18

In conclusion, litigation provides an incentive to reform policies and practices of juvenile justice systems. As one might imagine, state juvenile justice agencies want to avoid unfavorable media attention and protracted litigation. According to Judy Preston, an experienced staff attorney in the special litigation unit at the DOJ, states are typically responsive to the threat of litigation, and it is seldom necessary for DOJ to go to trial. 19 However, reaching agreement or being ordered to do something is often the first step in a larger reform process. Cases can remain active for years afterward. Of the 57 federal CRIPA investigations over conditions of confinement in state-funded juvenile correctional facilities, 6 cases have remained active for as long as 11 years following the initial case disposition (e.g., a settlement, consent decree, order, or decision). 20

DOJ is now in the process of expanding its investigative activities from a traditional focus on conditions of confinement and the postdispositional stage to the moment a youth enters the system. To do so, it is relying on Section 14141 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which gives the attorney general authority to file lawsuits to seek judicial remedies when administrators of juvenile justice systems engage in a pattern or practice of violating incarcerated juveniles’ federal rights. 21

Interestingly, the court’s involvement can be a double-edged sword. While improving and moderating institutional conditions and reducing harsh discipline, it can also reinforce the reliance on an institutional model. Because there is the threat of ongoing litigation, legislators may use the

17 E-mail exchange with Cheri Townsend, executive director, Texas Juvenile Justice Department, September 6, 2011.

18 E-mail exchange with Gladys Carrión, commissioner, New York State Office of Children, Youth, and Family Services, April 23, 2012.

19 Telephone interview with Judy Preston, staff attorney, special litigation unit, civil rights division, U.S. Department of Justice, June 29, 2011.

20 Rhode Island has the distinction of having the longest open case. In 1971, the Department of Justice initiated an investigation of conditions in the Rhode Island Boys Training School, and, since 2000, a court-appointed master has monitored compliance with the court order ( Inmates of the Boys Training School v. Lindgren [D.R.I. filed 1971]) (Mendel, 2011).

21 Telephone interview with Judy Preston, staff attorney, special litigation unit, civil rights division, U.S. Department of Justice, June 29, 2011.

litigation as a reason to justify higher budgets and more staff and buildings (Miller, 1991).

Influential Foundation Initiatives

Beginning in the early 1990s, foundations became increasingly aware of and involved in activities aimed at addressing the harsh treatment of youth by the juvenile justice system. Their interest in juvenile justice was a natural extension of their interest in promoting the healthy development of children and their increasing concern about poor institutional conditions, unfairness, and ineffective practices. In particular, the Annie E. Casey Foundation (Annie E. Casey) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (MacArthur) have invested millions of dollars in research, demonstrations, and TTA to support jurisdictions willing to change the way they currently handle juvenile offenders. Employing different strategies and slightly different but overlapping objectives, these foundations have assumed the mantle of leadership during a time in which it appears that OJJDP’s leadership role has waned.

Annie E. Casey Foundation and Detention Reform

Alarmed by the number of youth being detained, the deplorable conditions and the troubling effects of detention on youth (e.g., isolation, increased levels of violence, suicides, lack of services), the Annie E. Casey Foundation initiated in 1992 the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI)—perhaps the most widely replicated reform initiative since the passage of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974. From an initial demonstration program involving five sites, the initiative has been implemented in approximately 150 jurisdictions in 39 states plus the District of Columbia (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012). Four of them serve as model sites: Bernalillo, California; Cook County, Illinois; Multnomah County, Oregon; and Santa Cruz, California (Mendel, 2009; Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012).

The chief goals of the initiative are to reduce detention and to use the detention process as a lever for broader system-wide reforms. It is characterized by collaboration between juvenile justice agencies and other community and governmental organizations; use of data to diagnose problems; objective admissions criteria and instruments to replace subjective decision making; new or enhanced nonsecure alternatives to detention; case processing reforms to expedite the flow of cases through the system; minimizing special detention cases; additional specific strategies aimed at reducing racial disparities; and improve the conditions of confinement (Mendel, 2009).

Assessing Effectiveness. JDAI places a great emphasis on the collection and analysis of data for the purpose of understanding the characteristics of youth going through the system and what is happening to them. In addition to quarterly submission of data (specified by race, ethnicity, and gender) on admissions, average length of stay, and average daily population, JDAI requires each site to collect information on current charge, prior adjudications, prior failures to appear in court, and aggravating and mitigating factors. Furthermore, sites report when a youth is detained despite being at low risk for failing to appear in court or for committing another offense prior to adjudication (Soler, 2010).

Annual Results Report . In fall 2011, JDAI released its first annual results report (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011). 22 Although JDAI sites had been submitting annual reports since 2004, many data-related problems needed to be overcome (Mendel, 2009). The JDAI Annual Report 2009 covered 102 local sites, with data from individual sites within a state being aggregated, for a total number of data from 34 grantees. Three core areas were measured:

• impact—quantifiable change in detention utilization, postdisposition commitments and placements, public safety (reoffending and failure to appear), and racial/ethnic disparities;
• influence—specific changes in policies, practices, and programs implemented by the sites; and
• leverage dollars invested in the reporting year to support detention reform activities, whether local, state, federal, or private.

JDAI sites reported a one-third decrease in the average daily population of detention facilities, a 30 percent decrease in detention admissions, and a 5 percent decrease in average length of stay across all JDAI jurisdictions in comparison to the baseline year. JDAI reported that annual commitments to state youth corrections by the JDAI sites decreased by one-third and out-of-home placements decreased by 16 percent across all sites in comparison to the baseline year. Finally, results with respect to the racial/ethnic disparities showed a 28 percent reduction in average daily population in detention among youth of color and a 12 percent average reduction in youth of color placed out of home at disposition. Interestingly, the findings reported that reductions for youth of color in average daily population in detention and in detention admissions were lower than reductions for the overall youth population for these indicators. Reductions in average length of stay in detention and in commitments to state corrections for youth of color were

22 Despite its release date, the report is entitled JDAI Annual Report 2009.

higher than reductions reported for the overall population for these same indicators (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011).

Although the JDAI report represents a real advance in the foundation’s effort to assess the impact of its path-breaking national reform effort, the evaluation has significant weaknesses. A great deal of attention is given to “reductions,” but comparison periods are not clearly defined. Sites have different baseline years and have been allowed to determine whether the 12-month period is a calendar or a fiscal year (FY) as long as they remain consistent. The comparison of youth of color with all youth rather than with white youth reflects an inaccurate picture of the size of the effect. In a place like Chicago or the District of Columbia, youth of color may constitute half (or much more) of the total, so the comparison may miss the contrast between youth of color and white youth. Finally, the report does not deal with other changes in the jurisdictions that might account for changes in detention or commitment—for example, whether the overall use of commitment has dropped, regardless of whether the youth had pretrial detention, and whether new laws have been enacted that increase the transfer of youth to adult court, making it more likely that a youth who is eventually incarcerated will not be handled through the juvenile system and therefore will not be reflected in the statistics that JDAI uses. The committee also notes that, in the absence of raw data, it was difficult to understand the calculations. 23

Despite these shortcomings, what makes the report particularly noteworthy is the honesty with which it describes the data deficiencies. These include underreported or inaccurate data regarding failure-to-appear rates, preadjudication rearrest rates, out-of-home placements, and commitments and out-of home placement of youth of color. More than two-thirds of all local JDAI sites failed to report baseline and recent-period data for the failure-to-appear and rearrest indicators—the greatest single failing in the annual results reports. Defining admissions, out-of-home placements, and general indicators of public safety also proved to be problematic. Although the report explains some of the deficiencies, it concedes the importance of addressing these problems if the sites “are to credibly claim that their detention reforms do not undermine the integrity of the court process or jeopardize public safety” (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011, p. 5).

