Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice

Juvenile Justice

Juvenile Justice Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice

Edited by

FRANCINE T. SHERMAN and FRANCINE H. JACOBS

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. 

Copyright # 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If legal, accounting, medical, psychological, or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. In all instances where John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is aware of a claim, the product names appear in initial capital or all capital letters. Readers, however, should contact the appropriate companies for more complete information regarding trademarks and registration. For general information on our other products and services please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our Web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Juvenile justice: advancing research, policy, and practice/edited by Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs. p. cm. Includes index. ISBNs 978-0-470-49704-3; 978-1-118-10586-3; 978-1-118-10585-6; 978-1-118-10587-0; 978-1-118-09337-5 1. Juvenile justice, Administration of—United States. 2. Juvenile corrections—United States. 3. Juvenile delinquents—United States. I. Sherman, Francine T., 1955- II. Jacobs, Francine H. HV9104.J864 2011 364.630973—dc22 2011014932 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all the children, families, advocates, practitioners, and policy makers involved with juvenile justice, acknowledging the critical roles you play in creating a more humane and effective system

Contents

Foreword

Justice for America’s Children

xi

Marian Wright Edelman Preface

xv

Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs Introduction

xvii

Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs Contributors

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SECTION I Framing the Issues

1

Chapter 1 A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

3

Marty Beyer Chapter 2 Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

24

Kristi Holsinger Chapter 3 The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

44

Paula Braverman and Robert Morris Chapter 4 Children’s Rights and Relationships: A Legal Framework

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Francine T. Sherman and Hon. Jay Blitzman Chapter 5 A Vision for the American Juvenile Justice System: The Positive Youth Development Perspective

Richard M. Lerner, Michael D. Wiatrowski, Megan Kiely Mueller, Christopher M. Napolitano, Kristina L. Schmid, and Anita Pritchard vii

92

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CONTENTS

SECTION II Understanding Individual Youth Chapter 6 Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry in Juvenile Justice

109 111

James Bell and Raquel Mariscal Chapter 7 The Role of Gender in Youth Systems: Grace’s Story

131

Francine T. Sherman and Jessica H. Greenstone Chapter 8 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Youth and the Juvenile Justice System

156

Laura Garnette, Angela Irvine, Carolyn Reyes, and Shannan Wilber Chapter 9 Adolescent Parents and the Juvenile Justice System: Toward Developmentally and Socioculturally Based Provision of Services

174

Ellen E. Pinderhughes, Karen T. Craddock, and LaTasha L. Fermin

SECTION III Understanding Youth in Context Chapter 10 Parents, Families, and the Juvenile Justice System

197 199

Francine H. Jacobs, Claudia Miranda-Julian, and Rachael Kaplan Chapter 11 Violence Within Families and Intimate Relationships

223

Linda L. Baker, Alison J. Cunningham, and Kimberly E. Harris Chapter 12 Making a Place for Youth: Social Capital, Resilience, and Communities

245

Robert L. Hawkins, Maryna Vashchenko, and Courtney Davis Chapter 13 The Developmental Impact of Community Violence

Edmund Bruyere and James Garbarino

267

Contents

Chapter 14 The Right to a Quality Education for Children and Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

ix

286

Kathleen B. Boundy and Joanne Karger Chapter 15 Juvenile Prison Schooling and Reentry: Disciplining Young Men of Color

310

Sabina E. Vaught Chapter 16 The System Response to the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Girls

331

Francine T. Sherman and Lisa Goldblatt Grace Chapter 17 How American Government Frames Youth Problems

352

Timothy Ross and Joel Miller Chapter 18 Youth Perspectives on Health Care

369

Rachel Oliveri, Ila Deshmukh Towery, Leah Jacobs, and Francine H. Jacobs

SECTION IV Working for Change Chapter 19 Youth-Led Change

389 391

Barry Dym, Ken Tangvik, Jesus Gerena, and Jessica Dym Bartlett Chapter 20 The End of the Reform School?

409

Vincent Schiraldi, Marc Schindler, and Sean J. Goliday Chapter 21 Collaboration in the Service of Better Systems for Youth

433

Anne F. Farrell and Diane M. Myers Chapter 22 Getting on Board With Juvenile Justice Information Technologies

Stan Schneider and Lola Simpson

456

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Chapter 23 Establishing Effective Community-Based Care in Juvenile Justice

477

Peter W. Greenwood and Susan Turner Chapter 24 Better Research for Better Policies

505

Jeffrey A. Butts and John K. Roman Afterword

527

Congressman Robert (Bobby) Scott About the Editors

531

Author Index

533

Subject Index

551

Foreword: Justice for America’s Children MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN President, Children’s Defense Fund, Washington, DC

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (c. 1940)

too often, early death. Others become trapped in the pipeline to prison later in life. At crucial points in a poor child’s development, more risks pile on—the loss of a parent, sibling, or friend; low teacher expectations; family or neighborhood violence; gang involvement—making a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely. For children of color, who are disproportionately poor, the odds of youth detention and eventual incarceration as adults greatly exceed those for White children. Black children are 3 times as likely as White children to be poor. A Black boy born in 2001 is more than 5 times as likely as a White boy born that same year to be incarcerated at some point during his lifetime. And, in the past 20 years, sentencing for juveniles in our nation has become increasingly harsh and punitive and there has been an increase of 72% in the number of children held in America’s juvenile detention centers;2 thousands of children are held in adult prisons. As a number of the chapters in this important volume illustrate, the experiences of detained and incarcerated children in America are rarely rehabilitative. Children and teens who go through our nation’s juvenile justice

Has America turned her back on her most vulnerable children? America is the richest nation in the world. We rank #1 in gross domestic product (GDP), and we have more billionaires than any other country. Surely, a nation so blessed will take care of its children, who are its greatest treasure, its future, and its most vulnerable population. Yet the gap between rich and poor in America is greater than in any other major industrialized nation1 and is growing wider, dooming millions of children to the fate of growing up poor—if they survive infancy. Today, tens of thousands of poor babies in rich America enter the world with multiple strikes against them: born without prenatal care, at low birth weight, and to a teen, poor, and poorly educated single mother and absent father. Many are funneled from birth into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls ‘‘the cradleto-prison pipeline,’’ which traps children into life paths marked by abuse, illness, school failure and suspension, detention, incarceration, and,

1

OECD Report (2009), Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, notes that ‘‘the United States is the country with the highest inequality level and poverty rate across the OECD, Mexico and Turkey excepted.’’

2

Myers, D. M., & Farrell, Anne F. (2008). Reclaiming Lost Opportunities: Applying Public Health Models in Juvenile Justice. Children and Youth Services Review 30, 1159–1177.

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system are condemned to long terms at large youth detention centers and adult prisons only to languish in cells surrounded by thick walls and razor wire. Too often, they are locked down for long periods of the day with no real opportunities for rehabilitation, treatment, or education. Many youth become hardened criminals while incarcerated, and at the end of their sentences they are released into communities that don’t have adequate resources to reintegrate them. Tragically, instead of helping disadvantaged youth become responsible adults, the juvenile justice system today has become a major feeder into the cradle-to-prison pipeline, leading young people into the adult criminal system. That pipeline runs through economically depressed neighborhoods and failing schools; across vacant lots where playgrounds and health facilities should be; and in and out of broken, understaffed child welfare agencies. By the time many children get arrested and are brought before a juvenile court, they have been provided far too little loving and thoughtful adult support—only to face purported child-serving systems that treat them unjustly. The high number of cases that juvenile courts administer—an estimated 1.6 million cases each year nationwide—is attributable to the fact that we, the adults, have let our most vulnerable children down. We don’t pay attention to early warning signs, such as a drop in grades or a reluctance to go to school, that indicate poor children need help; we don’t provide them with adequate mental health services or other counsel; and we have permitted the increasing criminalization of children at younger and younger ages for behaviors that used to be handled by families, churches, teachers, and community organizations. We seem to have forgotten that children are children, and that our job as adults is to guarantee their safe passage to successful,

AMERICA’S CHILDREN

productive adulthood by guiding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and teaching them. It was not always so. America’s juvenile justice system was once regarded as one of the most enlightened in the world. It was founded over 100 years ago on the principle that children, unlike adults, are still developing and that many of their perceptions, actions, and reactions are immature responses to an increasingly complex world. The early American juvenile justice philosophy taught that, with the proper guidance, children can learn new behaviors and attitudes as they mature. The emphasis was on rehabilitation, not punishment and retribution. In order to grow into responsible and caring adults, it was believed, youthful offenders need support, treatment, and care. The editors of this volume and authors of individual chapters urge us to remember that the children involved in our juvenile justice system are, first and foremost, children. Like all children, they need the love and guidance of adults—in their families, in their neighborhoods, in their communities—to develop their considerable potential and to thrive. And like all children, they need a nurturing school environment, the attention of caring and talented teachers who know their students can learn, and a rigorous curriculum that gives all students the skills to succeed in college and the workplace. The fact that risk factors such as poverty, discrimination, and personal tragedy add stress to their young lives and increase their chances of becoming trapped in the cradle-toprison pipeline should not cause us, the adults in their lives, to lower our expectations for their success or, worse, write them off or abandon them. Indeed, their increased vulnerability should make us redouble our efforts to give them the support and care they sorely need. Repeatedly, in the chapters of this volume, we are reminded that deficit- and

Foreword: Justice for America’s Children

punishment-based approaches to juvenile justice only feed the pipeline to prison and that when we identify children’s strengths and build on those strengths intentionally and consistently, we can help children in the juvenile justice system grow and thrive. In the pages that follow, you will meet children involved in the juvenile justice system who would have benefited from a coordinated, caring, and developmentally appropriate system of support. There is Marco, a young boy who initially did well in school and loved science but whose grades dropped when he became sad and fearful in middle school because he was terrorized by gang violence in his neighborhood and witnessed the murder of a friend; no adults picked up on signs of his stress or bothered to check in with him to see what was going on. As his fears grew, Marco succumbed to pressure to join a gang ‘‘for protection’’ and, before long, he was charged with being an accessory to a crime in a drive-by shooting. You also will hear from Grace, an intelligent and outspoken young girl of color who, shortly after her placement in a foster home (a placement she perceived as punishment), was charged with assault on a public employee and ‘‘disturbing school assembly.’’ After Grace’s expulsion from school, she was shuttled among foster homes, residential placements, and secure detention, as the Department of Family Services and the Department of Juvenile Justice struggled over control of her case. And you will visit a juvenile justice detention center school where children 13–20 years old are regarded as ‘‘predators’’ by the adults in charge of their care and whose ‘‘sentences’’ are extended when they fall asleep in class. The authors place such stories in the context of the latest research and recommend best practices on child development that emphasize the importance of an environmental, developmental approach that builds on a

xiii

child’s strengths. The chapter on youth-led change introduces us to youth who have discovered, within themselves, immense resources not only to change themselves but to transform their communities, creating ‘‘virtuous cycles’’ (instead of ‘‘vicious cycles’’) that serve as positive feedback loops building on increasing strengths. The lessons in this book remind us that we can—and that we must—do better, for the sake of our children, their futures, and the sake of our nation. Incarceration should not be our society’s first or primary response to youth in trouble. Judges need to look for opportunities to offer poor, young, and minority defendants the same second chances most privileged youth can count on. These include alternatives to incarceration such as restitution, community service, electronic monitoring, drug rehabilitation treatment, or placement in a ‘‘staff secure’’ (but not locked) community corrections facility. These youth in trouble must get the education, special education, mental health treatment, and other services they need. We must ensure that systems intended to support children actually help them, instead of serving as entryways into the cradle-to-prison pipeline. And as the final chapter in this volume makes abundantly clear, child welfare, juvenile justice, and education systems all need to collaborate to design individualized systems of support that build on each child’s strengths. There is already good work under way in a number of states and communities, and you will read about that work throughout this volume. Committed leaders and staff are working to rid the system of the abusive and punitive treatment of youth in custody that now too often pushes them into the adult criminal justice system. Reforms in Missouri’s juvenile justice system, often now referred to as the Missouri Model, have replaced large training schools and detention facilities with

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small group programs located as close to youth’s homes as possible. These small programs offer a broad range of therapeutic interventions and are staffed by highly trained and educated staff who understand that constructive reform is best accomplished through positive behavioral supports and that the use of force must be kept to a minimum. The Missouri Model is being used to promote juvenile justice reforms in Louisiana; New Mexico; San Jose, California; and Washington, DC, and other jurisdictions are waiting in line. States such as California, Texas, and New York are also making progress in establishing alternatives to secure confinement. The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, begun by the Annie E. Casey Foundation 15 years ago, has reduced the number of youth in detention and in some places also reduced the number of juvenile arrests. The goal of these and other reforms is to create throughout our nation a juvenile justice system that will give children the support they need to grow into thoughtful, confident, caring, and productive adults as they transition to the community. We must bring to scale the reforms already under way that build on the strengths of children, youth, and families;

AMERICA’S CHILDREN

provide children and youth with individualized and comprehensive services in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their needs; promote evidence-based approaches; and assist and support the successful return of youth to their communities. These new approaches recognize the usefulness and importance of tracking outcomes for youth and responses to the new reforms over both the short and long term. At the same time, we must take action to address the root causes of a child’s involvement with the juvenile justice system so that we might keep children and youth from ever entering the system. We must eliminate child poverty, assure every child comprehensive health and mental health coverage and the early childhood experiences and education required to meet their individual needs, and offer families the supports needed to keep their children safe and in nurturing communities. This volume is a call to action, and I encourage everyone who reads it to take steps to ensure that all America’s children are given an equal chance to succeed. We must all work together to replace the cradle-to-prison pipeline with a pipeline to responsible, productive adulthood.

Preface F R A N C I N E T. S H E R M A N

AND

F R A N C I N E H. J A C O B S

The idea for this book grew out of our 5-year collaboration on the Massachusetts Health Passport Project (MHPP; first the Girls’ Health Passport Project), which was an effort to develop a system of continuous health-care access for girls, and then boys and girls, committed to the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services. Fran Sherman was the principal investigator of the core project to develop and implement MHPP, and Fran Jacobs and her team at Tufts University, of its evaluation. Through many hours of discussion, debate, and mutual education explicating MHPP goals and teasing out ways to evaluate them, we each discovered new, more critical ways of thinking about our own fields, along with new connections among the worlds of law, policy, and the social sciences. The experience was both refreshing and challenging. For us, that concrete, almost daily collaboration reinforced our belief in interdisciplinary conversations and understandings of juvenile justice and broader youth policy. It also reinforced the importance of looking behind practice (however successful you think you are being) to understand how, and the extent to which, it reflects current theory and research on the one hand, and is approaching attainment of its goals, on the other. That iterative process of doing and analyzing and then redoing and reanalyzing, is key to the development of sound and innovative juvenile justice policy and

practice moving forward, and was practiced, as well, in the development of this volume. In that spirit, we hope this book will stimulate both interdisciplinary conversations among students, academics, policy makers and practitioners, and links among practice, research, and theory to develop programs and policies promoting positive development for youth and their communities. We have both benefited from the support and dedication of talented students and colleagues. I (Fran Sherman) am grateful to the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project clinic and seminar, which gives me the invaluable, daily opportunity to see juvenile law and policy through the fresh eyes and quick minds of second- and third-year law students; to Rebecca Vose and Tony DeMarco, my JRAP colleagues, who have made my work life both stimulating and fun and have been so generous with their time, giving me time to work on this volume, and Judy McMorrow, who has provided thoughtful and consistent counsel and friendship through all of my 26 years at Boston College Law School. I also want to thank my national juvenile justice colleagues, many of whom have contributed to this volume, who demonstrate the power of vision, leadership, devotion, and intentionality in implementing smart and effective juvenile justice practices and policies. The many youth and, particularly young women, whom I have represented xv

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over 30 years, are an ongoing inspiration and education, and are, of course at the core of this volume. Likewise, I (Fran Jacobs) have much appreciated the support and encouragement of colleagues in both of my departments at Tufts—the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning—many of whom, from distinct and distantly flung perches in the worlds of child development and public policy, have had encouraging words to share about the worthiness of this book. Rachel Oliveri, Ila Deshmukh Towery, Jessica Greenstone, and Claudia Miranda-Julian expertly helped us convert what was learned in the course of the MHPP evaluation into broader lessons for juvenile justice policy. And Maryna Vashchenko and Jessica Dym Bartlett provided expert substantive consultation and patient editorial intervention. At Boston College Law School, Classie Davis, Celeste Laramie, Kori Burnham, Lauren Whillhoite, Hilary Jaffe, Coleman Peng, Dan Maltzman, Mary Ann Neary, and Chester Kozikowski all provided important research and administrative support. A number of foundations supported the Girls’ Health Passport Project and the Massachusetts Health Passport Project in some way, and through that support helped stimulate the thinking behind this volume. They are: The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, The Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, The Boston Foundation, the Florence V. Burden Foundation, The Jessie B. Cox Charitable Trust, and the Gardiner Howland Shaw Foundation. We are grateful for their support and for the encouragement and insight provided by our grant administrators in each and every case. I

(Fran Sherman) have greatly appreciated the support and fellowship I have received over the years from my colleagues at the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. The many lessons I have learned from them are woven through this volume. We both thank our universities, Boston College Law School and Tufts University, respectively, for providing us with essential research leave and support to work on this volume. We are also grateful to Marian Wright Edelman for her foreword to this volume; her career as an advocate for children is unparalleled and stands as an inspiration. My (Fran Sherman) boundless love, gratitude, and respect go to my three children, Leah, Sarah, and Jake Tucker for their warmth, kindness, intelligence, and senses of humor. This book and so much of my work, which is centrally about ways to support youth, is dedicated to my children for the way they honor their many gifts and opportunities. They are my inspiration, and I look forward to continuing to watch their adult lives unfold. And most of all, my gratitude and love go to my husband, Scott Tucker—my best friend, most solid support, and biggest booster. My (Fran Jacobs) deep gratitude goes to my family—first and foremost to my husband Barry Dym—and then to my children (Jessica and JJ Bartlett, and Gabriel Dym and Rachael Kaplan) and grandchildren (Molly and Jake Bartlett, and Eli Aaron Dym) for having the patience to see me through this process, and the good sense to avoid me on those crunch writing days. My 91-year-old mother, Miriam Jacobs, kept up on the progress of this project, celebrating with me the completion of each phase. This book, about children and families and the help that every one of them needs and deserves, pays tribute to them all.