Future of JDAI. Since 2003, JDAI has been increasingly focused on state-level replication efforts. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has increasingly partnered with states enlisting cohorts of counties and then expanding as other counties come on board once they see progress being made. In 2009,

23 E-mail from William Feyerherm, vice-provost for research and dean of graduate studies, Portland State University, September 8, 2011.

New Jersey became the first statewide model jurisdiction and has closed three detention facilities, saving an estimated $16.5 million a year (Mendel, 2009). Florida, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania are the most recent state partners (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012).

While the Annie E. Casey Foundation remains firmly committed to expanding and sustaining JDAI, it concedes that its commitment is, in the long run, insufficient either to maintain fidelity or achieve scale. Although OJJDP has provided $1 million in discretionary funds over two years to support the strategic expansion of JDAI, 24 whether a long-term federal role will emerge remains uncertain. (See Chapter 10 .)

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Models for Change

In the period 1996-2011, the MacArthur Foundation has expended more than $140 million to improve the treatment of youth who come to the attention of the juvenile justice system. This investment in juvenile justice grew out of the foundation’s interest in promoting adolescent development as a pillar of juvenile justice practice. It was informed by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice (1996-2005), an interdisciplinary group of scholars, policy experts, and practitioners. The network’s research efforts focused on understanding the capabilities and limitations of adolescents, their risk for public safety, and their potential for change. 25

Among the important findings of the network’s research was that a significant proportion of adolescents age 15 or younger are probably incompetent to stand trial, as judged by adult measures of competency; that there are significant age-related changes in a youth’s ability to consider the consequences of his or her actions and susceptibility to peer pressure; that unconscious racial stereotyping causes African American adolescents to be seen as more “adult-like” and thus more blameworthy; and that the huge variability among serious offenders makes it difficult to predict future offending based on the presenting offense (MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, 2006).

MacArthur launched Models for Change in 2004 and selected Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington to develop “more rational, fair, effective and developmentally sound” juvenile justice systems that could then serve as models of successful system-wide reform elsewhere (John D.

24 Presentation by Bart Lubow, director, juvenile justice strategy group, Annie E. Casey Foundation, to the committee, January 19, 2011.

25 Presentation by Laurie Garduque, director of juvenile justice, program on human and community development, John D. and Catherine A. MacArthur Foundation, to the committee, October 11, 2010.

and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2010). Each state was provided with a total of $10 million for five years. Rather than propose a single model, MacArthur identified eight principles that constituted the framework of an ideal juvenile justice system (see Box 9-2 ). The strategy has been to fund different promising models in several states, to learn from those experiences, and then to come up with several models that could then be offered to other states for adoption (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2010).

BOX 9-2 Models for Change Principles

The Models for Change framework is grounded in eight principles that reflect widely shared and firmly held values related to juvenile justice:

• Fundamental fairness: All system participants—including youthful offenders, their victims, and their families—deserve bias-free treatment.
• Recognition of juvenile-adult differences: The system must take into account that juveniles are fundamentally and developmentally different from adults.
• Recognition of individual differences: Juvenile justice decision makers must acknowledge and respond to individual differences in terms of young people’s development, culture, gender, needs, and strengths.
• Recognition of potential: Young offenders have strengths and are capable of positive growth. Giving up on them is costly for society. Investing in them makes sense.
• Safety: Communities and individuals deserve to be and to feel safe.
• Personal responsibility: Young people must be encouraged to accept responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions.
• Community responsibility: Communities have an obligation to safeguard the welfare of children and young people, to support them when in need, and to help them to grow into adults.
• System responsibility: The juvenile justice system is a vital part of society’s collective exercise of its responsibility toward young people. It must do its job effectively.

SOURCE: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2010).

MacArthur also provided support to jurisdictions in another 12 states through its Action Networks. Funded during 2007-2008, the networks focused on three separate issues: reducing disproportionate minority contact (DMC), improving access to mental health services for juvenile justice youth, and improving indigent defense services. 26 A National Resource Bank provides training, technical assistance, and consultation to the MacArthur sites. 27 To date, approximately 204 Models for Change grants have been made to 92 separate agencies and organizations. In all, MacArthur has spent almost $41 million of its Models for Change funding to support TTA for state and local governments (Griffin, 2011).

The MacArthur Foundation’s reach and influence in the juvenile justice field extend beyond its Models for Change initiative. MacArthur also supports several activities related to the handling of “dually involved” or “crossover” youth who are involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, often with adverse effects. (See Chapter 3 for a discussion of crossover youth.) One of these related activities is the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Integration Initiative, an ongoing activity in the Model for Change states. Begun in 2000, this initiative focuses on cross-system coordination and integration of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems (Herz et al., 2012). A partnership between the Casey Family Program (a separate program from the Annie E. Casey Foundation) and Georgetown’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform is implementing and testing the Crossover Youth Practice Model, specific practices aimed at reducing the number of youth who cross over between the two systems, the number of youth entering and reentering care, and the length of stay in out-of-home care (Herz et al., 2012).

Assessing the Impact of Models for Change. To date, a formal cross-site evaluation of the impact of the Models for Change program has not been conducted. 28 The Models for Change initiative is a sprawling, complex set of activities involving more than 35 jurisdictions in 16 states (Griffin, 2011). Its four key states were funded at different times and are at different stages of development. Each state determined its own starting point in the

26 Available: http://www.modelsforchange.net/aboutAction-networks.html [April 2012].

27 Available: http://www.modelsforchange.net/about/National-Resource-Bank.html [April 2012].

28 In 2009, MacArthur hired Bennett Midland LLC to design a database to be used for reporting on the totality of its investments, activities, and accomplishments of Models for Change. The first report, produced in December 2011, provides a broad description of the grants (size, goals, activities) and what it calls “progress events,” such as publications, activities associated with community-based programs, training, data infrastructure/use/sharing, establishment of collaborative infrastructure, screening and assessment, and fiscal commitment (Griffin, 2011).

juvenile justice system and targeted areas of improvement. Consequently, each site conducts different kinds of evaluation activities, usually reporting qualitative information as to what was achieved. There has been some attempt to collect information on five key outcomes from the four key states on a quarterly basis (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2010). These key outcomes include

• impartial and unbiased decision making (reduced racial disparities);
• retention of youth in the juvenile justice system (reduced transfer and waiver to adult criminal court);
• prosocial development and engagement (increased participation in education and rehabilitation and treatment programs);
• public safety (reduced recidivism); and
• informal local handling of delinquency (reduced reliance on incarceration and increased use of community-based alternative sanctions).

To date, however, this information has not been made publicly available on a cross-site basis or in a comprehensive way.

Within the Action Networks, data are also being collected on impact (Soler, 2010). For example, 20 sites in the 4 core Models for Change states and the 4 DMC states (Kansas, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin) collect data on 35 indicators developed by the W. Haywood Burns Institute in San Francisco. 29 This information is used by the sites and the Center for Children’s Law and Policy, the technical assistance provider, to monitor the sites’ policies and practices (Soler, 2010).

In 2008, MacArthur also funded a study of system change strategies of its four key states to identify what strategies had been implemented, their outcomes and consequences, and the identifiable facilitators and barriers for the reform initiatives (Wiig et al., 2010). According to the lead researcher on the study, it was not possible to assess outcomes because of lack of data. 30 Recently, MacArthur released a report presenting composite information on grant characteristics, grantees, grant aims, and focus areas (Griffin, 2011). It is based on data taken from the foundation’s grant files and grantees’ annual and final reports as well as data entered retroactively online. Although helpful in categorizing the range and scope of activities supported under the mantle of Models for Change, the report concedes that

29 Examples of indicators include admissions to detention, average length of stay, and average daily population on a quarterly basis. Data are broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender.

30 Telephone conversation with Kimberly Isett, associate professor, school of public policy, Georgia Tech, November 14, 2011.

the summarized results “should be regarded as preliminary impressions, not facts” (Griffin, 2011, p. 11).

Future of Models for Change. MacArthur is now working with state and local jurisdictions to ensure that the foundation-funded reforms can be sustained and replicated (Wiig et al., 2010). More recently, it announced that it is creating a funding partnership with OJJDP in four areas: mental health screening and risk/need assessment, mental health training for juvenile justice staff, DMC reduction, and juvenile justice and child welfare system integration (U.S. Department of Justice, 2012). It also signaled that its focus will shift to promoting statewide legislative reforms and promoting state policy changes on a national scale. 31

Community Advocacy

Changing the way youth are handled by the juvenile justice system depends heavily on public support and acceptance. Public support can influence juvenile justice policy (Cullen et al., 1998; Roberts, 2004), and sometimes previously adopted policies reflected in statutes become out of touch with developing public opinion (Mears et al., 2007). Community-based organizations also act as drivers of reform legislation. California, Connecticut, Louisiana, and New York are four states where community advocates have been pivotal in moving the reform agenda along.

Connecticut’s Raise the Age Campaign

In the past six years, a combination of litigation activities, legislative action, and community organizing has been under way in Connecticut to improve services for youth in detention, reduce detention of status offenders who have violated court orders, increase community-based services, and develop regional family support centers. The issue most closely identified with community advocates, however, is the raising of the maximum age of juvenile jurisdiction from 15 to 18. 32

During the 1990s, Connecticut was one of only three states that had lowered the maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction to age 15. The Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance composed of various groups concerned with the treatment of youth in the juvenile justice system conducted

31 Presentation by Laurie Garduque, director of juvenile justice, program on human and community development, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to the commit tee, October 11, 2010.

32 Abby Anderson, executive director, Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, Children’s Law Center webinar, July 11, 2011. Available http://www.childrenslawky.org/webcasts/2011/5/9/trends-and-challenges-in-juvenile-justice-reform-experiences.html [November 2011].

a “Raise the Age” campaign in which it undertook intensive efforts to inform the public, the media, and legislators of the need to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction. 33 In July 2007, legislation was passed that raised the age of juvenile court jurisdiction from age 15 to age 16 effective January 2010 and to age 17 effective January 2012. However, it was not until October 2009, after some hard-fought battles in the legislature over cost projections and the concerns of law enforcement, that the final timetable was established and the budget was approved. Community advocates are credited with keeping the issue on course through monthly statewide advocacy meetings, working closely with state legislators to lobby for the necessary funding, and providing continuous information on the positive effects of the changes as well as the failure of various concerns to materialize. 34 The activism has paid off. On July 1, 2012, the age of juvenile court jurisdiction was raised to age 18. 35

California’s Closure of State Facilities

In the 1960s and 1970s, California had an excellent reputation for its progressive handling of juvenile offenders, but by the late 1990s its reputation had become badly tarnished by evidence of harsh treatment in unsafe, overcrowded facilities (Skonovd, 2003). As in many other jurisdictions, the drop in juvenile crime rates and the concurrent escalation in costs ($252,000/year/bed) provided the impetus for change (McCracken and Teji, 2010).

Since the 1980s, community and advocacy groups had been feeding information to the media and the legislative staff on the abuses and identifying better options. 36 They testified before the legislature, educated juvenile justice professionals (including every presiding judge and every chief probation officer), and created a public record of abuses and failure to reform. Similar to Connecticut’s experience, federal litigation and a resulting court decree ( Farrell v. Cate , 2003; formerly Farrell v. Harper ) played a critical role in challenging all aspects of conditions in California’s facilities. 37 In

33 Available: http://www.raisetheagect.org [April 2013].

34 Abby Anderson, executive director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, Children’s Law Center webinar, July 11, 2011 (Children’s Law Center, Inc., 2011).

35 Available: http://www.raisetheagect.org.html [November 2011].

36 Sue Burrell, staff attorney, Youth Law Center, Children’s Law Center webinar, July 11, 2011 (Children’s Law Center, Inc., 2011).

37 As a result of the Farrell litigation, the California Division of Juvenile Justice is required to implement remedial plans to correct problems associated with education, disabilities, medical care, sexual behavior treatment, safety and welfare, and mental health. Since April 2006, a special master has monitored implementation of these plans. Available: http://www.prisonlaw.com/cases.php#juvi [November 2011].

addition, ongoing evidence of the abuse compiled in joint expert reports and special master reports received huge media attention. The result was pressure on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to focus his attention on reorganizing and reforming the system. 38 Legislation was passed imposing sliding scale fees on localities for commitments to state facilities (SB 681, 1996) and providing program funds for counties (Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Standards Act, AB 913, 2000), increasing the discretion of judges to reduce confinement time and to bring youth back to the community, restricting parole board powers, and increasing reporting requirements (SB 459, 2003). As the state struggled to make changes in line with the Farrell agreement, the legislature narrowed eligibility for commitment to state facilities (SB 81, 2007), and money was allocated to the counties to serve youth locally. SB 81 banned all future commitments of nonviolent youth to the state system, allowing state commitment only if the youth was found to have committed an offense on the statutory list of crimes for which juveniles could be tried as adults. The result has been a rapid decline in the training school population (see Box 9-3 ). Currently, the state is deciding whether to shut down the entire state system and to have all youth handled by the counties. It is unclear at this writing what the final outcome will be (Schiraldi, Schindler, and Goliday, 2011). 39 , 40

Louisiana’s Transformative Initiatives

The Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a public interest law firm and youth advocacy group, was formed in late 1997 on the heels of the U.S. DOJ’s investigation of the inhumane and harsh treatment of juvenile offenders. Its stated goals include reducing the use of incarceration and investing in community-based alternatives while alleviating the unconstitutional conditions of confinement (Celeste et al., 2005). Although many claims arising out of the DOJ investigation were settled in 1999 and 2000, the notoriously dangerous Tallulah Youth Corrections Center remained open through the support of numerous powerful legislators, including a former head of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections. JJPL teamed with Family and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), an organization formed in 2001 to serve as the collective voice of parents

38 Sue Burrell, staff attorney, Youth Law Center, Children’s Law Center webinar, July 11, 2011 (Children’s Law Center, Inc., 2011).