Introduction F R A N C I N E T. S H E R M A N

AND

F R A N C I N E H. J A C O B S

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1986) observed that the history of social policy in the United States reflects fairly predictable cycles, completed in 30 years or so, between liberalism and conservatism—‘‘public purpose and private interest’’ (p. 31). These cycles of national involvement with issues of social concern invigorate our politics with new energy and ideas; their seeds are sown, during previous cycles, as forays of innovation that eventually coalesce. And although it can appear at the ‘‘end’’ of a cycle, that policy has not advanced much, if at all, in fact the process is recursive. For better or worse, we never do return precisely to where we were, and every so often, the change in policy direction is bold, significant, and permanent. Those of us who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed this transformational progress in civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of persons with disabilities. And then there is juvenile justice policy. It is often noted that our national disposition toward delinquent youth and our approach to addressing their deeds and needs vacillate, unsurprisingly, and in the regular cycles that Schlesinger described, between punishment and rehabilitation. Modest changes are often consolidated before the pendulum swings once again in the opposite direction; reformers at either end tool up, readying themselves to undo or modify what has been codified in the ‘‘down’’ cycle. The prediction of the ‘‘coming of the superpredators’’ by John Dilulio (1995, November

27), then a professor at Princeton University, in the mid-1990s, may represent the apogee of the pendular swing of that time, the midpoint of that cycle. Broadly speaking, with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act and the procedural due process revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, juvenile justice policy had become more rehabilitative in orientation. Rates of juvenile crime arrests increased over the 1980s, however, and the population of juvenile offenders became increasingly racialized. The rise in juvenile violent crime arrests during the 1980s was a complex, multidetermined phenomenon (Zimring, 1998), however, and by 1994 juvenile violent crime arrests had already begun their long decline (Puzzanchera, 2009). Nonetheless, Dilulio capitalized on, and catalyzed, the growing sentiment among Americans that these youth were too dangerous to have in our midst. They were depraved, thoroughly incorrigible, and therefore needing to be removed from society to protect the rest of us. We know the end of this story: That onslaught never materialized—and indeed, juvenile crime statistics have evidenced steady improvement over the ensuing years (Puzzanchera, 2009). Nonetheless, the late 1990s witnessed a flurry of state legislation that expanded punitive approaches for juveniles, including making it easier to transfer youth to the adult correctional system. Meanwhile, reformers were preparing for the next cycle to emerge, and that cycle is, xvii

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indeed, upon us. There are many recent signs of progress toward a more rehabilitative posture in juvenile justice. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Roper v. Simmons (2005) and Graham v. Florida (2010) struck down the juvenile death penalty entirely and juvenile life without parole in nonhomicide cases based, in part, on grounds of child development and neuroscience. On the front end of the system, detention reform has significant national momentum, helping jurisdictions to be more accountable to youth and communities and reduce the use of secure detention to cases of greatest community and flight risk. On the back end of the system, led by the Missouri Model, states are reducing their reliance on secure youth institutions and building networks of community-based youth programs on principles of positive youth development. Around the country there is increasing use of evaluation—and evidence-based practices in juvenile justice systems—reflecting a more thoughtful and hopeful approach to meeting the goals these systems set for themselves. With greater interdisciplinary engagement, new ways to understand and support youth in the system have emerged. Positive youth development, ecological developmental theory, family systems theory, and new research on adolescent brain development, for example, are infiltrating programming and policy discussions in juvenile justice as well as the law. This is a moment of hope and possibilities; and perhaps these new possibilities will even direct us toward transformational changes in juvenile justice.

juvenile justice system within the context of their families, communities, and the multiple public systems that influence them, and are influenced by them as well. Although most of its chapters are scholarly in tone and content, other authors approach their topics with an activist orientation—a mix of perspectives we sought out from the volume’s inception. Chapter authors represent a broad range of disciplines and perspectives, also necessary, in our view, to engage meaningful juvenile justice policy. Following this ecological road map, Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice is divided into four sections: The first, ‘‘Framing the Issues,’’ offers an introduction to the core elements of the juvenile justice system—the youth, the proposed developmental lens (positive youth development) through which to consider their behaviors and the system’s responses to them, and the law that undergirds and directs the system operations. Next, in ‘‘Understanding Individual Youth,’’ we provide more in-depth portraits of subgroups of these youth, according to characteristics that appear to influence their experiences in the systems— race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and family circumstances. Next, in ‘‘Understanding Youth in Context,’’ we open the lens and examine aspects of family, community, and formal and informal systems particularly relevant to youth’s system involvement. Finally, in ‘‘Working for Change,’’ we highlight some of the most promising innovations in juvenile justice; combined they offer a vision for the future of juvenile justice system policy.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE VOLUME

BASIC PREMISES

The organization of this volume, reflecting the forward-facing trends previously noted, is ecological in structure, considering youth in the

Although the chapters in this volume present a range of opinions and approaches to collecting and validating evidence, certain underlying premises are represented in the book—obvious

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Introduction

to us, but worth mentioning—that contribute to the volume’s overall point of view. &

&

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Youth have a set of legal rights that are central to the structure and operation of effective and successful public systems and of society as a whole. The juvenile justice system is first a legal system, with youth involvement triggered by an alleged law violation. Youth do not lose their rights when they enter this system; rather, in significant ways, their rights are appropriately enhanced in counterpoint to the risk the system poses to them. The rights of system-involved youth, and of children generally, have a long history in the United States and can be understood to advance youth’s needs and autonomy. Youth law can also be understood ecologically, with children’s rights in relationship with those of their parents and the state. When the legal system works properly, it both respects and protects youth. The course of development is malleable, at least into early adulthood. While early experiences are core to a child’s development, a substantial, accumulating body of theory and research— reflected in recent Supreme Court and other court decisions—concludes that this developmental trajectory is not set by adolescence. Youth in the juvenile justice system, therefore, are still maturing, making them amenable to rehabilitation and, using value language, redeemable. This course of development is also multidetermined, involving millions of transactions and ‘‘inputs.’’ Urie Bronfenbrenner, the developmental

&

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psychologist who coined the term ecological development for use in his field, imagined the child as the core piece in a collection of nested, Russian dolls—at the center of a set of concentric circles of influence, including families; communities; informal and formal, governmental and nongovernmental institutions and organizations; and societal values and beliefs. Youth are both shaped by and shape their environments, and interventions to affect individual development need to factor these contexts, centrally, into the equation. The juvenile justice system is in the position both to improve and to degrade the functioning and future prospects of youth in its custody. Even assuming a benign or helping orientation, the juvenile justice system as presently structured (a back-end, after-thefact,residualsystem)isnotwell-situated to achieve its rehabilitation goals; there is a poor match between what youth need and what the system can provide. Given the awesome legal power it holds, systemreformersare increasingly proposing adoption of the ‘‘First, do no harm’’ dictum—involvement only or primarily with those youth whose actions clearly demonstrate imminent risk to public safety. Juvenile justice system reformers understand that much of the essential work for youth occurs at local levels. It follows, then, that efforts should be directed at families and communities as the primary vehicles for positive change for youth. The juvenile justice process should be used to intentionally engage these levels of youth ecology with, for example, positive youth

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INTRODUCTION

&

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development models of juvenile defense, expanded diversion, probation as brokers of community services, reduced use of secure detention and treatment, and expansion of community- and family-focused treatment at the back end of the system. The most promising juvenile justice policy includes respectful, authentic engagement of the full range of its participants. Although theory and research, and the wisdom of practitioners, are important cornerstones of juvenile justice policy, so are the beliefs, opinions, strategic recommendations, and visions for the future of system-involved youth, their parents and family members, their neighbors, and other members of the community. This input is critical to developing services that youth and families actually use, and to redressing the longstanding sense of disregard that these individuals have experienced. Interdisciplinarity in research, practice, and policy is critical to the development of a well-functioning system. Juvenile justice (like most of youth policy) is a naturally interdisciplinary field and should be intentionally approached as such. Practitioners, scholars, and advocates in law, developmental psychology, and sociology must make their work comprehensible across disciplines. Demystifying these disciplines for use by one another contributes to essential cross-system collaboration. Policy is also normative, informed by values. Research can get us only so far; at a certain point the decision is about the kind of society in which we want to live—inclusive or exclusive; more or less equitable, with more or

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less of a generous civic impulse. Effective juvenile justice systems are selfreflective in this way, asking themselves what they stand for, how they want to be viewed, and the result is as much values-based as evidence-based. We argue that this is as it should be. Confronting issues of race and poverty is critical to any real progress— the beachhead to claim during this cycle. The juvenile justice system cannot be fixed until it deals with the issues of race and poverty that undergird it and give it its present shape. The disproportionate minority contact (DMC) mandate, and federal and state policy behind it, acknowledge the racial impact of much of juvenile justice policy, a fact that we are only beginning to address.

SECTION I: FRAMING THE ISSUES We begin this volume, and this section, with an introduction to five system-involved youth whose developmental trajectories Beyer analyzes in Chapter 1 using a strengths/needsbased developmental framework. Based on years of clinical practice, she argues that adolescent delinquent behavior results, in part, from immature thinking and the effects of trauma and learning disabilities, all common in this population. These factors, in addition to the youth’s strengths, seen within the context of their families, peers, schools, neighborhoods, and cultural communities, must be considered at all points of the juvenile justice decisionmaking process. In Chapter 2, Holsinger, as a criminologist, bases her portrait of youth in the juvenile justice system on nationally available data that detail their demographic characteristics, and

Introduction

the characteristics of the offenses that trigger and sustain their system involvement. The chapter includes an overview of the history, development, and current operations of the juvenile justice system, providing a shapshot of the youth involved at each of its phases. In Chapter 3, Braverman and Morris, both physicians, introduce these youth as health-care providers might encounter them: often highrisk, underserved young people with a host of unaddressed health, dental, and mental health needs. After presenting the youth’s profile from this vantage point, the authors conclude that the factors that predispose these youth to poor health outcomes are not a unique combination of risks, but rather are shared by other disadvantaged young people in the United States. The final two chapters in this section provide theoretical and empirical scaffolding for the remainder of the book. In Chapter 4, Sherman and Blitzman, lawyer and judge, respectively, provide an overview of U.S. children’s law, framed both in terms of autonomy-based and needs-based rights, and by the legal dynamic among child, parent, and state. They highlight the law of juvenile justice and child welfare systems, and also examine law relevant to education and health care, two central institutions for children. The chapter proceeds ecologically, acknowledging that children’s lives, including their legal lives, are related to their families, communities, and the social institutions surrounding them. Finally, in Chapter 5, applied developmental scientist Lerner and his colleagues argue that the contemporary juvenile justice system is predicated on a deficit view of the youth in its custody, and as such demonstrates a counterfactual and counterproductive understanding of the nature of adolescent development. The authors provide an alternative lens—the positive youth development (PYD) perspective—that capitalizes on contemporary

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theory and research on adolescent development and has profound implications for the transformation of juvenile justice policy and programs.

SECTION II: UNDERSTANDING INDIVIDUAL YOUTH In Chapter 6, Bell and Mariscal, both lawyers and advocates, begin with an overview of the history, causes, and current status of racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system, placing contemporary federal policies purporting ‘‘race neutrality,’’ but actually disadvantaging Black and Latino youth, in the context of a deep historical legacy of systemic racism. They then examine promising policies and practices for reducing these disparities, arguing that despite its history, the juvenile justice system should strive to, and might achieve, fairness and equity for all young people. In Chapter 7, Sherman and Greenstone— from a legal and developmental perspective, respectively—describe the experiences of ‘‘Grace,’’ a teenage girl involved with multiple public systems, including juvenile justice. Through detailed analysis of primary interview data with Grace and others responsible for her care and supervision, and of court case material, they shed light on how Grace’s actions were interpreted and the responses they evoked. Their case study includes recommendations for implementing gender-responsive principles across these systems. In Chapter 8, Garnette, Irvine, Reyes, and Wilber (as lawyers, researcher, and system administrator) follow with a discussion of the experiences and needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth in the juvenile justice system. The authors offer a framework for understanding healthy

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INTRODUCTION

adolescent development within this population, and particular ways it can go awry, and present data on the often harmful effects of arrest and detention for LGBT youth. The chapter concludes with policy and program recommendations for addressing their needs. Finally, in Chapter 9, Pinderhughes and colleagues, from a cultural/developmental perspective, present the challenges to development— particularly identity development—and thus to parenting, encountered by the diverse population of incarcerated teen parents who are involved with the juvenile justice system. The authors recommend that the system adopt a more strengths-based orientation to these young parents, including facilitating contact with their own children during their confinement; this approach would increase the likelihood for continued engagement with their children after their confinement ends.

SECTION III: UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXTS OF YOUTH The first two chapters in this section focus on families. In Chapter 10, Jacobs, Miranda-Julian, and Kaplan—representing a combination of policy, developmental, and clinical expertise— detail the current state of family involvement in juvenile justice, proposing explanations for why there is evidence of so little. They argue that more and broader participation is a critical feature of any juvenile justice system that seeks or claims to be ‘‘reformed,’’ and review some promising approaches to engaging families in the positive development and rehabilitation of their children. Chapter 11 focuses on the significant percentage of system-involved youth who have experienced and/or perpetrated, violence in their families. Baker, Cunningham, and Harris—clinical and developmental

psychologists—usefully identify ‘‘signposts’’ of the effects of family violence, for example, compromised school success or mental health, substance abuse, and early home leaving. They argue for greater attention to the role that family violence plays in the lives of delinquent youth, in the service of designing more effective prevention and intervention programs. Chapters 12 and 13 focus on communities as a context for the development of systeminvolved youth. In Chapter 12, Hawkins, Vashchenko, and Davis combine their expertise in urban policy, social work, and developmental psychology to offer a framework, rooted in resilience and social capital theory, with which to generate support for youth reentering their communities after incarceration. The authors suggest that juvenile justice reentry programs and policies, and those designed to prevent criminal activity in the first place, would do well to assess a youth’s access to positive as opposed to negative social capital, and then optimize opportunities to build on the former. In Chapter 13, Bruyere and Garbarino— from a developmental perspective—discuss the effect of risk accumulation, community violence, and other trauma on youth, some of whom go on to become involved with the juvenile justice system. The chapter then argues for ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, seeing it as providing critically needed guidance for community development to support this population and reduce the need for future juvenile incarceration. Moving to the systems that interact with delinquent youth, and with other public youth-serving systems, the next two chapters examine the role of education before, during, and after incarceration. In Chapter 14, Boundy and Karger (lawyers who focus on educational policy) provide a detailed

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Introduction

discussion of the two most relevant federal laws—Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act/No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—which together require states to provide a quality public education to school-age youth, with and without disabilities, including those in delinquent facilities. Despite these guarantees, they find the education of these youth is seriously compromised throughout. The chapter concludes with research-based practices, targeted at implementing effective teaching, learning, and planning for transition, meant to thwart this school-to-prison pipeline. In Chapter 15, Vaught, a scholar of urban education, brings an ethnographic lens to the issue of race, education, and juvenile justice, using a Critical Race framework to examine how institutional schooling practice and policy function—in one school within a juvenile prison—to hinder, complicate, and even likely scuttle altogether, community reentry for incarcerated young men. The dynamics explored here serve as a local window onto national education policy, raising issues of fairness about, for example, zero-tolerance policy, and policies that assure the quality of the schooling offered to system-involved youth. Sherman and Goldblatt Grace, from the perspectives of law, public health, and social work, examine the system’s response to the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in Chapter 16, focusing here on girls. They describe the issue and then examine the range of international, federal, state, and local laws and policies, aimed at aiding and enhancing prosecution of perpetrators of CSEC (i.e., pimps, johns), and at providing protection and services to its victims. They show that, as state and local authorities implement practice and policy for this population, those two goals— law enforcement and victim protection—may

conflict, creating practices that serve neither goal fully and yielding results contrary to sound public policy and research. The chapter concludes with a recommended comprehensive response to CSEC. In Chapter 17, Ross and Miller bring youth policy and criminal justice together, and shift to providing a view of the landscape of government systems involved with youth issues. They argue that the structure of American government, combined with bureaucratic service delivery systems, lead to fragmented and, at times, inconsistent policies concerning youth, including youth caught up in the juvenile justice system. A number of solutions to these problems are offered, and the chapter concludes on a hopeful note: that efforts to address service fragmentation are improving the circumstances for some of these system-involved youth. This section concludes with Chapter 18, Oliveri and colleagues’ (developmental psychologists) qualitative study of the complex relationships among system-involved youth and the multiple systems meant to help them maintain good health. Beginning with a detailed review of the literature on healthcare access and utilization among this population, the chapter then analyzes primary data collected from youth regarding their health behaviors and preferences, and their use of health care. Its findings are useful to those working across public sectors interested in improving the health status of these youth.