40 In the January 2012 California state budget appropriation, the state declared it would not accept serious and violent youthful offenders from the counties. In May 2012, Governor Jerry Brown inserted language into the revised budget appropriation that reversed the earlier language and required that young offenders (up to age 23) would continue to be sentenced to the California Department of Youth Services (de Sá, 2012).

BOX 9-3 Closing State Juvenile Institutions

Declining numbers of juveniles being sentenced to secure state institutions, coupled with the need to respond to budget shortfalls, is resulting in the closing of state juvenile facilities and the shifting of youth to local community-based programs. This trend has been particularly dramatic in five states:

California: The California Youth Authority originally operated 11 facilities and 4 youth forestry camps. Currently, the Division of Juvenile Justice operates 4 institutions and 1 camp. In April 2011, 1,232 youth were under the Division of Juvenile Justice, which includes more than 200 youth housed in adult prisons. In 1996, the population peaked at 10,122. At the end of 2010, the population was 1,254, a nearly 88 percent decline.

Illinois: Commitment of youth to the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice 1996-2010 declined from 902 to 400.

Ohio: Since 2002, the state has reduced its commitments to state facilities by more than 70 percent.

New York: During 2007-2012, the state closed 18 facilities and allocated $5 million from the cost savings to support local alternatives to detention.

Texas: In 2011, 3 of 10 youth prisons closed, and money was shifted to local rehabilitation programs. Texas has cut its 5,000 youth population by half within two years. The end-of-year secure population in fiscal year (FY) 2000 was 5,646; in December 2011 it was 1,267. A cautionary note when comparing states: some states, like Texas, have a determinate sentence option, which means that some youth who are committed to state youth facilities might be sent straight to prison in another state. There is also the issue of age of juvenile and adult jurisdiction. Still, since 2007, Texas has closed 2,232 secure beds.

SOURCES: Moore (2009); McCracken and Teji (2010); California Department of the Youth Authority (n.d., p. 4); California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Division of Juvenile Justice; National Campaign to Reform Juvenile Justice Systems, Report on the 2011 States (fact sheet distributed at Models for Change meeting in December 2011); Felony Commitments and Revocations of Parole for FY2002-2011 spreadsheet provided in an e-mail from Ryan Gies, deputy director, Courts and Community Services, Ohio Department of Youth Services, August 24, 2012; e-mail from Cherie Townsend, former executive director, Texas Department of Juvenile Justice (December 14, 2011).

whose children were at that time (or formerly) incarcerated at Tallulah. FFLIC efforts were at first unsuccessful. It took another two years before a full-fledged legislative and public media campaign known as “Close Tallulah Now!” was begun in force. The campaign was undertaken by JJPL, FFLIC, and the Coalition for Effective Juvenile Justice Reform, with strong support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Youth Law Center, the Justice Policy Institute, and the Grassroots Initiative. Two years of intense advocacy work resulted in the passage of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 (known as Act 1225), calling for Tallulah’s closing (Celeste et al., 2005). In 2004, the legislature passed a bill creating Youth and Children Services Planning Boards, composed of all stakeholders at the local level (Bervera, 2003). In 2006, Louisiana became a MacArthur Foundation Models for Change site, and five local sites (encompassing seven parishes) have been engaged since then in building an infrastructure of local alternatives to formal processing and secure confinement, promoting access to evidence-based services, and addressing the problem of DMC (Griffin, 2009). Today, FFLIC continues to monitor conditions of confinement and to advocate for numerous reforms, including an increased role for the family in several facilities in Louisiana.

New York’s Transformative Initiatives

In September 2008, a Task Force on Transforming the Juvenile Justice System was convened by New York’s governor, David Paterson. Chaired by Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College, the task force was composed of 32 juvenile justice experts drawn from around the state. It is noteworthy that 20 of them represented private organizations—universities, TTA organizations, advocacy groups, and community service organizations. The focus of the task force was the treatment of adjudicated juveniles found guilty of committing a delinquent act (a crime committed by someone between ages 7 and 15) and subject to a dispositional order. The task force’s recommendations called for reducing the use of institutional placement, reinvesting resources in community-based alternatives, eliminating racial disparities, improving services during custody and after release, and ensuring system accountability (Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, 2009).

The New York task force came on the heels of a major effort already under way to reform juvenile justice services. With the support of Governor Paterson, Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the state’s Office of Children and Family Services, had begun the process of closing unneeded facilities and implementing a comprehensive system reform agenda. She was able to amass considerable support by working closely with community organizations to develop necessary programs, securing foundation money for programs, collaborating with the juvenile justice network (an organiza-

tion of advocacy groups), producing data regarding the costs of operating facilities, and conducting a well-organized media campaign. The task force also played an important role in supporting and sustaining the momentum. According to Carrión:

The Task Force was instrumental in moving the process along. Its report became the blueprint for reform and the effort was given credibility. The Governor viewed the Task Force as an antidote to anticipated backlash. Here was an independent prestigious body to counter the opposition. People were respectful of such a deliberative body that was also inclusive. Its report was embraced and was responsible for pushing forward the work. It was also reassuring to the advocates who tend to want quick results. It assured them that there would be no turning back. 41

The task force disbanded after the release of its report, but its recommendations have continued to influence juvenile justice budget decisions, according to Carrión. By March 2012, New York had closed 18 facilities, eliminating 969 beds and 1,035 full-time positions (see Box 9-3 ). The secure population has been reduced by 23 percent, the limited secure population by 55 percent, and the nonsecure population by 56 percent. The numbers of youth in direct care have continued to decline. Expanded mental health services for youth in facilities, as well as those being maintained in communities, have been developed. New York City Mayor Bloomberg decided not to send New York City youth to upstate facilities (Bosman, 2010). Brooklyn to Brooklyn, a newly established program located in the community, offers a continuum of nonresidential and residential services based on the pillars of the Missouri model. Incentives have been offered to jurisdictions with the highest placement rates to divert youth from detention, and reinvestment funds have been targeted to community-based services in those jurisdictions that are home to the greatest number of youth placed in state custody. 42

PROMOTING AND SUSTAINING REFORM

Previously reviewed evidence shows convincingly that reforming juvenile justice in accord with well-established principles of adolescent development can reduce offending and promote accountability while treating juvenile offenders fairly and serving their individual needs. There is no need to trade public safety for due process and individualized treatment.

Despite the momentum for developmentally grounded juvenile justice reform, it is disappointing, though perhaps not surprising, that the changes

41 Telephone conversation with Gladys Carrión, commissioner, New York Office of Children, Youth, and Family Services, July 12, 2011.

42 E-mail correspondence from Gladys Carrión, commissioner, New York Office of Children, Youth, and Family Services, March 16, 2012.

already put in place have not been evaluated in a sufficiently rigorous and systematic manner. This lack of evaluation impedes other reform-minded jurisdictions to undertake similar initiatives with the confidence that they can be implemented successfully and will achieve the desired effects. However, the committee is impressed with the reformers’ ability to generate and consolidate stakeholder coalitions, build a consensus regarding the necessary changes, create the infrastructure needed to maintain momentum, and sustain the effort over the long run. This accumulated experience inspires optimism that juvenile justice reform can be achieved successfully on a national scale.

On the basis of this perspective, the reader is asked to assume that policy makers in a state are committed to transforming their juvenile justice system so that it is grounded in a developmental perspective. The following section aims to summarize what has been learned from efforts to implement policy change, what are the obstacles to successful innovation, and what can be done to address them.

Assembling and Using Data

The issue of data quality and inadequacy has been discussed throughout this report. In Chapter 3 , we note the inadequacy of the juvenile arrest data, the incompleteness of court data and the lack of available juvenile justice data due to privacy restrictions. In Chapter 6 , we attribute a failure to identify effective programs to the inadequate data for tracking youth outcomes. In Chapter 8 , we note the lack of racial/ethnic data on youth at various processing stages.

An essential prerequisite to designing, implementing, and sustaining reform is the compilation of critical data and analytical tools. Many agencies lack data needed for their internal operations (individual, process, and outcome data) and across systems data (education, mental health, education, child welfare). 43 Without these data, it is difficult to see the true picture of who is detained, how the system operates, what the impact is on minority youth, whether the youth is receiving the designated services, and what the impact is of the treatment he or she does receive. Agencies need to distinguish between data required for routine monitoring of processes (i.e., outputs and outcomes, such as numbers served, services delivered, costs, and quality of services) and data that are required for empirically based research evaluations (i.e., treatment outcome data, comparison data for different youth samples). A common measure of performance for many

43 Presentation by Laurie Garduque, director of juvenile justice, program on human and community development, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to the committee, October 11, 2010.

juvenile justice systems is recidivism data. Yet 12 states still do not track recidivism outcomes of youth released from juvenile facilities statewide in any fashion; 6 states track only the share of youth who return to juvenile custody; and another 8 measure youth’s success only for 12 months or less following release (Mendel, 2011). Data are also often not available on other measures of effectiveness that indicate whether progress has been made toward successful maturation, such as academic progress, enrollment in school, job placement and retention, and health and mental well-being (Mendel, 2011). Efforts are being made to improve data and to create integrated data systems, but the impact of these efforts has been very limited thus far (see Appendix B ) (Mankey et al., 2006; Wiig and Tuell, 2008). Data tools are also needed to identify problems, develop responses, and then monitor and assess the impact of policies and programs.

Both Models for Change and the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative acknowledge the importance of data and describe themselves as “data-run programs” that aim to use data to inform policy and practice at the organizational and system levels. Data are also a crucial element in demonstrating a program’s effect on youth and their families, the juvenile justice and other child-serving systems, and the community. Data can be used to make the case for why reform activities are needed and then can be used to support the need to sustain them (Wiig et al., 2010). (For a useful discussion of evaluation methods and challenges for anticrime programs, see National Research Council, 2005.) In both cases, automated management information systems are urgently needed (Howell, 2003a). Data collection, aggregating data, and accessing data across systems have been identified as factors impeding an organization’s ability to implement change (Isett, 2011).

In summary, resolving data issues and having good data systems appear to be paramount to launching reform activities. Yet this is a challenge that often goes beyond the capacity or capability of individual juvenile justice systems or even entire jurisdictions to address adequately. One need only look at state efforts to develop and implement Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information Systems (SACWIS), mandated by the federal government in 1993, to understand how expensive and difficult a challenge it is. 44 The committee repeatedly heard from national juvenile justice leaders that an appropriate role for the federal government is to help develop accurate and timely data systems and to provide TTA in their use. The committee strongly agrees.

44 Since 1993, the federal government has expended $2.3 billion getting SACWIS up and running, and some states are still in the planning and development stage. See http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/systems/sacwis/about.htm [April 2013].

Clarity of Mission

There are 51 different juvenile justice systems in the country. As observed in Chapter 3 , policies and practices based on a correctional model in which youthful offenders are detained in facilities with varying degrees of security may exist side by side with policies rooted in a rehabilitative approach focused on serving the needs of young offenders. The committee doubts that reform based on a developmental model can be achieved and sustained without resolving this tension explicitly. Papering over the problem may allow a legislative victory to be achieved, but it will not establish the necessary foundation for enduring change. The fundamental case for reform is that public safety can be well-served—indeed, better served—by abandoning a confinement-oriented correctional approach in favor of community-based services for the majority of juveniles who can be safely supervised in the community.

Leadership and Organizational Culture

Strong leadership is required to articulate and build consensus concerning the goals of reform as well as its essential elements. Accommodations on specific issues will be needed, such as satisfying prosecutorial concerns about the jurisdictional borders between juvenile courts and criminal courts, but prosecutors are not institutionally or professionally opposed to the juvenile justice reforms described in this report if they are presented with the evidence and are convinced that interventions will be undertaken to ensure public safety and satisfy legitimate public expectations about accountability.

The organizational culture of juvenile justice agencies may impede innovation. Some state juvenile justice agencies fall under state-run criminal justice facilities (e.g., California), and in other states juvenile justice responsibilities are part of the broader child-serving agency (e.g., New York). It is likely that one reason for the sustainability of the Missouri system is the fact that the Division of Youth Services is under the Department of Social Services and separate from the adult correction system (see Appendix B ). Even within juvenile justice agencies, it is sometimes difficult for managers and line staff to think about the long-term benefits and not be enticed by a piecemeal approach (Howell, 2003b). In places where reform is thriving, leaders with vision are working closely with multiple groups—including the legislature, other executive agencies, community stakeholders, and the media—to explain the desired changes and to keep them well informed. Sometimes the driving force is the director of the juvenile justice state agency; in other jurisdictions, the judicial official takes the lead in bringing about change. But there is always a need for someone

who can take charge and has the necessary clout to call other youth-serving agencies to the table.