SECTION IV: WORKING FOR CHANGE With Chapter 19, Dym and colleagues (psychologists and community activists) launch this section devoted to promising efforts to reform the juvenile justice system, with a case study of a

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youth-led community development program— the Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF) in Boston, Massachusetts. Youth at HSTF, with the support and encouragement of staff, initiate, design, and implement advocacy projects to improve their own circumstances and transform their community. HSTF is nationally recognized as a model for community-based youth development, acting as an antidote to the forces that pull youth toward involvement in the juvenile justice system. We move from program-specific innovation to focus on systemwide reform in Chapter 20. Schiraldi, Schindler, and Goliday (experienced system administrators) thoughtfully advocate for systemwide reform to eliminate the training school and its mind-set, in favor of a graduated, primarily communitybased approach to juvenile justice premised on the tenets of positive youth development. After reviewing the troubled history of the reform school, and the promising alternatives now available, they argue that this route is the most likely to be able both to support youth and protect and enhance communities. In Chapter 21, Farrell and Myers (developmentalists interested in service systems’ operations) identify collaboration as the ‘‘new imperative’’ across youth-serving systems. They present the advantages of, and potential barriers to, collaboration, and offer suggestions for increasing service providers’ organizational capacities to engage in this way. After recommending the development of principles and guidelines for evaluating systems change efforts, Farrell and Myers conclude that systems providing services to at-risk and incarcerated youth must find ways to communicate, cooperate, and share accountability for outcomes. Chapters 22, 23, and 24 focus on the significant contributions that relevant, reliable, and accessible information can make to systems reform. In Chapter 22, Schneider and

Simpson, experienced data system consultants to child-serving public agencies, highlight how the quality, availability, and use of data can either promote or impede agencies’ abilities to plan, operate, and evaluate wisely. The authors review the role that data systems have played historically in these agencies, and the current status, overall, of their information systems; they then provide a detailed analysis of the technical, logistical, and resourcerelated challenges to be addressed before agencies can shift to data-driven decision making, using three JDAI (Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative) jurisdictions as successful case examples. In Chapter 23, Greenwood and Turner, experienced consultants on evidence-based practices for juvenile justice systems, review the current state of evidence-based practice, enumerating its demonstrable benefits, and noting the challenges it may pose for agencies adopting it. The chapter then provides the framework by which the Blueprints for Violence Prevention project validates program models as promising or efficacious, and includes an overview of successful programs. The authors conclude with examples of the implementation of such programs in selected jurisdictions. Finally, in Chapter 24, Butts and Roman draw on their extensive experience as program and systems evaluators to provide a clear-eyed review of the research approaches that inform evidence-based policy. Although they support the increasing intention, and practice, of using evidence to inform policy, they caution against overreliance on it, detailing the limitations of currently available methods and products of research and evaluation for the tasks juvenile justice systems have at hand. The authors conclude with recommendations for enhancing the applicability of research in this context.

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The volume concludes with an afterword from U.S. Representative Robert ‘‘Bobby’’ Scott of Virginia. Congressman Scott, a national spokesperson for youth and families in the juvenile justice system, notes prospective federal legislation that focuses increasing attention on less advantaged children, and exhorts the federal government to continue to demonstrate its leadership by enacting a number of pending federal bills and initiatives, such as the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act and the Youth PROMISE (Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education) Act. In reflecting both the exciting advances and the considerable challenges currently evident in the juvenile justice system, Juvenile

Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice aims to make a modest contribution to the movement toward a rehabilitative, youth and community-centered vision of juvenile justice.

REFERENCES Dilulio, J. (1995, November 27). The coming of the super-predators. Weekly Standard. Puzzanchera, C. (2009). Juvenile arrests 2009. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice: Office of Justice Programs: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Schlesinger, A., Jr., (1986). Cycles of American history. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin. Zimring, F. (1998). American youth violence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Contributors

Linda L. Baker, PhD Centre for Children and Families in the Justice System London, Ontario, Canada Jessica Dym Bartlett, MSW, LICSW Tufts University Medford, MA James Bell, JD W. Haywood Burns Institute San Francisco, CA

Jeffrey A. Butts, PhD City University of New York New York, NY Karen T. Craddock, PhD Education Development Center, Inc. Newton, MA Alison J. Cunningham, MA Centre for Children and Families in the Justice System London, Ontario, Canada

Marty Beyer, PhD Independent Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Consultant Cottage Grove, OR

Courtney Davis, MPP New York University New York, NY

Honorable Jay Blitzman, JD Massachusetts Juvenile Court Lowell, MA

Barry Dym, PhD Boston University School of Management Boston, MA

Kathleen B. Boundy, JD Center for Law and Education Boston, MA

Marian Wright Edelman, LLB Children’s Defense Fund Washington, DC

Paula Braverman, MD Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Cincinnati, OH

Anne F. Farrell, PhD University of Connecticut Stamford, CT

Edmund Bruyere, MS Loyola University Chicago, IL

LaTasha L. Fermin, MA Tufts University Medford, MA

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CONTRIBUTORS

James Garbarino, PhD Loyola University Chicago, IL

Angela Irvine, PhD National Council on Crime and Delinquency Oakland, CA

Laura Garnette, MPA County of Santa Clara Probation Department San Jose, CA

Francine H. Jacobs, EdD Tufts University Medford, MA

Jesus Gerena Family Independence Initiative/Hyde Square Task Force, Inc. Boston, MA

Leah Jacobs, MA, MSW University of California Berkeley, CA

Lisa Goldblatt Grace, LICSW, MPH My Life My Choice/Justice Resource Institute Boston, MA Sean J. Goliday, PhD CSR, Inc. Arlington, VA Jessica H. Greenstone, MS Tufts University Medford, MA Peter W. Greenwood, PhD Association for the Advancement of Evidence-Based Practice Agoura, CA

Rachael Kaplan, MSW, LICSW Clinical Social Worker Brookline, MA Joanne Karger, JD, EdD Center for Law and Education Boston, MA Richard M. Lerner, PhD Tufts University Medford, MA Raquel Mariscal, JD Senior Consultant/Annie E. Casey Foundation Watsonville, CA Joel Miller, PhD Rutgers University Newark, NJ

Kimberly E. Harris, PhD Centre for Children & Families in the Justice System London, Ontario, Canada

Claudia Miranda-Julian, MS, LICSW Tufts University Medford, MA

Robert L. Hawkins, PhD New York University New York, NY

Robert Morris, MD University of California Los Angeles, CA

Kristi Holsinger, PhD University of Missouri Kansas City, MO

Megan Kiely Mueller, MA Tufts University Medford, MA

Contributors

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Diane M. Myers, PhD Assumption College Worcester, MA

Stan Schneider, MA Metis Associates New York, NY

Christopher M. Napolitano, MA Tufts University Medford, MA

Congressman Robert (Bobby) Scott, JD U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC

Rachel Oliveri, MA Tufts University Medford, MA

Francine T. Sherman, JD Boston College Law School Newton, MA

Ellen E. Pinderhughes, PhD Tufts University Medford, MA

Lola Simpson, MS Metis Associates New York, NY

Anita Pritchard, PhD Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL

Ken Tangvik, EdD Hyde Square Task Force, Inc. Boston, MA

Carolyn Reyes, MSW, JD Legal Services for Children San Francisco, CA

Ila Deshmukh Towery, PhD The New Teacher Project Boston, MA

John K. Roman, PhD The Urban Institute Washington, DC

Susan Turner, PhD University of California Irvine, CA

Timothy Ross, PhD Action Research Partners Brooklyn, NY

Maryna Vashchenko, EdM Tufts University Medford, MA

Marc Schindler, JD Venture Philanthropy Partners Washington, DC

Sabina E. Vaught, PhD Tufts University Medford, MA

Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi, MSW Department of Probation New York, NY

Michael D. Wiatrowski, PhD Center for Democratic Policing Williamsburg, VA

Kristina L. Schmid, MA Tufts University Medford, MA

Shannan Wilber, JD Legal Services for Children San Francisco, CA

Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice Edited by Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

S ECTION I

FRAMING THE ISSUES

Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice Edited by Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

CHAPTER

1

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System MARTY BEYER

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arco is a serious 14-year-old whose parents, born in Mexico, have been stably employed for many years. Although his family is close, Marco has faced numerous family problems, including the death of his grandmother who took care of him, and his parents’ preoccupation with the problems of his older siblings, leading to his feeling sad and unloved. Because his parents worked so hard, it felt ungrateful for him to disparage them. Marco’s parents had high aspirations for their children. When his older siblings dropped out of school and had children as teenagers, the pressure was on Marco to be the one to graduate high school. Marco did well in school and particularly loved science. But he found his teachers were overly critical of him—in his view, because they knew his siblings, who had been problem students in the same school, and because some had racist attitudes. When his grades started dropping in eighth grade, the school did not initiate any special supports. He started spending time with dropouts, was suspended, and then arrested for a fight in school; he was diverted from the juvenile justice system but received no services. His parents’ disapproval and his own feeling that he was a school failure were difficult for Marco to bear. For several years, Marco had been increasingly terrorized by gang violence in his neighborhood. He witnessed the murder of a friend and worried every time he walked down the street. Marco had been seriously threatened three times in the 2 weeks before

this arrest. “I tried never to walk alone. If I did, I’d run to a safe spot where there were people. You didn’t have to look like a gangbanger. If you ignored them, they would jump you. If you ran, they would chase you. This is not the movies. In life, violence is real. A lot of people have died in my neighborhood. Death is always there.” Marco did not talk to his family members or friends about his sadness or fears. He did not realize how intense the pressure was and how having to contend with it alone undermined good decision making. Marco is emotionally needy, like a younger teenager, but he does not admit his desire for comfort and protection. He started spending most of his time with his brother and his friends, all several years older and in a gang. As he got more scared, Marco reluctantly went along with pressure from them to join their gang. Marco did not realize the risks of gang protection: “I now know that when I joined a gang it was not a smart choice, but I thought I had to have protection.” Working long hours with many family responsibilities, his parents assumed Marco was safe with his brother, and did not know that he had joined a gang, used marijuana, and was becoming alienated from school. The day before ninth grade began, a gang leader gave Marco, his brother, and a friend a ride home. Unbeknownst to Marco, they were on their way to a drive-by shooting. “At first, I thought it wasn’t really going to happen. I realized it too late, but I could have gotten out of the car. But I was 3

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threatened. He pushed everyone around. These things went on every day in the neighborhood, shootings and beatings to get revenge. He was mad about something done to him and he made us take revenge. It made no sense. But it seemed the only way out was to do what he ordered.” Marco talked about how sad he felt for the victim and expressed sympathy for the family. Marco did not object to being blamed and took responsibility for having bad judgment and not getting out of the car. He knows it was wrong, and if he had seen any choice, he said he would have left, but felt trapped even though he never intended to hurt anyone. How should the juvenile justice system deal with Marco? What criteria should it use to assess his culpability and impose an appropriate disposition? How does the system currently act in cases such as his? Juvenile justice systems make most decisions about youth based on age and offense. Yet age tells us little about what is behind an offense—for example, what precipitated it and what its meaning is for that individual—since each youth’s developmental progression is unique, often indexed in only limited ways to chronological age. The delinquent act itself also tells us little about the youth, since the contexts in which many offenses are committed are so complex. The intricate weave of factors, individual and contextual, that contributed to Marco’s involvement in a drive-by shooting illustrates how much more than age and offense must be considered in designing an effective rehabilitative service combination for him. However, employing a developmental framework allows for more hopeful and effective responses from the system and the community agencies that should be poised to help. In this chapter, I propose a developmental framework for making decisions regarding court proceedings, detention, and services, based on my training as a psychologist and my years of experience working with youth in

THE

ISSUES

juvenile programs and evaluating them for court. Its foundation, and the organizing premise of the chapter, is that the delinquent behavior of adolescents must be understood as resulting from their immature thinking and the effects of trauma and learning disabilities, which are ubiquitous among these youth. These core components are first introduced briefly below, and then I elaborate on each. I also argue for including youth’s strengths, and assessing their capacity for resilience within the context of their families, peers, schools, neighborhoods, and cultural communities at all points of the decision-making process. The chapter concludes with a demonstration of the richness of a developmental framework in vignettes of four system-involved youth, ages 13–16, with a range of offenses; Marco’s story is also included in the analyses.

CORE CONCEPTS To the extent that juvenile justice decisions are based on developmental concepts, these appear to be the outmoded, rigidly linear stagebased, and noncontextual theories of many years ago (Lerner & Steinberg, 2004). This view of development does not consider strengths, the effects of traumatic experiences, and environmental influences on youth. As a result, both in understanding the young person’s behavior and in designing services to change it, system decisions have not been developmentally sound, in the complex ways that we now understand development. For example, even though there is considerable research on the effects of trauma on children (Osofsky, 2004), it has not penetrated the system, perhaps because addressing the effects of trauma on delinquent behavior is not compatible with the simplistic view that offending is a bad choice. Probation and

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

juvenile facilities assume that youth control their behavior to avoid consequences and get rewards. What this fails to take into account is that some behavior is reactive to past victimization, and that traumatized youth may be unable to use rational decision making when the memories and anxiety from traumatic events are triggered. The challenges of learning disabilities have been well researched across academic and applied fields. Unfortunately, the application of research on learning disabilities, including processing problems, executive function difficulties, and attention deficits, appears to have been confined to use in schools, not in the many other realms of children’s lives. The school—in either the juvenile facility or the community—is expected to manage disabilities as they pertain to education, rather than helping everyone involved with the young person understand that they affect the youth’s behavior generally, and use this understanding outside the educational setting. In juvenile justice, disabilities are seldom used as a lens to understand the offense or facilitate behavior change. Instead, it is assumed that youth comprehend what to do and are simply being oppositional and making bad decisions. The notion that maturity should be assessed as a distinct developmental process, apart from chronological age, has a fairly long theoretical history in developmental psychology, but has only recently gained traction in juvenile justice policy and practice (American Medical Association, 2005). Research has demonstrated that adolescents are different from adults (Owen-Kostelnik, Reppucci, & Meyer, 2006; Steinberg & Haskins, 2008), but justice systems treat teenagers as adults in many ways (Bishop, 2000; McGowan et al., 2007). For example, even intelligent teenagers cannot appreciate the consequences of waiving their Miranda rights. Most teenagers say that

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although they were told they had a right to remain silent, they believed they could not refuse to answer police questions. Typically, when they are asked what would happen if the judge heard afterward that they would not talk to the police, they respond that the judge would believe they were guilty. These beliefs demonstrate that they do not comprehend the meaning of the right to remain silent and their decision making is influenced by emotions (Grisso et al., 2003). Teenagers are also more vulnerable to psychological manipulation than are adults. In the police station without a lawyer, young people may well give statements in response to questions that reduce their self-confidence and make them feel hopeless (Ofshe & Leo, 1997; Warden & Drizin, 2009). While research has found that adolescents 16 and older have similar competence-related abilities to adults regarding understanding facts about court proceedings (see Scott & Grisso, 1997, for a review), these findings have been widely misinterpreted to mean that youth over 16 should be considered adults. In fact, even 16- or 17-year-olds with normal intelligence are often incapable of weighing alternatives, seeing the risks of taking a plea or going to trial, and looking into the future in discussions with their lawyers; youth with learning disabilities are even further compromised. Developmentally sound juvenile justice decisions must be based on more than research on cognitive and psychosocial growth in adolescence. The developmental framework proposed here is comprehensive— including immaturity as well as a clinical perspective on trauma and learning disabilities and using an ecological approach regarding the contexts in which the teenager is gradually maturing. Let’s consider the several components of immaturity first.