Changing institutional culture is difficult and can take a long time. A Models for Change assessment team noted that, even after four years, veteran staff remained ambivalent about the transition from an adult corrections model to a juvenile-centered and rehabilitation model and unclear about their roles (Illinois Models for Change Behavioral Health Assessment Team, 2010). Missouri officials credit the transparency of their programs and their activities as a critical ingredient in keeping the support of the legislature and the public (see Appendix B ). They also attribute the longevity of the Missouri model to stable leadership, an unusual occurrence in the United States, where a juvenile corrections administrator serves an average of 2.8 years. 45

One common feature of many successfully implemented reforms is a significant investment in TTA to address organizational culture and to smooth the way for implementation by teaching specific operational skills and techniques essential to implementing reforms. Missouri estimates that it spends approximately $500,000 annually in training its staff (see Appendix B ). Training was viewed by JDAI as critical to retaining support among stakeholders and by Models for Change to ensure that new personnel have the knowledge and orientation to perform their new roles (Schwartz, 2001; Wiig et al., 2010). Technical assistance also continues to be an important component of reform activities. Both Models for Change and JDAI make heavy use of peers and consultants who offer technical assistance and allow for the sharing of experiences among the sites. Peer-to-peer technical assistance, as opposed to traditional technical assistance and training models, appears to be the more favored approach (Lubow, 2011).

Structural Barriers

Structural differences may exacerbate the difficulties of establishing and sustaining collaboration between the juvenile justice agency and the courts and among the courts, juvenile justice agency, and the family/welfare/schools/health agencies. We have already mentioned the difficulties associated with housing a juvenile justice agency within the adult corrections department. Key structural barriers can also arise from differences in mission, mandates, and goals among various youth-serving agencies (Osher, 2002). These differences have been particularly noted in the fields of education (Leone, Quinn, and Osher, 2002), mental health (Shufelt, Cocozza, and Skowyra, 2010), and child welfare (Siegel and Lord, 2004; Herz and

45 E-mail from Darlene Conroy, Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, April 18, 2012.

Ryan, 2008a; Wiig and Tuell, 2008). Achieving buy-in from different agencies often requires structural changes and the recognition that collaboration not only will further each agency’s mandate but also should contribute to a shared set of goals and vision (Shufelt, Cocozza, and Skowyra, 2010; Herz et al., 2012).

Some states have attempted to reform their systems by making structural changes. Texas passed legislation in 2011 combining two separate agencies, the Texas Youth Commission and the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission, into a unified state juvenile justice agency that has direct responsibility for youth committed to the state agency as well as responsibility to establish regulations and to pass through state funding to support youth who come to the attention of local juvenile justice agencies (Senate Bill 653, 82nd Regular Legislative Session [TX2007]).

Finally, structural issues also arise from the separation of legislative and executive powers. Even if reformers are able to establish new juvenile justice policies and missions, keeping all the agencies on board and collaborating are very difficult in light of these structural problems.

Accommodating Resistant Stakeholders

A more substantial impediment is to overcome the resistance of the staff of juvenile corrections agencies, who are concerned about the loss of job security that is inevitably associated with transitions from an institution-based model to a community-based services model, for which they have not been trained. (See the earlier description of Jerome Miller’s experience in Massachusetts.) The opposition may arise from local governments, particularly in small communities that are dependent on facility jobs. Well-organized opposition tends to come from the unions that represent juvenile justice staff and from legislators who support the unions. The difficulty of closing state juvenile justice facilities is analogous to the well-documented problems associated with closing state prisons and mental health facilities.

Union response to closing state juvenile justice facilities in New York is an illustration of this fierce opposition. In 2006, the unions in New York were successful in getting the legislature to statutorily impose a 12-month advance notice provision of a significant service reduction before any facility could be closed. Although there is no longer a need for a facility, unless the governor is able to secure a waiver from the legislature, the state is required to keep the facility open and fully staffed for a year after its announced closing. Efforts to minimize the impact of facility closings failed to appease the union or dampen its opposition. Since 2007, fewer than 300

people have been terminated from state service due to the rightsizing of the juvenile justice system. 46

According to New York officials, one key to reducing union influence and power was a media campaign that exposed the shortcomings of the system and highlighted the huge cost of incarcerating each youth and the poor system outcomes. A second factor was the influence of a strong advocacy community, which mobilized quickly and was strategic in engaging diverse constituencies and targeting the legislature. Finally, the commissioner’s willingness to operate in a more transparent manner and share information about the youth in care, conditions, and costs generated support among a diverse group of stakeholders.

Costs of Restructuring

Even when the reform promises to save money in the long run, added costs are often associated with implementing change in the short run, particularly when the change calls for creating a new agency or establishing new programs. It is a challenge to manage and mobilize the necessary financial resources to pay for salaries, training, and the costs associated with new programs as well as for transitional costs associated with layoffs or retraining displaced personnel. During the past two decades, states have attempted to meet the economic challenges caused by rising costs by offering financial incentives to counties for prevention programs and community-based treatment for adjudicated youth. In return, the counties agree to reduce their juvenile commitments to state facilities and intervene with youth locally. This “reinvestment” strategy was tried in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the past 15 years it has gained popularity as state governments have become increasingly strapped for funds. Today, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Deschutes County, Oregon, all have legislative programs calling for state reimbursement to counties for youth maintained in the local community (see Box 9-4 for a description of Ohio’s reforms). Wayne County, Michigan, has moved further: in 2000 it abolished its county probation agency and replaced it with a private juvenile case management system. The private provider is now responsible for all juvenile services, including residential placement, with the state matching funds that the county spends on juvenile services (Butts and Evans, 2011).

46 E-mail correspondence from Gladys Carrión, commissioner, New York Office of Children and Family Services, March 16, 2012.

Building and Sustaining Program Capacity

The desire to provide high-quality community programs is a driving force for many juvenile justice reform activities. This certainly is the case in states that are shifting the numbers of youth held in state institutions to community programs. It is also a key focus of states, including Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington, that have passed legislation requiring evidence-based programs and practices (see Box 9-5 ).

Committing funding sources to evidence-based programs is one part of the challenge. But an equal challenge is identifying programs at the local level capable of providing the needed services. This was a huge problem for youth services director Jerome Miller in the 1970s in Massachusetts, who admits to having gambled on community-based programs that were not very experienced (Miller, 1991). One approach used in Missouri is the creation of community liaison councils in program sites. These councils have responsibility for managing the community-based treatment programs. In addition to providing treatment, they offer peer support and a general home base in the community (see Appendix B ).

Replication and Scaling Up

Replicating and scaling up successful innovations requires documentation of the innovation itself and the contextual and organizational elements that contribute to its successful implementation. As Berman and Nelson point out, “A model that produces desirable outcomes in some locations by changing the organization is likely to require organizational change in another setting…. Knowing that a model produces desirable outcomes in one location is not the same as knowing what makes the model work” (Berman and Nelson, 1997, p. 329). Berman and Nelson (1997) believe that it is not even possible to replicate with any fidelity; instead, replication should be regarded as an effort to stimulate a process of adaptation whose results are most likely to produce effective outcomes. Increasingly, however, this view is being challenged (Fagan et al., 2008; Hawkins et al., 2008).