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THE EFFECTS OF IMMATURITY ON TEEN BEHAVIOR Adolescent development is not a smooth, uniform, linear progression—there are differences in maturity among youth of the same age and across domains within individuals. I have sketched out in this section a number of ways that immaturity affects behavior in these years. Immature Thinking In real life situations, particularly when influenced by peers and/or under the influence of substances, young people often have immature thought processes, including not anticipating, minimizing danger, reacting to stress, and seeing only one option. &

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Not anticipating. Adolescents often do not plan or do not follow their plans and get caught up in unanticipated events. They usually view as “accidental” the unintended poor consequences of actions that adults could have predicted. For example, a young person could go with a group to an event and, on the way, a friend could have a conflict with a young person outside the group; a fight might break out, and several youth might be arrested for an assault they never imagined would have happened. Carrying, and even using, a weapon does not mean that a teen intended harm or thought that he or she would use the weapon. Often, teens feel driven to self-protection and never picture an injured victim. Minimizing danger. Risk taking is typical of adolescents who seldom can consider the worst possible outcomes of their actions (Furby & Beyth-

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Marom, 1992; Steinberg, 2008). Youth do not perceive or weigh risks accurately, and indeed, it has been asserted that “it is statistically aberrant to refrain from such [risk-taking] behavior during adolescence” (Spear, 2000, p. 421). In comparison to adults, teenagers attach different value to the rewards that risk taking provides (Fareri, Martin, & Delgado, 2008; Scott & Steinberg, 2008). Difficulty in managing impulses is a normal characteristic of teens, partly because they have more rapid and extreme mood swings than do adults (Scott & Steinberg, 2008). Impulsively defending a friend who is teased or pushed can quickly escalate into a situation a youth will regret but did not view as risky. Similarly, youth get in trouble with parents, school, and/ or the juvenile justice system for texting they think is benign, and do not realize can be interpreted as threatening. Drugs and alcohol, also often not seen as risky, lower inhibitions and reduce teens’ abilities to use mature judgment; being high frequently contributes to delinquent acts. Reacting to stress. Stress affects the ability to weigh risks and to override impulses with rational thought, and adolescents are more susceptible to stress and emotional fluctuations than are adults (Hampel & Petermann, 2006; Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002; Seiffge-Krenke, 1995; Spear, 2000; Wills, Sandy, & Yaeger, 2001). Decision making can be even more immature when a teen is scared, particularly if he or she has been mistreated in the past. A common form of immature cognitive processes

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

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in adolescents is reacting to threat that adults might consider exaggerated. For example, a young person with no prior arrests or problems in school who jumps a subway gate without paying could get into a physical confrontation that leads to the serious charge of assaulting a police officer. Afterwards, his parents may find it difficult to understand how he could have felt so threatened. Seeing only one option. Adolescents only gradually develop the advanced cognitive ability to weigh alternatives simultaneously (Wigfield, Byrnes, & Eccles, 2006). In situations where adults see several choices, adolescents may believe they have only one. It is not unusual even for intelligent adolescents to imagine only a single scenario. When things do not unfold as they imagined, because of their immaturity, they behave as if they are incapable of adapting with another reasonable choice. For example, a teenage girl who thinks she is going shopping with a friend may be surprised when her friend encourages her to shoplift but may feel unable to leave, go home, or shop on her own.

Immature Identity Identity development is among the central tasks of adolescence (Erikson, 1959; Kroger, 2003). Becoming good at something, for example, doing well in school, arts, sports, or religious or cultural practices, is a cornerstone in the development of a positive identity, and helps it to solidify. Many system-involved youth have not experienced success, particularly in school; often, they feel marginalized.

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Having an unformed identity makes them more vulnerable to involvement with delinquent peers. For most teenagers, belonging to a family provides the basic architecture for identity development. Family provides cultural, religious, and other values that are important to the teenager’s self-definition: sometimes the youth’s values remain consistent with his or her family, and sometimes he or she separates from the family’s values. Identifying with peers is another important aspect of self-definition; group membership is necessary for a young person to feel valued. The process of developing a stable identity takes time, during which young people need approval from family and peers. An ecological approach to understanding teenagers in the context of all their relationships—particularly family and peers—recognizes that development is influenced in complex ways by these interconnected contexts (Garcia Coll, Akerman, & Cicchetti, 2000; Lerner, 2002; Spencer et al., 2006). Conflicting identifications, between two groups of peers or between family and peer expectations, may cause unpredictable behavior in a teenager, especially under stress. Even protective families find it challenging to ensure positive friendships for their teens, and a teen may have positive peers and still get exposed, often in unplanned situations, to peer coercion and/or pressure from the desire for peer acceptance. Some families think teens cannot be supervised, and others, whose authoritarian tendencies increase out of a desire to protect, instead overlimit the teen’s autonomy, both with potentially disastrous consequences (Dodge et al., 2006; Putnick et al., 2008). It is difficult for adults to help youth develop self-confidence to resist peer pressure when the need to belong is so strong. Families can be unaware when a teen, who seems the same at home, becomes

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more influenced by peers and negative school and neighborhood environments. Furthermore, in some neighborhoods, resisting the pressure to commit crimes or to seek protection from a gang itself puts the young person in danger (Fagan, 2000). &

&

Racial and ethnic identity. As their social networks expand, youth see themselves in multiple roles requiring different self-presentations. Racial stereotypes and cultural dissonance make the process of achieving a stable identity more difficult for youth of color (Cross & Fhagen-Smith, 2001; Luthar, 2003). Youth are vulnerable to racial and ethnic marginalization. Violence poses a complex series of threats to resilience for Black males, including aggression as an adaptive response to deal with victimization, which may lead to arrest and reinforces negative stereotypes (Graham & Lowry, 2004; Spencer et al., 2006). Girl identity. Experts disagree about how much the increase in arrests of girls represents a change in behavior as opposed to a change in society’s responses to girls (Zahn, 2009). Developmental research has identified stressors on girls that make them more vulnerable, especially during physical maturation and school transitions. For example, many 11- and 12-year-old girls become less outspoken and more preoccupied with perfection and fear being disliked; and this may contribute to an enduring sense of unworthiness affecting their involvement in delinquent acts (Beyer, Blair, Katz, Simkins, & Steinberg, 2003; Brown & Gilligan,

&

1992; Chamberlain & Moore, 2002; Hennessey Ford, Mahoney, Ko, & Siegfried, 2004; Wood, Foy, Goguen, Pynoos, & James, 2002a). A connection to others is the central organizing feature of development in girls, and their relationship focus and the struggle to be loyal, including worries about abandonment and disconnection, dominate girls’ thinking. Girls in juvenile justice include first-time offenders who were coerced by their older boyfriends. Many teenage girls report violence in their dating relationships. Though some confide in a friend, almost none talk to adults in their family or at school about being victimized in this way and the difficulty of extricating themselves. Traumatic experiences predict delinquency and risky sexual behavior, and most girls who have experienced significant trauma need, but do not receive, trauma treatment—including many who do not have PTSD diagnoses (Smith, Leve, & Chamberlain, 2006; see also Sherman & Greenstone, Chapter 7, this volume). Sexual orientation and gender identity. Harassment for gender-nonconforming appearance or behavior, a nonheterosexual orientation or nontraditional gender identity can lead to a serious loss of self-esteem (Galliher, Rostosky, & Hughes, 2004). Homophobic discrimination at school and in the community is common and hurtful to teenagers and can lead to youth missing school or activities because they feel unsafe (Majd, Marksamer, & Reyes, 2009). Youth who experience

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

antigay victimization in middle or high school are more than twice as likely to be depressed and have substance abuse problems and three times as likely to report suicide attempts than lesbian, gay, or bisexual peers who have not been harassed (Wilber, Ryan, & Marksamer, 2006; see also Garnette, Irvine, Reyes, & Wilber, Chapter 8, this volume). Youth whose parents reject their sexual orientation and gender expression are more likely to be depressed and suicidal; they may end up living on the street, which may, in turn, bring them into the juvenile justice system (Ryan, Huebner, Diaz, & Sanchez, 2009). Immature Moral Reasoning Much has been written about moral development during adolescence, stressing youth’s increasing responsibilities in relationships and awareness of how others will judge one’s actions (Eisenberg, Morris, McDaniel, & Spinrad, 2009). The practical application of adolescent moral development research to real-life reasoning under stress is complicated. Committing a delinquent act can be misconstrued as an indication that the young person did not know right from wrong and/or lacked concern for others. But youth may express strong family and religious values and are frustrated that they cannot explain why they used poor moral reasoning during the offense. Adolescents are generally moralistic, insisting on what should be and intolerant of unfairness (Smetana & Turiel, 2003). They may become involved in an offense naively in order to right wrongs, often out of loyalty. As a result, they may not express an adult understanding of the

9

effect of their offense on victims, despite the fact that their capacity for empathy with others may not be impaired. Next let’s turn to considering the role of trauma in the lives of these youth.

THE EFFECTS OF TRAUMA ON TEEN BEHAVIOR The incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among youth in the juvenile justice system is up to 8 times higher than youth in the community in general (Abram et al., 2004; Kerig, Ward, Vanderzee, & Moeddel, 2009). Among nonincarcerated youth seen in juvenile court clinics, one in nine met criteria for PTSD (Brosky & Lally, 2004). In a study of 50 delinquents, all but two had experienced trauma, including repeated abuse and/or parent death and/or abandonment; at least a third were physically abused and a quarter were sexually abused; more than half the girls had been physically or sexually abused (Beyer, 2006). In my experience, trauma typically slows down development in children and can interfere with all aspects of a youth’s functioning. While other children are growing emotionally, the child coping with trauma is distracted from normal developmental tasks and is occupied with sadness and feeling powerless. Trauma causes disturbances of emotional regulation, social relationships, and attachment (Lieberman & Van Horn, 2004). Children who have been abused or were not protected from violence often blame themselves and have trouble trusting others (Cohen, Mannarino, & Deblinger, 2006). Many youth in juvenile justice have in the past been involved with child protective services and some are in foster care when they are

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arrested. Children who are exposed to disrupted caregiving (separation from their families and multiple foster homes) are at risk for continued difficulty in emotional regulation and deficits in social cognitive processing (Price & Landsverk, 1998). Depression Associated With Trauma Depression is common but often not diagnosed in traumatized teenagers (Ney, Colbert, Newman, & Young, 1986). Their behavior problems become the focus rather than their underlying sadness, isolation, and loss. Depressed children typically express selfdislike, show distorted thinking, and have a greater dependence on peers, but being depressed is correlated with teacher and peer ratings of unpopularity (Cicchetti & Toth, 1998). Often, young people come to juvenile justice without having received trauma treatment despite persistent depression, aggression, and school difficulties (Wolfe, Rawana, & Chiodo, 2006). Aggression Associated With Trauma Aggression can be a defense against the helplessness common among traumatized children. Traumatized youth may misinterpret and be offended by relatively benign things that others say and react with combative selfpreservation. These young people often have had difficulty since childhood modulating their reactions and putting their feelings into words. They react negatively to outside controls and are often labeled oppositional (Ford, Chapman, Hawke, & Albert, 2007; Wolfe et al., 2006). Traumatized teens may not be able to stop these reactions because they see controlling adults as mean and unfair, to which past abuse has made them acutely sensitive. When adults threaten them, they reflexively

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protect themselves; even if the adults believe they are controlling a situation, the teen automatically reacts as if back in the position of being victimized. When their feelings are hurt, they are flooded with anger from the past, which they are unaware is out of proportion to the present provocation, and they lack the ability to calm themselves. Unless adults arrange an environment to meet their needs, this predictable reflexive reaction will be provoked repeatedly. Multiple placements cause more loss and anxiety, provoking fear reactions and reinforcing sensitivity to hostility, rejection, and perceived unfairness. Externalizing behaviors—behavior problems in school, substance use, and truancy—are correlated with extreme parental permissiveness, and internalizing behaviors—depression, anxiety, and self-destructiveness—are associated with extreme parental psychological control (Steinberg, Lamborn, Darling, Mounts, & Dornbusch, 1994). Furthermore, the problem-solving strategies that boys bring to adolescent and adult social situations are directly traceable to the lessons learned from dads . . . young boys who are aggressive and are low in pro-social behaviors . . . have fathers who are more likely to engage in angry exchanges with them . . . the [boys] who are most prone to break down when the going gets tough are those who have been raised with the idea that to admit vulnerability, even to themselves, is weak. (Kindlon & Thompson, 1999, pp. 102–104) Reactions to Bullying Youth who have been chronically picked on have low self-esteem and academic and peer

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

difficulties in school, leading to more teasing and bullying (Horowitz et al., 2004). Bullying keeps children from perceiving school as a safe environment. Other students fear that by associating with victims they may become targets. Sometimes victimized children become bullies themselves, and they tend to have more emotional problems than those who are victims only (Arseneault et al., 2006; Olweus, 1993). Pathologizing Trauma-Related Behaviors It is unfortunate that the effects of trauma on youth are often overlooked or misunderstood (see Sedlak & McPherson, 2010; see also Baker, Cunningham, & Harris, Chapter 11, this volume). The effects of trauma may significantly interfere with the young person’s life and put him or her at risk of delinquency, even those whose symptoms do not meet the PTSD criteria (Widom, 1994; Wood, Foy, Layne, Pynoos, & James, 2002b) (see also Braverman & Morris, Chapter 3, this volume). Adolescents with a history of trauma have high rates of alcohol and substance abuse; these youth rely on substances to escape sad feelings and bad memories (Giaconia, Reinherz, Paradis, & Stashwick, 2003). Trauma is considered a significant risk factor, accounting for numerous items in checklists of factors connected to delinquency or dangerousness (e.g., the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth [SAVRY] and the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument [MAYSI-2]), but is seldom considered in designing rehabilitative services. Too often, symptoms from trauma are misinterpreted as part of the character of the young person, rather than a guide to what is behind behavior that can be changed. Finally, I briefly discuss the effects of learning disabilities on the behavior of youth in the juvenile justice system.

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THE EFFECTS OF LEARNING DISABILITIES ON TEEN BEHAVIOR About 17–53% of youth in juvenile justice systems have learning disabilities, in comparison to 2–10% in the overall child population (Kazdin, 2000; Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Learning disabilities affect young people not only in school, but at home and in the community, particularly in comprehending, following directions, and establishing and maintaining relationships. Learning disabilities include a variety of problems in listening, remembering, prioritizing, and strategizing as well as reading and mathematics. Delinquents have higher rates of neuropsychological deficits as reflected in language, verbal intelligence, working memory, and reading. Of special interest are deficiencies in “executive” functions that are served primarily by the frontal lobes of the brain . . . [including] abstract reasoning, goal setting, anticipating and planning, self-monitoring and self-awareness, inhibiting of impulsive behavior, and interrupting an ongoing sequence of behavior in order to initiate a more adaptive behavior (Kazdin, p. 53). Attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are the most frequently diagnosed behavior disorders of childhood. It is estimated that at least 25% of adolescents (17% of males and 21% of females) in the juvenile justice system have ADHD, compared to 9% in the overall child population (12% of males and 5% of females; Eme, 2009). Distractibility and impulsiveness are prominent characteristics of attention deficit disorders, making these young people less able to stop

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behaviors, which may contribute to delinquency (especially when they have immature cognitive processes and are unable to see alternative choices at the time of an offense). Difficulties with social skills are also common among children with attention deficits and, in my experience, often lead to indiscriminately seeking acceptance (even from delinquent peers). Some youth’s problem-solving skills are compromised by not accurately perceiving cues from peers and adults, typically attributing hostility to others and believing that aggressive acts will result in peer approval (Dodge, 2003). By the time the learning disability is identified, many youth lack the basic skills necessary to comprehend schoolwork and to get along with others. Often, the youth who is embarrassed by poor performance gets into a negative cycle of attention seeking that interferes with school participation. Some youths’ problem-solving skills are compromised by not accurately perceiving cues from peers and adults, typically attributing hostility to others and believing that aggressive acts will result in peer approval (Dodge, 2003). Truancy from feeling picked on by teachers and/or students and frustration with poor academic progress can begin early in young people with learning disabilities, and not attending school can lead to delinquency.

STRENGTHS OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTS Youth have strengths that must be built on in designing supports and services to meet the needs driving their delinquent behavior (Eccles & Gootman, 2002; see Lerner et al., Chapter 5, this volume). Often, youth can be engaged in change when their strengths

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are recognized. Their aspirations may be connected to something they are or were good at, and what may motivate them to change is to get back on track toward achieving dreams. Although families are typically blamed as the cause of delinquency, most families also have strengths, and youth often take it personally when their families are criticized (see Jacobs, Miranda-Julian & Kaplan, Chapter 10, this volume). Peers and neighborhoods also receive blame for youth getting involved in delinquency, but positive peers can encourage the youth’s aspirations and neighborhoods can offer significant support (such as pastors, relatives, and other adults and athletic and artistic opportunities) (see Hawkins, Vashchenko, & Davis, Chapter 12, this volume). Schools are seen as failing to address youth problems before they drop out or are suspended or expelled, but schools also can meet youth needs with services that offer youth the opportunity for success. Through a developmental framework, juvenile justice can avoid pathologizing and instead identify the strengths and needs behind each young person’s behavior. Rather than viewing the young person as a “bad seed” likely to become an adult offender, developmentally sound services support the youth’s resilience so he or she can outgrow unacceptable behaviors.

VIGNETTES OF YOUTH IN JUVENILE JUSTICE The stories of four youth are presented next, including brief descriptions of their strengths; family, peer, school, and neighborhood contexts; immaturity; trauma; and disabilities. These vignettes demonstrate how a developmental framework can guide our understanding and treatment of these youth,

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

as well as our efforts to prevent systeminvolvement for others. Marco’s story is included, as well, in the analysis presented in Table 1.1. Dustin Dustin is a quiet 13-year-old Native American youth born on a reservation. His mother was 16, his father was incarcerated before his birth, and he was raised by his grandmother. When he lived with his mother, he periodically ran away to his grandmother because of his mother’s physical abuse. His mother married, and they moved across the country to live with his new stepfather when Dustin was in seventh grade, shortly before the birth of his brother. It was traumatic for Dustin to lose his extended family and strong cultural roots. His stepfather was young, had not parented before, and favored his newborn; his mother’s life centered around her husband. Dustin adjusted surprisingly well to his new school. He had several friends who lived nearby and he spent most of his time in their homes. The girl next door was his best friend, and he felt “adopted” by her parents, who took him to the water park and skating rink; he resented his family for not caring enough about him to do activities together. He worried about his stepfather’s drinking, which caused work and marital problems. His stepfather was furious when Dustin protected his mother when he was about to slap her. Dustin said his stepfather hit him and constantly reprimanded him for not doing household chores properly. Dustin’s mother and stepfather criticized him for getting poor grades, although he complained that he worked on his homework longer every afternoon than his friends. Initially, his teachers attributed his academic struggles to their assumption that the small reservation school he had attended from first to sixth grades was

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inferior. Because he was so “shy,” his trouble concentrating and following directions was overlooked, and they were surprised that on his first standardized testing in late spring, Dustin scored more than three grades lower than his classmates. Although he was not referred for evaluation of attention deficit (without hyperactivity) and/or executive function deficits, Dustin was likely eligible for special education services to address disabilities, which would have improved his grades and self-esteem. During the summer, Dustin’s mother told him they had to move, but not back to his relatives. When he told his friend next door, she cried and Dustin said he held back tears. He was upset he would have to leave his friends and their caring families and adjust to a new school. The week of the offense, it came as a surprise to Dustin that his mother was sending him to live with a relative he did not know far from both his grandmother and where his mother was moving. He felt rejected, especially since his stepfather said it was his disobedience and poor grades that were making them send him to relatives who could discipline him. Early physical abuse, being separated from family members, chronic disapproval, worrying about his mother’s marriage, and the impending move was a significant amount of trauma. Dustin did not have anyone to confide in and internalized his feelings. Leading up to his explosion, Dustin was under extreme stress that compromised his typical immature thinking. When he walked in the door that night, Dustin said his mother immediately started yelling at him. He heated up some food and was watching television. His stepfather yelled at him to get off the couch and turn off the TV. He was real mean about it. I was still eating. He told me to hurry up. I got up and moved so he could lie down on the couch. I went into the kitchen

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and put my dishes in the dishwasher. Then he yelled at me because I had turned the kitchen light on. It made me mad. I was sick of being yelled at and not allowed to watch TV in my own house. I can’t explain what happened next. I grabbed a knife from the dishwasher. Without thinking, Dustin lunged at his stepfather, cutting him seriously before he ran out of the house. Later, he understood that he had “bottled up all that anger at my stepfather and my mother and it all came out at once, but I didn’t expect it.” Behind Dustin’s aggression were complicated unmet needs to: &

&

&

& &

&

Understand that the loss and rejection he experienced are not his fault; Learn how to respond when criticized and not overreact to rejection; Learn how to express himself without holding his feelings in until he erupts; Feel successful in school; Recognize the effects of his learning disabilities on his concentration and decision making; and Not be separated from family.

These needs could be met by trauma treatment, services to learn how to compensate for his learning disabilities, coaching on expressing his feelings and not overreacting, and returning to live with his grandmother. Peter Peter is a childish, White 14-year-old who was traumatized by abuse by his mentally ill mother, and then by abuse in his foster home. Later, he was moved to his father and stepmother’s home. When he was in elementary school, Peter ran away repeatedly because of

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his father’s abuse. Child Protective Services again placed him in a foster home for more than a year. When he was returned, the school complained that his father was not cooperative in dealing with Peter’s academic and behavior problems. Peter remembers being picked on since second grade for being behind academically. As he got older, Peter was upset that he was teased for being gay. He said he always liked girls, but kids thought he was gay because “I’m small and soft.” He felt unfairly treated by the PE teacher and got Fs in PE because he was being harassed in the locker room and refused to change. Peter’s arms are lined with scars. “I was always cutting my wrists. My teacher saw it. My dad saw it. No one did anything about it.” Peter talked about being isolated and alone, tolerating physical punishment by his father and conflict with his stepmother. “I didn’t care about anybody. I just wanted to be dead.” Asked what made him get to that point in eighth grade, he responded, “Thinking no one cares, people making fun of me all the time. My whole class made fun of me for being gay and not being able to do math.” Because of past trauma, Peter was unusually sensitive to criticism. He could not articulate that he felt hurt when he was teased and embarrassed about being unable to do his schoolwork. After years of abuse, Peter experienced any “no” as another victimization and he reflexively reacted to protect himself. He had not learned how to prevent escalation or how to calm himself down when he was teased, cornered, pushed, or touched. Peter’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) was blaming, focused on behavior control, and reflected no understanding of trauma-driven behavior. Peter got angry when he read his behavior intervention plan (BIP): “Peter’s motivation for inappropriate behavior and language toward peers and teachers is

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

avoidance of work and attention seeking.” He thought his IEP was wrong: “Why do they think I avoid work? I go to school. I try to do my work. I need help on a lot of things. I am frustrated when I can’t get more help.” After his arrest, a neuropsychological evaluation found “a severe attentional disorder, a slow rate of information processing, and memory and executive dysfunctions which constitute a significant functional disability” that interfered with Peter’s school performance as well as with interactions with family and friends. For years he had IEPs without the required evaluations, which could have identified his disabilities in order to design the proper combination of services to ensure that his social skills, attentiveness, reading, and math improved. Had instruction in the give-and-take of communication, how to avoid talking too much, how to read others’ nonverbal cues, and how not to misinterpret rules as mistreatment been initiated in the early elementary years when his social skills deficits were first documented, Peter’s behavior improvement might have prevented being picked on. His early depression and anxiety might have been reduced with improved peer relationships, although these were also symptoms of trauma that went untreated. The kids were picking on me, calling me gay every day. The teacher heard them and didn’t do anything. The PE teacher yelled at me. The counselor wouldn’t do anything. No one would help. Nobody cared. A kid called me a name, another kid tripped me as I was walking to my seat. I got angry. My teacher yelled at me to calm down. I got more out of hand. She came toward me, trying to corner me. When I get angry, I don’t think. I was telling her to

15

leave me alone. She was yelling just like my father. She pushed me. I told her, “You better not touch me again.” She pushed me against the cabinet. I went ballistic. I pushed her down, ran out of the school. Behind Peter’s aggression were numerous unmet needs to: &

& &

&

&

Learn to separate his past victimization from provocation in the present; Learn to calm himself before reacting; Understand his pool of anger and hurt and learn to be less sensitive to rejection and to express his anger without hurting himself or others; Understand his attention, processing, and executive function difficulties; and Be successful at something.

These needs could be met by trauma treatment, services to learn how to compensate for his learning disabilities, a home and school where he is not maltreated, and guidance for the adults to understand that their actions might prevent most of his behavior problems by avoiding power struggles and deescalating before he gets out of control.

Brandon Brandon is a bright, engaging African American 15-year-old from a loving family. His mother is proud of her two older children in community college and she is raising her young great nephew who had been neglected. Brandon’s father’s murder when Brandon was young led to his family’s move out of a high-crime area. Brandon’s arrest for selling marijuana shocked all of them. His siblings and mother

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insisted that their family’s love, religious values, emphasis on school achievement, and strong work ethic made it inconceivable that any of the children could be a delinquent. Family members expressed regret for not realizing that his doing poorly in school and hanging around with kids who were not successful in school or athletics put him at risk. Brandon kept secrets from his mother for more than a year. His family said Brandon remained the same loving, childish, entertaining son and sibling at home, helping with his cousin and doing chores. But when he was out, he was using marijuana daily and paying for it by selling marijuana. Brandon’s life had changed significantly in the past 2 years, in a negative direction in several dimensions simultaneously. &

&

&

The loss of basketball. Brandon experienced a major, painful rejection when he was not invited to continue with the elite team he had been on for years. He felt humiliated, and lost a sense of belonging and identity that was critical to him. He stopped playing basketball altogether, believing his future as an athlete was over. Less attention from his mother. When he was in seventh grade, his mother lost her job and they had to move again. Her great nephew required a lot of her assistance when he was removed from his mother and had to adjust to a new family and school. Because Brandon was not playing sports, he spent less time with his mother, who had been at all his games. His brother’s leaving. When Brandon’s brother left home, he lost the daily friendship and guidance of the person to whom he was closest in his family.

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&

This marked the end of Brandon’s life at home playing video games, since his brother was his game partner from second to seventh grade. The loss of school as a place of success. For Brandon, like many students, seventh grade was a difficult adjustment—the work was more challenging and he felt the teachers expected too much. Although in elementary school he had met state standards, getting As and Bs, in seventh grade Brandon was below standard in math and reading, did not like his teacher, and failed a class. In eighth grade, he was absent 40 days (in contrast to nearly perfect attendance in elementary school), got Ds, and was suspended for getting into an argument. Not wanting to burden his mother, he kept his problems from her. His brother told Brandon “to turn it around. You are just being lazy.” A friend’s parent was monitoring her MySpace and complained to the school that Brandon wrote threatening statements about the assistant principal; he was arrested, put on probation, and suspended (even though he said he was just joking). His probation officer detained him for a week when he was suspended in the first month of ninth grade for having marijuana in his pocket at school.

Unaware of the seriousness of Brandon’s problems, his family viewed these as minor “incidents” due to his being unfairly treated at school and by probation. His mother was angry at the school for singling Brandon out: If he had been a White kid, the school would have given him help a long

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

time ago. If he had been White, his probation officer would have sent him to a drug program, rather than locking him up in detention. Brandon’s immature thinking included not being able to anticipate the long-term consequences of poor grades. He did not imagine that each day his choices about his schoolwork were taking him off the path of high school graduation and going to college on a sports scholarship. Brandon also minimized the risks of his secret life. He was smoking marijuana every day in ninth grade and believed that marijuana was benign. Brandon said marijuana gave him a “mellow mind,” and he liked being relaxed. The only problem he saw with marijuana was cost. Brandon also had an immature identity. Prior to seventh grade, Brandon was a successful athlete and student, staying close to his family and home. But he lost some of his family-centeredness and he lost his sportsfocused identity. Brandon did not want to turn his back on his close friends, with whom he had played basketball since elementary school. They smoked marijuana together, were barely passing in school, and none were playing high school sports. He was their supplier, believing he would never get arrested selling drugs just to people he knew. Behind Brandon’s illegal behavior were significant unmet needs to: & &

&

&

Be successful at school; Develop a stable, positive identity supported by successful peers at school; Talk about how much he has missed his father and brother; Learn how to get a “mellow mind” without using marijuana; and

&

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Learn how to anticipate consequences, see risks, and make choices that will allow him to achieve his goals.

These needs could be met by coaching on getting involved with college-bound peers, decision-making skills, returning to sports, improving study habits, tutorial assistance, college-preparatory summer programs, and guidance for his mother in providing supervision and recognizing Brandon’s successes. Kristi Kristi is a 16-year-old biracial girl whose grandmother said she was “the perfect child until middle school: good grades, happy, nice friends, loved sports. She loved her mother; they had survived hard times together.” Her parents’ arguments and bitter divorce and her mother’s remarriage were hard on Kristi. She missed having her father at home, and by the time she was in fourth grade, the fighting between her mother and stepfather was frightening. “I was scared of him. He wasn’t working and was living off my Mom and me. I couldn’t understand why she took him back over and over.” Kristi developed an eating disorder in sixth grade after her stepfather was arrested for attacking her mother and Kristi when she tried to get help. Kristi’s soccer team was the center of her life for years, and her mother, grandmother, and father cheered for her at tournaments: “It was hard work to be on a travel team. It was an honor. We went to the state championship and met girls from all over. We did so well. We had so much fun.” After the game, Kristi and her friends got caught drinking and their coach kicked them off the team. “I was going to try out for the high school team, but I gave up. . . . It was a big mistake that I regretted.”

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Her father talked about the vacuum that not playing soccer caused in Kristi’s life, observing that without the discipline of sports she “became less motivated to do well in school, had more worries about her weight, and did not have her good group of friends.” The combination of reactions to her parents’ divorce and her mother’s involvement in an abusive second marriage made Kristi susceptible to an exploitive relationship with an older male. With her worries about her appearance, the loss of soccer, and feeling less motivated academically, Kristi was flattered by his attention, and minimized keeping him a secret from her parents, who would not have approved. He was extremely moody, arguing with people for no reason. He hit me with his fists. He said the meanest stuff to me. And then sweet talk me, saying beautiful things. I told my best friend I didn’t want to stay with him, but I didn’t know how to break it off. I was so depressed. Kristi continued,

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Lacking experience, Kristi did not correctly assess many danger signals: “He would not let me go anywhere without him. His mood swings were extreme and unpredictable. He smashed things when he was angry.” His obsession that afternoon with wanting to run away with her was annoying, but she thought it was “just talk” when he kept coming back to the same subject for hours and was not satisfied with her telling him she was not leaving home. What Kristi did not know was that he had been using meth that day. She was shocked when he attacked her mother, stabbing her to death with a kitchen knife when she got home from work: “It was so quick; I was in shock, shivering and not understanding what was happening.” Threatening Kristi with the knife, he ordered her to get her mother’s car keys and wallet and made her drive to an ATM to withdraw the limit in cash from her mother’s account. When they were apprehended in her mother’s car, it did not occur to Kristi that the police would arrest her. She gave a simple statement about what had happened: I thought the police wanted information about what he did. I didn’t try to explain it to them. I didn’t understand what happened myself. I thought they knew I didn’t have any part in it and were going to take me home.

I was ashamed that I still loved him and his sweet-talking and hoped our good times would return. I didn’t ask for help because I didn’t realize I was over my head. I knew getting high with him and skipping school to be with him were wrong. But I thought I could quit him anytime.

Asked whether she told the police she had been kidnapped, Kristi responded that she thought kidnapping referred to a small child or someone being tied up. She added,

Kristi said she hid “how bad I felt about myself ” and did not know how to get counseling without burdening her mother. She told herself that her substance use was not a problem. She believed that she would get serious about school again and achieve her goal of college.

I was forced the whole time. I wasn’t dragged by my hair. But if I had refused, he would have made me. The look in his eyes was so threatening. In the car he was holding the knife. I didn’t have control, of course, I never did with him.

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

Her boyfriend told the police it was Kristi’s idea to kill her mother because she wanted to run away from home. In her state, 16-yearolds charged with murder did not have a hearing where a judge would decide whether they could be rehabilitated in juvenile court. Kristi was held for many months in an adult jail, fortunately supported by maternal and paternal extended family, before she was acquitted by a jury in an adult trial. Behind Kristi’s involvement in an abusive relationship were complex unmet needs to: &

& &

&

Recover from her parents’ divorce and her exposure to domestic violence, and understand the connection between her worries about loss of relationships and her eating problems and use of substances; Be proud of her academic performance; Learn how to have a good dating relationship without violence or being controlled; and Improve her ability to assess the riskiness of her choices.

These needs could be met by trauma treatment, support from teachers and family for good grades in school, and guidance in deciding about whether to return to sports. Commonalities Among These Young People Of the five youths ages 13–16 arrested for a range of offenses described previously, all had strengths. Three had loving families and one had been raised in the past by a loving grandmother. All five needed, and had not received, trauma treatment. The behavior for which they came to the attention of the juvenile justice system (and one of them to the child welfare system) was linked to abuse, loss, harassment, and exposure to

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violence. None of them understood the connection between past trauma and their present problems, even the two whose aggression was directly related to prior victimization. For two of the youth, their delinquent behavior was associated with their untreated learning disabilities. The other three did not have disabilities, but had become alienated from school and were not achieving as well as they had in the past. Immaturity affected all of their offenses. All had immature thinking, minimized risk, and were unable to anticipate the worst possible outcomes of their behaviors. None of them had the experience to realize that they needed help and could not solve their problems themselves. One was helped by friends, one was loyal to friends, two were pressured by older youth, and one had poor peer relationships. All expressed moral values and knew right from wrong, but they were not rational and could not use mature moral reasoning when caught up in an offense they did not realize was going to happen. The range of developmental characteristics behind the behavior of these five youth is presented in Table 1.1. These portraits are quite different than the standard files of system-involved youth might suggest. Without minimizing the seriousness of the acts these young people have committed, each portrait attempts to explain how the youth came to be in the situations that led them to these actions, and based on that information, what services would likely be successful in building on their strengths and meeting their needs so they can achieve adult lives of purpose. They argue, in my view, for keeping youth out of adult probation, jails, and prisons—allowing them the opportunity to mature and to heal within a juvenile justice system that can provide developmentally sound support. The vignettes also identify lost opportunities for intervening before delinquent acts were ever committed.