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has acknowledged that rigorous replication of its JDAI model has been a challenge and attributes the difficulty to the demands of the model itself and the lack of a single dedicated funding source. A 2008 survey of its 54 sites revealed that almost all had formed leadership collaborations, had site coordinators and annual work plans with measurable outcomes, and had developed a data capacity. But sites had much more difficulty implementing case processing reforms, reducing confinement of some kinds of detention cases, and identifying factors contributing to DMC. Furthermore, few sites had been able to monitor

BOX 9-4 Ohio’s Reforms

Since 1995, the Ohio legislature and the state’s juvenile justice leadership have undertaken far-reaching statewide reforms that include highly incentivized reinvestment strategies, e.g., RECLAIM OHIO and Targeted RECLAIM, which allow youthful offenders to be served in their local communities; an expansion of community-based alternatives; an expansion of evidence-based programs in its state institutions; a focus on the behavioral and health needs of its most serious juvenile offenders; efforts to reduce collateral sanctions; and capacity-building components related to the support of evidence-based programs and workforce capacity.

The results to date are impressive:

• Between 2002 and 2011, Ohio decreased its annual commitments to state facilities from 2,336 to 633 youth (felonies and revocations). Source: Felony Commitments and Revocations of Parole for FY2002-FY2011 spreadsheet provided in e-mail correspondence from Ryan Gies, deputy director, Courts and Community Services, Ohio Department of Youth Services, August 24, 2012.
• Between April 2009 and July 2012, Ohio more than halved the average daily population of its state facilities. Source: Ryan Gies, deputy director, Courts and Community Services, Ohio Department of Youth Services.

and improve conditions of confinement for youth in secure confinement (Schwartz, 2001).

The Missouri model has also presented great challenges to jurisdictions attempting to replicate it. Part of the challenge arises from the fact that some jurisdictions find themselves unable to adopt the model in its entirety. Another challenge is the inadequacy of documentation of the Missouri model. New York’s Office of Children and Family Services found it necessary to commission a detailed set of written policies and procedures for use with its own developing program (New York State Office of Children and Family Services, Vera Institute of Justice, and the Missouri Services Institute, 2011). In Louisiana, replication of the model has become a political issue with the youth advocacy group, FFLIC, sharply criticizing the inadequacy of the state’s efforts to replicate the model (Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, 2011).

• Since 2010, Targeted Reclaim (the six counties that have historically committed the most youth to ODYS as well as an additional 8 counties added in 2012) has funded evidence-based treatment programs in their counties and now participates in an extensive evaluation.
• Between 2006 and 2011, Ohio treated 1,758 charged or adjudicated youth with substantial mental health impairments as part of its Behavioral Health/Juvenile Justice Initiative (BHJJI). Operating in the largest urban counties, the program diverts youth from local and state detention centers who are primarily (76%) moderate or high-risk youth into community-based mental and behavioral health treatment. Nearly 62% of the youth terminated from the program were identified locally as successful treatment completers. One year after termination, 10% of successful completers and 19% of unsuccessful completers had a new felony charge. The average cost to the state of youth enrolled in BHJJI was $4,778 compared to $167,960, the estimated costs of housing the average youth at a state facility (Kretschmar, Flannery, and Butcher, 2012).
• The Collateral Sanctions Bill, S.B. 337, signed June 26, 2012, reduces those barriers that further impact juveniles, including breach of confidentiality involving juvenile records, educational hindrances for youth returning to their communities, and laws or administrative codes that impede a youth’s ability to get a job (Ohio Department of Youth Services, 2012).

JDAI is now working to achieve state-scale replication of its model. New Jersey is serving as a learning laboratory for other JDAI states. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has indicated that it hopes JDAI can be replicated in jurisdictions serving at least three-fourths of the nation’s youth by 2015. Expanding to additional states and localities, sustaining detention reform in existing sites, and doing both during difficult financial times remain difficult challenges (Mendel, 2009).

The committee thinks that scientifically valid evaluations could contribute to replication efforts by providing solid evidence of the impact of reform activities and identifying effective elements of any reform model. Research aimed at examining the quality of implementation efforts across many sites can also shed important light on the factors affecting the implementation process (Durlak and DuPre, 2008; Liberman, 2011).

BOX 9-5 Legislative Commitments to Evidence-Based, Developmentally Appropriate Policies

Illinois— House Bill 83, signed by Governor Pat Quinn, directs judges to consider whether treatment in a youth’s community would be a better option than sentencing to incarceration in a state juvenile prison. HB 83 was signed on August 15, 2011, and took effect on January 1, 2011. It is an amendment to the Illinois Juvenile Court Act. Advocates said it is intended to make certain that judges determine what sentence is best for the youth and the community.

Under Public Act 95-1031 (January, 2010), 17-year-olds charged with misdemeanors will now have access to the juvenile court’s mental health, drug treatment, and community-based services.

In 2005, Illinois voted unanimously to repeal an “adult time for adult crime” law that required youth accused of drug crimes in or around public schools or housing projects to be transferred to the adult system.

Mississippi— Under S.B. 2969, 2010 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Miss. 2010), most 17-year-olds are removed from the adult criminal court. The new law, which went into effect on July 1, 2011, allows juveniles charged with arson, drug offenses, robbery, and child abuse to remain under the original jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system.

Sustaining Reforms

Sustaining juvenile justice reforms is regarded by at least one foundation as “the most challenging issue facing new and innovative juvenile justice programs today” (Wiig et al., 2010, p. 3). Some efforts have been made to document the factors influencing sustainability, but the research is limited and does not appear to be very rigorous (Wiig et al., 2010).

Sustainability certainly arose as an issue 40 years ago, following the closing of the facilities in Massachusetts by Jerome Miller. Miller experienced enormous pushback from the Massachusetts legislators, who were not able to find their constituents jobs. Miller’s own peers, the National Conference of State Training School Superintendents, voted to censure him, and by November 1972 he was forced to vacate his position. During the next decade, commitments to institutions continued to fall, but by the beginning of the 1990s, the number of young people in secure care in Massachusetts had risen (Miller, 1991).

North Carolina— The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 1998 called for adoption of Office of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Comprehensive Strategy framework. It was preceded by North Carolina General Statute, Chapter 143B, Executive Organization Act of 1973, which called for programs and services to be planned and organized at the community level in partnership with the state. It also established the Juvenile Crime Prevention Council at the local level to undertake planning.

Ohio— HB 86 and HB 153, signed into law in 2011, provide for the investment of funds from closed facilities into local services; enhance research-based practices; extend juvenile court authority to permit judicial release throughout a youth’s term of commitment; review mandatory sentencing to allow young people to be tried in juvenile court; and adopt uniform competency standards.

Tennessee— The Evidence-Based Law, signed by Governor Bredesen on July 1, 2007 (Public Chapter 585), provides for a five-year implementation timeline for all dollars spent on juvenile justice to go to evidence-based practices. The state is conducting a review of programs’ ability to generate data elements to determine effectiveness of evidence-based practices.

The Annie E. Casey and MacArthur Foundations have recognized the importance of providing guidance to their sites regarding sustainability. Each has produced a publication that specifically addresses the issue (Schwartz, 2001; Wiig et al., 2010). Both reflect the view that strategies to sustain innovations should be part of every genuine reform effort from the very beginning. They also emphasize the importance of building an infrastructure to support long-term change. Among the elements of such an infrastructure that they both cite are: strong leadership and collaborative bodies; communication and marketing strategies; data systems that can be used, not only to highlight problems, but also to provide critical information about the impact of policies and programs as well as their cost-effectiveness; and administrative practices that include an emphasis on training and skill development. As described earlier, the reforms in Missouri have been sustained by four factors: stable leadership, organizational change, treatment strategies, and constituency buy-in. Critical to its political success has been a bipartisan Youth Services Advisory Board (see Appendix B ). Created by

the legislature, it is a collaborative advisory body with policy responsibility, oversight, and clout. As Decker (2010) has noted, constituency building is a key element to any successful program, particularly for long-term initiatives that span legislative cycles.

Stakeholder advocacy organizations can play a vital role to ensure that the pressure for sustaining the reformist vision and commitment is maintained through leadership changes. As shown in California, Connecticut, and Louisiana, commitment and single-mindedness have helped sustain the efforts in all the diverse ways that are necessary. Foundation priorities come and go. Good inspirational leaders come and go. But these advocacy groups remain.

During the past 15 years, substantial progress has been made by numerous states and local jurisdictions in embracing and implementing a more developmentally appropriate way of handling youth in the juvenile justice system. Sometimes jurisdictions have been driven to make these changes by the threat of litigation or by cuts in funding that make current practices and policies untenable. Others have responded to incentives offered by the federal government and to financial, training, and technical support provided by foundations. Juvenile justice watchdog groups and stakeholder organizations (at the local, state, and national levels) have played an increasingly important role in building consensus around the need for reform and bringing reform activities to fruition. Collaboration among the foundations and reform-minded stakeholder organizations is urgently needed if the reforms achieved during the past decade are to be sustained.

A major impediment to reform has been the lack of critical data on youth characteristics, particularly racial/ethnic data, offense data, and process data. Data on program outcomes are also urgently needed both for individual programs and larger system-wide efforts involving major jurisdictions. Both the Annie E. Casey and MacArthur Foundations acknowledge the difficulties they have had in quantifying the impact of their programs, particularly in light of other forces at work at the same time (Mendel, 2009) and the broad and flexible range of system reform models (Griffin, 2011). The Missouri model is being replicated, but its policies and practices have not been thoroughly documented and outcomes have not been assessed with scientific rigor. Resources are clearly required to conduct such assessments, but first and foremost there needs to be a commitment to undertaking this work.

The committee is disappointed with the efforts to date to define goals and specify quantified outcomes. We could find no evidence of well-constructed, scientifically valid evaluations that present the underlying

theories about expected program outcomes to guide the assessment. Despite the fact that the use of logic models has gained broad acceptance as a tool for constructing and conducting evaluations, and there have been examples of well-constructed multisite evaluations with jurisdictions as the unit of analysis, these methods have not been widely employed to assess the juvenile justice reforms described in this chapter.

The committee is puzzled about why systematic evaluation has not been undertaken and can only theorize that it has not been a priority given its expense and the practical difficulty of conducting them in sites that lack adequate research expertise and an infrastructure to conduct them successfully. The federal government can play an important role in facilitating efforts to improve data collection and analysis and supporting evaluations that will promote the adoption of developmentally appropriate policies and practices.

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Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks.

Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century.

It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

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Home / Essay Samples / Crime / Juvenile Justice System

Juvenile Justice System Essay Examples

Juvenile justice system: trying minors as adults.

A teenager, girl or boy, manages to get his or her hands on a gun and shoots another person who has been annoying them. These teens should be sentenced for such a hideous crime, without hesitation With crimes like these being committed without putting thought...

Juveniles Should not Be Tried as Adults

United States is the only country where they will sentence juveniles life behind bars for serious crimes and that is wrong. Several argue whether or not juveniles should be treated as Adults for serious crimes or not however studies show that juvenile’s brains are not...

Analysis of the Mental Health Needs of Young Children Who Are Involved in the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Systems

This article primarily focuses on how children in foster care and the juvenile justice system have mental health issues. This article also goes into depth about the risks of being put in foster homes, and how that affects the children physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially....

Minorities and the School-to-prison Pipeline System

The School-to-Prison Pipeline further advances low-income families into the cycle of poverty and is detrimental to society and change. The School-to-Prison Pipeline is a concept where children of minorities are being oppressed by the school system and that directly leads to expulsion, which leads to...

The Issue of Recidivism in Juvenile Justice System

Recidivism is a major issue in the juvenile justice system today and is difficult to track and combat due to deficiencies in recording and reporting standards. It is important for juvenile justice agencies to attempt to combat this problem and they have many tools at...

The Perceptions on Juvenile Crimes and Punishment Among the General Public

In 1998, juvenile offenders were responsible for 29% of criminal arrests in the United States and are among the fastest growing groups of offenders. The purpose of this paper is to examine the different perceptions of juvenile crimes and punishment among the general public. Perceptions...

Discussion of Whether There Should Be a Death Penalty for Juvenile Crimes

Should there be a death penalty for juvenile criminal offender? This has been one of the most sensitive and highly debated topics both in our Federal and State Legislatures in recent years. It is also one of the most high-profile subjects that several civil rights...

People of Color and the School-to-prison Pipeline Problem in 'The Match'

The story “The Match” written by Colson Whitehead opens with the discovery of a secret grave full of buried, unidentified bodies located on the school of what used to be Nickel Academy, a reform school for troubled juveniles. It is a story where former students...

Overview of the Juvenile Justice System in Ireland

In 2001, the juvenile justice system of Ireland passed the Children Act in hopes to have a more humane approach to controlling and disciplining children, as well as altering the legislation. Seymour (2017) found that Ireland focuses on rehabilitation and prevention of crime by using...

Juvenile Boot Camps in the Us Justice System

As a rule, boot camps are viewed as a milder punishment than imprisonment in some residential facility, but a more restrictive one than a mere probation period. However, the state support of juvenile boot camps has significantly decreased over the years, partially due to an...

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About Juvenile Justice System

Juvenile justice in the United States is a collection of state and local court-based systems whose purpose is to respond to young people who come into contact with law enforcement and are accused of breaking the law.

The first juvenile court in the United States, authorized by the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899, was founded in 1899 in Chicago. The act gave the court jurisdiction over neglected, dependent, and delinquent children under age 16. The focus of the court was rehabilitation rather than punishment.

Probation, community service, youth court, youth incarceration and alternative schooling.

Courts in the juvenile justice system are focused on rehabilitating juveniles rather than punishing them like adults. The system has a lot of flexibility because its main goal is to correct juvenile offenders and not necessarily to punish them.

The United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world. Ten (10) is the minimal age for secure detention of a juvenile unless it is a capital offense. Young offenders who are released a second time are even more likely to end up behind bars again.

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