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Marco (Age 14)

Attached to extended family Strong positive family values Felt criticized by stepfather, betrayed by mother

Nondelinquent friends

Well liked by teachers Behind academically No testing for services

Loss of reservation culture Safe neighborhood

Impulsive reaction to criticism Did not realize anger and sadness could explode Did not realize he needed help Not excelling at anything

Physical abuse Separation from family Constant criticism Stress of moving

Undiagnosed ADD and/or executive function deficit

PEER CONTEXT

SCHOOL CONTEXT

NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXT

IMMATURITY

TRAUMA

DISABILITIES

Separation from mother, abuse in foster home, abuse by father and stepmother Years of feeling unwanted

Wants friends, nonabusive home No prior arrests or substance use

Peter (Age 14)

Minimized risks of boyfriend Minimized risks of alcohol and marijuana Did not realize she needed help Dependent Divorce Domestic violence at home Loss of sports Depressed

Minimized risks of selling marijuana Did not realize drift away from path of school and sports Did not realize he needed help Did not want to be disloyal Father’s murder Loss of sports Mother’s job loss and move Brother leaving

Can’t anticipate consequences Didn’t want to be perceived as gay Not successful at anything Self-destructive behavior Tormented by teasing Repeated abuse caused reflexive reaction to threat Depressed

Minimized risks of joining gang Felt he had no choice but to do what was ordered Did not realize he needed help Not excelling at anything Deaths in family Parents preoccupied Constant fear from violence Pressure to achieve

Untreated processing, attention and executive function difficulties

Low-crime neighborhood

Was an excellent student Decreased confidence in school Working-class neighborhood with increasing crime

Was an excellent student

Isolated rural area

IEP for behavior control, not for disabilities Feels no one stopped mistreatment

Strong, caring family Did not realize she needed more supervision and help

Strong, caring family Did not realize he needed more supervision and help

Nondelinquent friends except her boyfriend Unable to leave abusive boyfriend

Wants to go to college No prior arrests Athletic talent

Wants to go to college Athletic talent

Friends no longer athletes and likely to drop out of school Daily marijuana use requires $

Kristi (Age 16)

Brandon (Age 15)

Terrified by gang violence

Capable of grade-level work, but alienated Feels teachers are unsupportive

Brother and friends in gang Picked on every day in school for 6 years

Strong, caring family Did not know how to provide supervision or encouragement

Wants to complete high school Wants to complete high school No prior arrests or substance use Remorseful Knows hurting someone is wrong

FAMILY CONTEXT

STRENGTHS

Dustin (Age 13)

Table 1.1. A Developmental Framework for Understanding Five System-Involved Youth

A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

Taking an ecologically oriented, traumainformed developmental view of who these young people are, what they need, and what they might yet become is a step toward providing them with the effective juvenile services described in subsequent chapters.

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perspective. In B. Jackson & C. Wijeyesinghe (Eds.), New perspectives on racial identity development: A theoretical & practical anthology (pp. 243–270). New York: New York University. Dodge, K. A. (2003). Do social information processing patterns mediate aggressive behavior? In B. Lahey, T. Moffitt, & A. Caspi (Eds.), Causes of conduct disorder and juvenile delinquency (pp. 254–274). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Dodge, K. A., Malone, P. S., Lansford, J. E., MillerJohnson, S., Petit, G. S., & Bates, J. E. (2006). Toward a dynamic developmental model of the role of parents and peers in early onset substance use. In J. Dunn & A. Clarke-Stewart (Eds.), Families count: Effects on child and adolescent development (pp. 104–131). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Eccles, J. S., & Gootman, J. (2002). Community programs to promote youth development. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Eisenberg, N., Morris, A. S., McDaniel, B., & Spinrad, T. L. (2009). Moral cognitions and prosocial responding in adolescence. In R. M. Lerner & L. Steinberg, Handbook of adolescent psychology, Vol. 1: Individual bases of adolescent development (3rd ed., pp. 229–265). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Eme, R. (2009). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the family court. Family Court Review, 47(4), 650–664. Erikson, E. H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle; selected papers. New York, NY: International Universities Press. Fagan, J. (2000). Contexts of choices by adolescents in criminal events. In T. Grisso & R. Schwartz (Eds.), Youth on Trial (pp. 371–402). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fareri, D. S., Martin, L. N., & Delgado, M. R. (2008). Reward-related processing in the human brain: Developmental considerations. Development and Psychopathology, 20, 1191–1211. Ford, J. D., Chapman, J. F., Hawke, J., & Albert, D. (2007). Trauma among youth in the juvenile justice system: Critical issues and new directions. Retrieved from National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Web site: www.ncmhjj.com Furby, M., & Beythe-Marom, R. (1992). Risk-taking in adolescence: A decision-making perspective. Developmental Review, 12, 1–44. Galliher, R. V., Rostosky, S. S., & Hughes, H. K. (2004). School belonging, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms in adolescents: An examination of sex,

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A Developmental View of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

Putnick, D. L., Bornstein, M. H., Hendricks, C., Painter, K. M., Suwalsky, J. T., & Collins, W. A. (2008). Parenting stress, perceived parenting behaviors, and adolescent self-concept in European American families. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(5), 752–762. Ryan, C., Huebner, D., Diaz, R. M. & Sanchez, J. (2009) Family rejection as a predictor of negative health outcomes in white and Latino lesbian, gay and bisexual young adults. Pediatrics, 1, 346–352. Scott, E. S., & Grisso, T. (1997). The evolution of adolescence: A developmental perspective on juvenile justice reform. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 88, 137–189. Scott, E. S., & Steinberg, L. (2008). Adolescent development and the regulation of youth crime. The Future of Children, 18(2), 15–33. Sedlak, A., & McPherson, K. (2010). Conditions of confinement: Findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (May). Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U. S. Department of Justice. Seiffge-Krenke, I. (1995). Stress, coping, and relationships in adolescence. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Smetana, J. G., & Turiel, E. (2003). Moral development during adolescence. In G. R. Adams & M. D. Berzonsky (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of adolescence (pp. 247–268). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Smith, D., Leve, L., & Chamberlain, P. (2006). Adolescent girls’ offending and health-risking sexual behavior: The predictive role of trauma. Child Maltreatment, 11(4), 346–353. Spear, L. P. (2000) The adolescent brain and age-related behavioral manifestations. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 417–463. Spencer, M. B., Harpalani, V., Cassidy, E., Jacobs, C. Y., Donde, S., Goss, T. N., . . . Wilson, S. (2006). Understanding vulnerability and resilience from a normative developmental perspective: Implications for racially and ethnically diverse youth. In D. Chicchetti (Ed.), Handbook of development and psychopathology (pp. 627–673). New York, NY: Wiley. Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28, 78–106.

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Steinberg, L., & Haskins, R. (2008). Keeping adolescents out of prison. Princeton University-Brookings Institution Policy Brief. Retrieved from www.future ofchildren.org Steinberg, L., Lamborn, S. D., Darling, N., Mounts, N. S., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1994). Over-time changes in adjustment and competence among adolescents from authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent and neglectful families. Child Development, 65, 754–770. Warden, R., & Drizin, S. (Eds.). (2009). True stories of false confessions. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University. Widom, C. S. (1994). Child victimization and adolescent problem behavior. In R. D. Ketterlinus & M. E. Lamb (Eds.), Adolescent problem behavior: Issues and research. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Wigfield, A., Byrnes, J. B., & Eccles, J. S. (2006). Adolescent development. In P. A. Alexander & P. Winne (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (2nd ed., pp. 87–113). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Wilber, S., Ryan, C., & Marksamer, J. (2006). Serving LGBT youth in out-of-home care. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America. Wills, T. A., Sandy, J. M., & Yaeger, A. M. (2001). Coping dimensions, life stress, and adolescent substance use: A latent growth analysis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 309–323. Wolfe, D., Rawana, J., & Chiodo, D. (2006). Abuse and trauma. In D. Wolfe & E. Mash (Eds.), Behavioral and emotional disorders in adolescents. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Wood, J., Foy, D., Goguen, C., Pynoos, R., & James, C. B. (2002a). Violence exposure and PTSD among delinquent girls. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 6(1), 109–126. Wood, J., Foy, D., Layne, C., Pynoos, R., & James, C. B. (2002b). An examination of the relationships between violence exposure, posttraumatic stress symptomatology, and delinquent activity: An “ecopathological” model of delinquent behavior among incarcerated adolescents. In R. Greenwald (Ed.), Trauma and juvenile delinquency (pp. 109–126). New York, NY: Hayworth. Zahn, M. (2009). The delinquent girl. Philadelphia, PA: Temple.

Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice Edited by Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

CHAPTER

2

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement KRISTI HOLSINGER

C

onventional wisdom about juveniles and delinquency control measures in this country has evolved substantially over time, yielding fragmented, contradictory, and at times even chaotic, approaches to managing juvenile delinquency—hardly a “system” in any conventional sense and certainly “young” in its development. In turn, shifting perspectives on who these youth are and how they should be treated have bedeviled attempts to standardize how they and their offenses are described and documented. Based on nationally available data, this chapter presents as full and accurate a portrait as possible of these young people, at each stage of their involvement with the juvenile justice system. A brief review of the history of the development and current operations of the system will proceed to provide necessary context for the data that follow.

1972). An important counterdevelopment occurred in 1841 with the advent of probation for children; similar “child-helping” initiatives soon followed with the creation of reform schools. However, it was during the Progressive Era when reforms that credited the ageminority status of children, including the establishment of the first juvenile court in 1899, became widespread. The reformers of this period saw the main goal of the juvenile justice court as treatment and rehabilitation, not punishment. Delinquency was a condition that could be identified, treated, and cured, they argued, through an individual analysis of the youth’s special needs and circumstances. In response, the court eliminated the punitive, adversarial, and formalized procedures of the adult criminal process and adopted more informal proceedings characterized by greatly increasing judicial discretion; as an unintended consequence, many due process protections afforded adults were eliminated. Eventually, common belief held that the juveniles were getting “the worst of both worlds” (Kent v. United States, 1966, p. 556), receiving neither the necessary help or treatment promised by the juvenile court, nor the procedural protection adults in the criminal justice system enjoyed. Landmark cases heard by the Supreme Court (e.g., In re Gault, 1967;

THE HISTORICAL LEGACY OF THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM Some mark the beginning of the juvenile justice system in the early 1800s, when states began to supersede parental authority and rights by institutionalizing “deviant” children, often for cheap labor, however, still treating them similarly to adult criminals (Mennel, 24

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

In re Winship, 1970) supported this contention, and the rights of juveniles were greatly expanded, institutionalizing some of the formality of the adult system in the juvenile court. Juveniles began to be treated more like adults in other ways as well; for example, the 1980s marked efforts by virtually every state to allow easier transfer of youth to adult court (Feld, 1998; Torbet et al., 1996; see Sherman & Blitzman, Chapter 4, this volume). Research in the 1960s and 1970s also identified serious flaws in the system. Correctional “treatment,” especially in institutions, was punitive, harsh, and sometimes even sadistic (Holland & Mlyniec, 1995; President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 2008; also see Beck, Harrison, & Guerino, 2010, for a current review and analysis of sexual victimization in juvenile facilities), and minor offenders were incarcerated alongside seriously delinquent youth. In the 1970s, deinstitutionalization (providing programs in community-based settings rather than in institutions) and diversion (keeping youth out of the system to begin with) were promoted. The decriminalization and deinstitutionalization of status offenses were also encouraged, largely due to provisions in the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974. By the 1980s, a score of social and demographic factors precipitated a shift away from the long-standing posture of rehabilitation to one reflecting a “get tough” mentality (Butts & Mears, 2001). Crime control policies instituted for juveniles included lowering the age limit for juvenile court jurisdiction, the increased use of preventative detention, the increased transfer of juveniles to the adult system, a move toward determinate sentencing for violent offenders, and even the use of the death penalty for certain crimes. Data linking these get-tough measures with reductions in youth

25

crime have not been forthcoming; in fact, an in-depth analysis in Florida found such punitive measures to have a negligible impact on juvenile crime rates (Frazier, Bishop, & LanzaKaduce, 1999). Recent developmental research on adolescent brain functioning also suggests that youth do not have the same skills as adults in weighing costs and benefits and acting rationally (Scott & Steinberg, 2000). These developments have called into question the wisdom of the policy shifts of the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly, both of these contradictory approaches remain part of the current juvenile justice system. States and counties vary greatly in their ideological viewpoints on, and their legislation concerning, juvenile crime; juvenile court practices are also determined by the demographics and geography of states and by the resources available for youth in a given community (see Schiraldi, Schindler & Goliday, Chapter 20, this volume). All this leads to wide variation across the country in the youth who are involved in the juvenile justice system, which in turn produces broad variation in selection and maintenance of both person- and crime-specific data.

HOW JUVENILE CASES ARE PROCESSED There are almost 3,000 juvenile courts in operation in the United States (Krisberg, 2005). The number of delinquency cases handled by them remained largely stable between 2000 and 2007, with approximately 1.7 million cases handled nationwide in 2007 (Knoll & Sickmund, 2010). As can be seen from Figure 2.1, the juvenile court caseload climbed steadily from 1960, when 400,000 cases were processed, to the peak year in 1997 with over 1.8 million cases (Puzzanchera &

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Figure 2.1 Number of Delinquency Cases, 1960–2005

Source: Adapted from Puzzanchera and Sickmund, 2008.

Sickmund, 2009). Between 1997 and 2007, there was an 11% decline in delinquency cases (Puzzanchera, Adams, & Sickmund, 2011). This decrease has been attributed to reductions in juvenile violent crime and expanded laws allowing for juvenile cases to be directly transferred to adult courts (Adams & Addie, 2010). The juvenile justice process typically begins with a referral, which can be handled informally or formally, or diverted. Most juveniles (83% in 2007; Puzzanchera et al., 2011) are referred into the system by law enforcement, although many cases drop out of the system through informal processing or diversion. Other referrals come from schools, parents, victims, probation officers, and social service agencies, largely dependent on the offense. For example, in 2002 non-law enforcement referrals accounted for a small percentage of property (9%), drug (10%) and person offenses (13%), and a larger percentage of truancy (86%), ungovernability (70%), runaway (45%), and public order offenses (39%) (Snyder & Sickmund, 2004). Beginning in the 1990s, there has been a trend of increased school referrals to juvenile court as the result of zero-tolerance state laws mandating referral of children to law

enforcement for certain school violations (see Bell & Mariscal, Chapter 6, this volume; Boundy & Karger, Chapter 14, this volume; Vaught, Chapter 15, this volume). An analysis of school referrals in five states found that four of the states experienced a greater proportion of referrals from schools to juvenile court in 2004 compared to 1995 (Krezmien, Leone, Zablocki, & Wells, 2009). Initially concerned with drugs, gangs, and weapons, zero-tolerance laws have expanded to include behaviors considered disruptive (Skiba, 2001). This practice has led to a phenomenon referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline” where certain groups of students, particularly African American students, are put on a pathway by schools into the justice system (Wald & Losen, 1995; see Boundy & Karger, Chapter 14, this volume). The decision to detain a juvenile must involve parental notification and a review by an intake officer or a prosecutor to ensure sufficient evidence to proceed. At this point in processing, 44% of the cases are dismissed or handled informally, while slightly more than half (56%) result in formal intervention by the court (Sickmund, 1988). Holding a youth for an extended period of time (over 24 hours in

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

most states) requires a judicial decision and typically is determined by whether the youth is believed to be a harm to self or others; the youth lacks a parent or guardian, which can include homelessness or runaway status; or it is believed the youth is unlikely to appear for future court proceedings (Chesney-Lind & Shelden, 2004). In 2005, detention hearings resulted in 21% of youth being detained (Snyder & Sickmund, 2004). A delinquency case is handled in either juvenile or criminal (adult) court. Between 1992 and 1997, 44 states and the District of Columbia passed laws increasing the likelihood a juvenile would be waived to adult criminal court, either through changes in the law or by giving judges and/or prosecutors increased discretion (Allard & Young, 2002). The criteria and process for waiver to adult court are determined by state statute, but largely reflect an individual or policy decision about whether a youth or groups of youth are likely to be rehabilitated by the services provided in the juvenile court (see Sherman & Blitzman, Chapter 4, this volume). Less than 1% of all delinquency cases result in judicial waiver, and about half are for personrelated offenses (48%), with the other half being transferred to the adult system for property (27%), drug-related (13%), or public order offenses (11%) (Adams & Addie, 2010). This offense distribution has changed considerably when compared to transfers 20 years ago. In 1985, most cases involved property offenses (53%), followed by person (33%), public order (9%), and drug offenses (5%) (Adams & Addie, 2010). In 2007, approximately 8,500 cases were waived to criminal court. Most waived cases involved males (90%) over the age of 15 (88%) (Adams & Addie, 2010). To date, research on the use of waivers for juveniles is not supportive of the practice, as there is no evidence that it achieves reductions in recidivism or youth

27

crime, and in fact the practice may lead to increased recidivism (Bishop, 2000; Bishop & Frazier, 2000). Because of waivers, youth are eligible to receive life sentences. In 2008, the number of juveniles serving life terms was 6,807, and, depending on the source, between 26% and 37% of these youth have no chance of parole (Human Rights Watch, 2008; Nellis & King, 2009). While virtually every state doles out life terms (exceptions are Indiana, Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia), more than 50% of these juveniles are from five states: California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada. Juveniles sentenced to life without parole are most likely to come from the states of Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, and Louisiana. In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court held that a sentence of life without parole for juveniles in nonhomicide cases was unconstitutional (Graham v. Florida, 2010; see Sherman & Blitzman, Chapter 4, this volume). If a case proceeds in juvenile court, an adjudicatory hearing is scheduled, and the case is typically decided by a judge (see Figure 2.2 for the typical case flow in the juvenile justice system). In juvenile court, a separate hearing is held to determine the disposition of the case. This separate hearing allows time for a presentence investigative report to be filed based on a probation officer’s assessment of the unique needs and circumstances of the juvenile and exists as evidence of the court’s enduring goal of individualized treatment and rehabilitation. A judge then determines the disposition of the case, although input from the prosecution, youth, and probation officers can be presented (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Two categories of offenses that come to the attention of juvenile courts are criminal offenses and status offenses, the latter of which are behaviors deemed illegal based solely on the minor status of the offender (i.e., running away,

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Figure 2.2 Juvenile Justice System Case Flow Diagram

Source: Adapted from Snyder and Sickmund, 2006.

truancy, consuming alcohol). Processing for these two types of offenses is similar; however, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) of 1974 (P.L. 93-415, 88 Stat. 1109) and subsequent reauthorizations (1977, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2002) prohibit the use of secure detention for status offenses. In the JJDPA, states were required to use services outside of the juvenile justice system, such as group homes or shelter facilities run by family or social services in lieu of juvenile court residential placements. However, many status offenders still find their way into detention and placements through the valid court order (VCO) exception, passed in 1980 and included in subsequent reauthorizations. Under the VCO exception, status offenders can be detained if they violate a valid court order in the form, for example, of a probation condition. In

2007, about 11% of all adjudicated status offenders were in court ordered out of home placement (Puzzanchera et al., 2010). Due to the less serious nature of most juvenile crime, the most common disposition has always been, and remains, probation. Probation or regularly scheduled meetings between a probation officer and juvenile offender results in 56% of cases adjudicated delinquent and typically include other mandates such as drug testing, counseling, or restitution (Sickmund, 2010). After reaching a peak in 1997, the number of cases adjudicated delinquent and sanctioned to probation declined 17% by 2007 (Puzzanchera et al., 2010). Probation, either for a fixed amount or an open-ended amount of time, is terminated once the specified conditions have been met (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Regardless

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

of the effectiveness of probation, its use successfully allows a youth to avoid the many negative consequences now associated with incarceration (Bernburg & Krohn, 2003). Twenty-five percent of offenders adjudicated delinquent are placed in a residential facility for a specified or indeterminate time, which is the most severe outcome available for juveniles within the juvenile justice system (Sickmund, 2010). Approximately 95,000 youth are held in juvenile justice facilities and publicly operated facilities house 69% of juvenile offenders (Livsey, Sickmund, & Sladky, 2009). In 2007, state-funded, postadjudicatory, residential facilities cost an average of $241 per day (American Correctional Association, 2008). The use of out-of-home residential placements peaked in 1997 and decreased 16% through 2007, with the largest decreases taking place for property offenses (34% reduction between 1997 and 2007) and drug offenses (16% reduction) (Puzzanchera et al., 2010). Rehabilitative ideals typically coincide with an indeterminate sentence, in which the juvenile is held until juvenile justice professionals feel he or she is adequately reformed, whereas a determinate sentence, which is based on the offense and specific sentencing guidelines determined by states, is more consistent with “get-tough” practices (Forst, Fisher, & Coates, 1985). Upon release from residential facilities, jails, and adult prisons, some form of juvenile aftercare (referred to as parole in the adult system) is typically available, but jurisdictions vary greatly on the extent to which aftercare is treatment oriented. From an accountability perspective, there are usually conditions during this time period, which, if violated, can result in recommitment. In spite of very high recidivism rates for system-involved youth, aftercare is underdeveloped in most juvenile justice systems (Mears & Travis, 2004).

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Relying on institutions to “fix” juveniles in the system is problematic, as abusive and harsh conditions remain a reality (Beck et al., 2010). A survey conducted by the Associated Press found 13,000 claims of abuse from 2004 through 2007, but only a fraction of these is confirmed, likely related to the positions of authority held by adults in these environments (Mohr, 2008). A 2010 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics based on the National Survey of Youth in Custody (26,550 youth) found that 12% (n ¼ 3,220) report experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another youth or facility staff in the past 12 months (Beck et al., 2010). Staff sexual misconduct accounts for the majority of the incidents (85%), and boys report more abuse by staff, while girls are at greatest risk for sexual victimization by another youth (Beck et al., 2010). These statistics are of particular concern, given the higher rates of childhood victimization that exist in the delinquent population compared to the general population and the potential for additional traumatic experiences in the girls’ lives.

OFFENSE TRENDS Much of what is known about juvenile arrests and offense trends comes from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice through the Federal Bureau of Investigation; these data are based on reports submitted by law enforcement agencies. In 2008, 95% of the total population of law enforcement agencies was represented by the UCR, making it the most comprehensive data set on juvenile crime available (U.S. Department of Justice, 2009). Nonetheless, there are questions about the extent to which the data represent an accurate picture of juvenile crime. The most frequent criticism has

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Figure 2.3 Percentage of Juvenile Arrests by Offense Type, 2009

non-index property index violent index

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, 2010.

been that the data are affected by discretionary police policies and practices, such as the level of police presence in a particular area. Further, many juvenile crimes are committed that never come to the attention of the police, a statement particularly true for minor offenses. Additionally, arrest statistics do not reflect the guilt of an individual. As a result, when possible, it is important to examine multiple data sources that use several different research methodologies, in addition to arrest statistics, in order to gain the most complete picture possible of youth crime.1 In 2009, the number of juveniles arrested was 1,919,257, comprising 17.8% of the total number of arrests for all ages (U.S. Department 1

Other data sources available include large self-report studies, which collect data from the youth themselves (i.e., the National Youth Survey, www.colorado.edu/ IBS/NYSFS/, Monitoring the Future, www.monitor ingthefuture.org), the National Crime Victimization Survey, which gathers data from victims of crimes (www.ojp.usdoj.gov.bjs), and Juvenile Court Statistics, which are a compilation of records of cases handles by juvenile courts (www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org).

of Justice, 2010). This number captures the number of arrests, not the number of juvenile offenders, and therefore includes multiple arrests of the same person within the year. Additionally, only the most serious offense is recorded in cases where multiple crimes are committed. As shown in Figure 2.3 above, of all the juvenile arrests, the vast majority (73.4%) were for less serious felonies and misdemeanors (also called “nonindex” or Part II offenses). Index crimes (also referred to as Part I offenses) are the eight serious, felony-level crimes of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, larcenytheft (over $50), motor vehicle theft, and arson. Approximately one quarter (26.6%) of juvenile arrests were for index crimes (22.2% for property index offenses and 4.4% for violent index offenses). In 1980, approximately 7,400 juveniles were arrested, a number that continued to climb to its peak of approximately 9,400 in 1996 (see Figure 2.4). Ten-year trends, from 2000 to 2009, indicate that arrest rates of juveniles are down 20.2%, with greater

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

31

Figure 2.4 Arrests per 100,000 Juveniles, Ages 10–17, 1980–2008

Source: Adapted from Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2009.

reductions seen in index property crimes (down 20.3%) than in index violent crimes (down 15.0%) (U.S. Department of Justice, 2010). From 2008 to 2009, juvenile arrests fell an additional 2.4%, with a decrease in violent index crimes (2.3%) and an increase in index property crimes (1.6%) (U.S. Department of Justice, 2010). Although the UCR has been critiqued for reflecting enforcement practices, these reductions in arrests are substantiated by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which finds serious violent and property victimizations at their lowest levels since 1973 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008). Between 2005 and 2007, the NCVS showed reductions in violent crime (1.9%), personal theft (11.1%), and property crimes (5%).2 From large self-report studies that rely on youth’s disclosure about law violations, several other important factors about juvenile crime are revealed (Elliott, Huizinga, & Ageton, 1985; Nye, Short, & Olson, 1958; Williams & Gold, 1972). First, apropos to this method of data gathering, unlike official data, self-report 2

NCVS data are not specific to juvenile offenders, but rather reports all victimizations regardless of the age of the offender.

surveys typically tap less serious, even trivial, delinquent behaviors that are unlikely to come to the attention of the police. This measurement approach to juvenile crime showed that minor acts of delinquency are common among youth in the general population in all socioeconomic groups, thus questioning the social class–delinquency relationship (Akers & Sellers, 2008). However, shortcomings of the available data abound, particularly regarding their accuracy capturing more frequent and serious offenses (Elliott & Ageton, 1980). This critique has led to the development of studies that identified a relatively small group of chronic offenders who commit a disproportionate amount of crime and delinquency (Blumstein, Cohen, & Farrington, 1988). An overwhelming strength of self-report studies is the ability to test theoretical propositions by collecting a variety of data. For example, the National Youth Survey, one of the most comprehensive attempts to measure delinquency through self-report survey methodology, found that having delinquent peers was the best independent predictor of self-reported offending for early adolescence, but not an important predictor in childhood (Elliott & Menard, 1996). These data also

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Table 2.1. Percentages of Selected Juvenile Court Referral Offense Types, 1985–2005 Year

Person

Property

Drugs

Public Order

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

15.9 19.1 22.0 23.0 25.3

60.8 58.4 50.1 39.8 35.3

6.7 5.3 9 11.5 11.5

16.9 17.3 18.9 25.7 27.9

Source: Sickmund, Sladky, and Kang, 2008.

support the contention that juvenile crime has been relatively stable over time (Osgood, O’Malley, Bachman, & Johnston, 1989). Contrary to negative media representation, crime by juveniles is at its lowest level in decades (Krisberg, 2005). Reductions in the youth crime rate have occurred despite slow, steady growth in the juvenile population over the past 25 years. Although the juvenile population is not the fastest growing segment of the population, it increased by 10 million from 1984 (62.5 million) to 2008 (72.3 million), and is projected to continue a slow increase through 2025 (Day, 1996). Another valuable data source on systeminvolved youth and the functioning of the juvenile court is Juvenile Court Statistics, now including 80% of U.S. juvenile court activities (Sickmund, Sladky, & Kang, 2008). These data provide information on the types and dispositions of cases handled by the juvenile courts. In 2005, the referring offense for juveniles was most often a property offense (35.3%), followed by a public order offense (27.9%). Violent or person offenses represented about a quarter of the cases (25.3%), with drugs making up the smallest percentage of cases (11.5%). Marked declines exist when comparing property offenses committed by youth over the past 20 years with less dramatic increases seen in the remaining three offense categories of person, drug, and public order offenses (see Table 2.1).

Over the past 20 years, referrals have become more likely to be handled formally (55.9% in 2005, compared to 45.6% in 1985) and more likely to result in adjudication (36.7% in 2005, compared to 29% in 1985). The use of detention has been slightly variable without consistent trends, but the 20-year average is 20%, meaning 2 out of every 10 youth are held in detention (Sickmund et al., 2008).

RISKS TO, AND STRENGTHS OF, SYSTEM-INVOLVED YOUTH Historically, system-involved youth have been characterized by their deficits, even among those who have advocated for more humane and rehabilitative approaches to addressing delinquency. These deficits appear either as actual conditions or limitations that are documented at some point during involvement with the system, or as “risk factors”— characteristics of the individual child, his or her family, or community that, as statistical predictors, increase the likelihood of a youth becoming delinquent. (See Braverman & Morris, Chapter 3, this volume, for a comprehensive treatment of risks implicated in delinquency.) These risks do not predict offending with certainty, but indeed, a host of factors—for example, impulsive or aggressive childhood behavior, or child maltreatment— have been found to be statistically correlated

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

with delinquency. The effect of risk factors can be cumulative, dependent on the timing in which they occur in a youth’s development; however, they also may be mitigated by existing strengths, or “protective factors,” in a youth’s ecology. The strengths perspective, also referred to as a resiliency framework (Masten & Powell, 2003; Saleebey, 2005) and positive youth development (Lerner, Taylor, & von Eye, 2002; see Lerner et al., Chapter 5, this volume), recognize the strengths in individuals, families, and communities and seeks to collaborate with, and utilize, existing resources outside of the justice system. (See Beyer, Chapter 1, this volume, for youth profiles that integrate both strengths and risks.) Strengths are often conceptualized as “protective factors” that can counteract the negative effects of risk factors in youth’s lives as well as promote prosocial behavior in youth. They are defined as “those factors that mediate or moderate the effect of exposure to risk factors, resulting in reduced incidence of problem behavior” (Pollard, Hawkins, & Arthur 1999, p. 146). At times, protective factors are the exact opposite of a given risk factor, for example, excellent academic performance versus academic failure. They can also be “characteristics or conditions that interact with risk factors to reduce their influence” (Office of the Surgeon General, 2001) but are not necessarily “cures” to delinquency. Although a full portrait of youth presenting both risks and strengths would help the juvenile justice system develop more appropriate strategies for combating delinquency and promoting better functioning, the system remains largely deficit based. The strengths of these youth are insufficiently identified, measured, and utilized (Masten & Powell, 2003; see Beyer, Chapter 1, this volume; Lerner et al., Chapter 5, this volume; Schiraldi et al., Chapter 20, this volume).

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THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF SYSTEM-INVOLVED YOUTH Understanding exactly who are the youth involved in the system is a complicated matter. Any national-level descriptive demographic profile of juvenile offenders results from official data and therefore represents only youth who are involved in the system, not all youth who commit offenses and do not come to the attention of the police, or those who are not formally processed. Therefore, demographic data related to age, gender, race/ethnicity, and geography presented in this section focus on youth who are processed in the juvenile justice system. Additionally, disabilities and mental health issues are reported, given their prevalence among this population. Age Each state determines the age at which a child will be under the juvenile court’s jurisdiction. Sixteen states specify a minimum age: 6 years old (North Carolina), 7 years old (Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York), 8 years old (Arizona), and 10 years old (Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wisconsin), while the remaining states do not specify an age but rely on the common-law age of 7 for inclusion in juvenile court (Snyder & Sickmund, 2004). The oldest age for juvenile court jurisdiction in delinquency matters ranges from 16 (New York and North Carolina) to 18, with 17 being the age limit in 11 states. This has been an issue on which states have recently amended their laws, with the trend toward raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction to 18, expanding youth’s access to the the juvenile justice system rather than the adult criminal justice system (Arya, 2011).

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Figure 2.5 Percentage of Juvenile Arrests Under Age 15, by Offense Type, 2008

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, 2009.

The UCR disaggregates arrest statistics by age. Arrest data also indicate the mean age at which youth are arrested for violent offenses (18 years old) and property offenses (16 years old) (U.S. Department of Justice, 2008). Data on arrests of juvenile offenders under the age of 15 show that their involvement in serious violent crime and serious property crimes is sizable, 27% and 29%, respectively, and similar for nonindex offenses (27%; see Figure 2.5, above). The highest offense categories for this age group within nonindex offenses are sex offenses (47%) and vandalism (40%). Their highest offense category overall is arson, where they make up 56% of juvenile arrests. In terms of violent index crimes, youth in the lower age category are responsible for 34% of forcible rape arrests and 31% of aggravated assaults. Of the cases processed in juvenile court in 2005, juveniles under the age of 16 accounted for 57% of all delinquency cases (4% under the age of 12, 5% 12-year-olds, 10% 13-yearolds, 17% 14-year-olds, 23% 15-year-olds) (Sickmund, 2009; Sickmund et al., 2008).

This younger age group accounted for 64% of all juvenile person offense cases, 59% of property offense cases, 54% of public order offense cases, and 42% of drug offense cases (Sickmund, 2009). The rank ordering of these cases stays the same when looking at the proportions of juvenile cases processed of youth younger than age 14 (24% person offense cases, 20% property offense cases, 15% public order offense cases, and 8% drug offense cases) (Sickmund, 2009). Sixteen-year-olds make up the largest proportion of juvenile court cases (24%), with involvement lower for 17-year-olds (18%) (Sickmund et al., 2008). There has been very little change over time in terms of the age representation in the juvenile court. The most notable changes are a 20-year decrease in the number of youth under the age of 12 (6.4% in 1985 versus 3.8% in 2005) and slight increases in the numbers of 16- and 17-year-olds (Sickmund et al., 2008). In 2005, 15% of the cases transferred to adult court were of youth age 15 or younger, with the remaining 85% being 16 or older; however, that profile has

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

shifted to include younger transfers over time. In 1985, only 7% of referrals were 15 years old or younger (Adams & Addie, 2009). Gender Females’ involvement in crime is lower compared to boys for the most serious crimes. Girls make up 18.6% of index violent offense arrests, 31.3% of index property offenses, and 18.6% of the nonindex offenses. Notably, females make up 69.6% of those arrested for prostitution and 55.2% of those arrested for running away. Based on the UCR, juvenile female involvement has been slowly on the rise over time. In 1980, girls made up 21% of arrests, with recent data reporting that girls make up 30% of all arrests in 2008 (U.S. Department of Justice, 2009). Between 2000 and 2009, arrest rates decreased 22.9% for boys and 13.1% for girls. The reductions seen during this period are most significant when looking at index property crimes—down 29.2% for boys, but up almost 1% for girls. Index violent crimes since 2000 are down 14.5% for boys and down 16.9% for girls (U.S. Department of Justice, 2010). The most significant changes in the female percentage of arrests can be attributed to increases in simple assaults (up 13% from 1980 to 2008), aggravated assaults (up 8%), and larceny-theft (up 18%) (U.S. Department of Justice, 1981, 2009). It is primarily for these offenses that gender differences are narrowing. However, detailed data analyses do not conclude that girls are becoming overall more violent; rather explanations focus on how changes, from law enforcement practices to zero-tolerance policies in schools, are driving the increase in girls’ arrests (Zahn et al., 2008). Juvenile court statistics show that in 2007, females made up about 27% of youth processed in juvenile court, a number that has been also

35

on the rise since 1985, when girls made up 19% of all court-involved juveniles (Sickmund et al., 2008). For most offenses, female delinquency cases have grown more or decreased less than male delinquency cases (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). However, overall, males appear to be receiving harsher treatment than females, which could be related to contextual differences in offending, indicating more serious typical offenses for males within broad offense categories (Zahn et al., 2008). For example, in 2005, males were more likely than females to be detained (22.5% versus 16.6%), more likely to be handled formally (58.9% versus 48.0%), and more likely to be adjudicated delinquent (39.1% versus 30.5%) (Sickmund et al., 2008). Limitations in the data collected, such as the absence of information on the seriousness of the behavior or a youth’s court history, both of which can influence case outcome, require caution in making gender comparisons (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006; see Sherman & Greenstone, Chapter 7, this volume). With the increased concern over how status offenses are managed, a new problem has developed, particularly with regard to the processing of girls for whom status offenses have always represented a larger proportion of committing offenses compared to boys (Chesney-Lind, 1997). When status offenses are relabeled as criminal offenses or youth find their way into the system for violating a valid court order related to a status offense, the deinstitutionalization of status offenses is thwarted and what is known as bootstrapping occurs. In bootstrapping, a status offense becomes a delinquency through mechanisms for enforcement of technical violations of court orders or probation. Evidence exists that girls are more likely than boys to be detained for minor offenses such as technical violation and status offenses (41% versus 25%) (Sherman, 2005).

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Race/Ethnicity Table 2.2 below presents arrest data by race. Native Americans (including Alaskan Natives) and Asians (including Pacific Islanders) comprise small percentages of arrest totals consistent with their representation in the population, and Whites are typically the majority group for every offense. Several notable exceptions exist where African American youth are the majority group represented;

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they are the serious violent offenses of murder (58%), robbery (67.3%), and the nonindex offenses of prostitution/vice (58.4%) and gambling (92.7%). Given that African American youth comprise 15% of the population under 18 years of age, they are overrepresented in every crime category (with the exception of alcohol-related offenses) compared to their representation in the population (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2009). White youth, 76% of the

Table 2.2. Percentages of Arrests for Persons Under 18 Years of Age, by Crime Type and Race, 2009 Crime Type Nonindex offenses Other assaults Forgery and counterfeiting Fraud Embezzlement Stolen property; buying, receiving, possessing Vandalism Weapons (carrying, possessing, etc.) Prostitution and commercialized vice Sex offenses Drug abuse violations Gambling Offenses against the family and children Driving under the influence Liquor laws Drunkenness Disorderly conduct Vagrancy All other offenses (except traffic) Suspicion Curfew and loitering law violations Runaways Index Violent Offenses Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter Forcible rape Robbery Aggravated assault Index Property Offenses Burglary Larceny-theft Motor vehicle theft Arson Total Arrests Representation in the Population (2009) Source: U.S. Department of Justice, 2010.

White

Black

Native American

Asian

67.6 58.6 66.4 61.9 63.8 54.6 78.4 60.7 39.7 71.2 72.4 6.8 73.9 92.0 89.4 88.5 56.8 71.5 69.2 42.3 60.8 65.7 46.4 40.4 63.4 31.1 55.4 63.9 60.9 65.0 54.0 76.7 65.9 77.2

29.6 39.2 32.2 36.0 33.3 43.6 19.2 37.3 58.4 26.6 25.6 92.7 24.3 5.1 6.2 8.7 41.4 27.3 28.0 57.1 37.1 26.7 51.6 58.0 34.5 67.3 42.4 33.2 37.3 31.8 43.2 20.6 31.3 16.2

1.3 1.1 0.5 1.1 0.2 0.8 1.2 0.8 0.4 0.8 0.9 0.0 1.3 1.8 3.1 1.9 1.0 0.4 1.1 0.0 1.0 2.2 0.8 0.9 0.8 0.4 1.0 1.2 0.9 1.2 1.5 1.3 1.2 1.5

1.5 1.1 0.9 1.0 2.7 1.0 1.2 1.2 1.5 1.4 1.1 0.5 0.4 1.2 1.3 0.8 0.8 0.7 1.8 0.6 1.2 5.4 1.2 0.7 1.3 1.2 1.2 1.7 1.0 2.0 1.4 1.4 1.6 5.2

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

total juvenile population in the United States, represent the vast majority of arrests for the offenses of driving under the influence (92.5%), liquor law violations (90.2%), and drunkenness (88.7%) (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2009). Fifteen percent of the juvenile population in the United States is Hispanic; however, this number is distributed across racial categories (22.5% of Native Americans are Hispanic, while 17.4% of Whites, 4.7% of African Americans, and 3.4% of Asians are Hispanic) (National Center for Health Statistics, 2008). The percentage of Hispanic youth under 18 years old is projected to make the most significant gains in the U.S. population, with one in four youth belonging to this ethnic group by the year 2021, compared to their current representation of 22% (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2009). Data on ethnicity are not collected in the UCR or in juvenile court statistics, so it is difficult to provide a national profile of Hispanic youth involved in the system. Explaining the disproportionate treatment experienced by minority groups is difficult, but research suggests a complex interplay

between existing biases in the policies and practices of law enforcement and justice systems and social conditions that place youth at increased risk for delinquency (Pope, Lovell, & Hsia, 2002; see Bell & Mariscal, Chapter 6, this volume; Vaught, Chapter 15, this volume). A 1-day snapshot of youth held in detention illustrates disproportionate minority contact, showing that in 2006, African American youth were 6 times as likely to be in detention compared to White youth. Latino youth were more than twice as likely, and Native American youth were almost 4 times as likely to be held in detention compared with White youth (W. Haywood Burns Institute, n.d.) (see Figure 2.6). African American youth made up 33% of delinquency cases handled in 2007 (at 16% of the U.S. population), although their representation increases for person-related offenses (41%) and public-order offenses (34%), and decreases for property-related offenses (30%) and drug offenses (25%) (Knoll & Sickmund, 2010). Black youth are 12% more likely than White youth to be formally processed and 9% more likely to be waived to adult court (Knoll & Sickmund, 2010). Of all the youth

Figure 2.6 Detention Rates Trends by Race (per 10,000 youth)

30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1997

1999 White

Source: W. Haywood Burns Institute.

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2001

African American

2003 Latino

2006 Native American

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waived to adult court, African American youth made up 37% of the waivers, compared with 59% of the waivers made up by White youth; however, it is for person and drug offenses that disproportionate minority numbers are most dramatic, as a greater percentage of Black youth are transferred into the adult system for these offenses than are White youth (Adams & Addie, 2010). Black youth are also 27% more likely to be placed in a residential setting and 14% less likely to be given probation compared to their White counterparts (Knoll & Sickmund, 2010). In 2002, three fourths of the 4,100 juveniles admitted to adult prisons were youth of color (Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2007). Seventy-seven percent of juveniles serving life sentences are non-White, supporting research showing the cumulative and increasing disadvantage experienced by minorities as they move through the juvenile justice system (Nellis & King, 2009; Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2007; see Bell & Mariscal, Chapter 6, this volume). Hispanic youth experience similar disproportionate minority contact to African American youth; however, these youth have been deemed largely “invisible” due to shortcomings in available data on ethnicity (Arya, Villarruel, Villanueva, & Augarten 2009; Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2007; see Bell & Mariscal, Chapter 6, this volume). Fourteen states and the District of Columbia participated in a study that found that Latino/ a youth were sent to detention and residential facilities in the juvenile justice system more often their White counterparts and for longer periods of time (even when controlling for offense type and delinquent histories) (Villarruel & Walker, 2002). Nationally, 32% of youth incarcerated are Latino/a, based on figures from the U.S Census Bureau data on the incarcerated population in 2000 (Human

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Rights Watch, 2002). Latino/a youth were also transferred to adult court more frequently than their White counterparts (Villarruel & Walker, 2002). Geography The UCR does not break arrests down by specific geographical region and age; however, arrest rates are highest for juveniles who live in metropolitan areas, accounting for 12.1% of all arrests versus 8.8% of all arrests in nonmetropolitan areas (U.S. Department of Justice, 2008). Within metropolitan areas, juveniles make up 15.2% of all arrests in the suburbs and that number increases to 16.8% in cities. The highest rates of juvenile crime involvement in serious violent crimes (17.2%) and serious property crimes (26.8%) are found in cities (U.S. Department of Justice, 2008). Urban jurisdictions are also more likely than nonurban areas to impose harsher dispositions, a factor compounding minority representation due to the concentration of minority youth in urban areas (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). The growth of the juvenile population has not been, and is not projected to be, evenly distributed among states. Between 2005 and 2015, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Florida are expected to experience the largest increases in their juvenile population. More than one third of the states are projected to experience a decline in this population, with North Dakota, Vermont, New York, West Virginia, Maine, and the District of Columbia projecting the most significant declines (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2005). Disabilities and Mental Health Issues Youth with disabilities are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system, and this assessment

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement

typically occurs once a youth is involved in the juvenile corrections system. Having a disability, however, can also affect a youth’s experiences in the system (see Beyer, Chapter 1, this volume; Boundy & Karger, Chapter 14, this volume). For example, youth with disabilities may be more likely to confess or to have problems communicating with their lawyers (Muller, 2005). They are more likely to plead guilty, be committed, and serve a longer sentence, and less likely to have their sentence appealed, be placed on probation, or be given some type of diversion program (Muller, 2005). Youth with emotional disabilities account for about 8% of students with disabilities in the school system; however, this number goes up to 47% among a national sample of incarcerated youth (Quinn, Rutherford, Leone, Osher, & Poirier, 2005; U.S. Department of Education, 2005). This condition is characterized by an inability to build or maintain relationships, inappropriate behaviors or feelings under normal circumstances, a pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression, or a tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears related to personal or school problems as defined by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004). This population typically experiences co-occurring problems related to behavior, academics, drug use, and mental health (Gagnon & Richards, 2008). Approximately 20% of youth with emotional disturbances have been arrested, or are in detention or on probation prior to leaving school (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Thirty-nine percent of youth incarcerated in the juvenile justice system have learning disabilities and almost 5% meet the classification for mental retardation (Gagnon & Richards, 2008). The majority of youth entering correctional and detention settings are testing below skill level (66% below in reading and 68% below in mathematics) (U.S.

39

Department of Education, 2006). Youth with learning disabilities are three times more likely to join a gang than youth who are not disabled (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Mental health concerns and needs are also prevalent in this population. For example, in a large-scale study of Chicago-area youth in detention facilities, almost 60% of males and more than two thirds of females met the criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder, and more than 40% of the sample met the criteria for a disruptive behavior disorder (Teplin, Abram, McClelland, Dulcan, & Mericle, 2002). Significant variations were found in race and gender with females, non-Hispanic Whites, and older youth showing higher rates of most disorders (Teplin et al.). The connection between disabilities and mental health needs of youth in the juvenile justice system have been inadequately studied and addressed (Gagnon & Richards, 2008; see Braverman & Morris, Chapter 3, this volume).

JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM REFORM A reform agenda in juvenile justice has clearly begun to take hold but needs empirical research to flourish (see Butts & Roman, Chapter 24, this volume). Research is needed in order to develop a more complete national picture of youth as they move through the system. If there were a rich and comprehensive national data collection effort, “who these kids and families are” might well help drive reform and the implementation of new strategies for intervention. At present, there are many descriptive factors that are simply not available that might better explain youth’s initial involvement in the system, as well as indicate how their circumstances change

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as they move through the system. Currently, the diversity within juvenile court jurisdictions and the lack of standardization make it impossible to examine the effectiveness of various sanctions, or to glean a national picture of the youth, let alone identify the best predictors of recidivism. Some global deficiencies in current data collection efforts even make it difficult to determine the number of youth who are actually involved in the system. For example, the UCR and the juvenile court statistics are incident based, as opposed to offender based. This method of tracking incidents makes it almost impossible to identify high-rate offenders on a systemic level, let alone incidents that have multiple offenders/defendants (see Schneider & Simpson, Chapter 22, this volume). Similarly, the current method of systemic-level data collection makes it difficult to ascertain trends in less serious offenses, since typically only the most serious offense or most severe disposition is recorded. Likewise, currently reported statistics do not include the seriousness of the behavior (which may not match the charge all that well), contextual offense variables, or a youth’s prior offenses making cross-race and sex comparisons in processing problematic, for example. As previously mentioned, national level data sources on system-involved juveniles do not distinguish ethnicity, nor do they provide information on youth involved with multiple systems, particularly related to disability and mental health. Moreover, most juvenile justice and other youth agencies do not have the data capacity to work across agencies to view youth in their family and community contexts, leaving an incomplete snapshot of youth in individual systems (see Schneider & Simpson, Chapter 22, this volume). Effective reform requires the deeper understanding that greater data capacity and research would provide.

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REFERENCES Adams, B., & Addie, S. (2010). Delinquency cases waived to criminal court, 2007. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2008). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Allard, P., & Young, M. (2002). Prosecuting juveniles in adult court: The practitioner’s perspective. Journal of Forensic Psychology, 2 (2),65–77. American Correctional Association. (2008). 2008 Directory: Adult and juvenile correctional departments, institutions, agencies, and probation and parole authorities. Alexandria, VA: American Correctional Association. Arya, N. (2011). State trends: Legislative victories from 2005–2010 removing youth from the adult criminal justice system. Washington, DC: Campaign for Youth Justice. Arya, N., Villarruel, F., Villanueva, C., & Augarten, I. (2009). America’s invisible children: Latino youth and the failure of justice. Washington, DC: Campaign for Youth Justice. Beck, A., Harrison, P., & Guerino, P. (2010). Sexual victimization in juvenile facilities reported by youth, 2008–2009. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Government Printing Office. Bernburg, J. G., & Krohn, M. D. (2003). Labeling, life chances, and adult crime: The direct and indirect effects of official intervention in adolescence on crime in early adulthood. Criminology, 41 (4), 1287–1318. Bishop, D. M. (2000). Juvenile offenders in the adult criminal justice system. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 27, pp. 81–167). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bishop, D. M., & Frazier, C. E. (2000). Race effects in juvenile justice decision-making: Findings of a statewide analysis. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 86, 392–414. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Farrington, D. P. (1988). Criminal career research: Its value for criminology. Criminology, 26, 1–35. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2008). Crime and victims statistics, 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Butts, J. A., & Mears, D. P. (2001). Reviving juvenile justice in a get-tough era. Youth & Society, 33(2), 169–198.

Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Characteristics and Patterns of Involvement Chesney-Lind, M. (1997). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chesney-Lind, M., & Shelden, R. (2004). Girls, delinquency, and juvenile justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Day, J. C. (1996). Population projections of the United States by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin: 1995 to 2050. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, U.S. Government Printing Office. Elliott, D. S., & Ageton, S. S. (1980). Reconciling race and class differences in self-reported and official estimates of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 45(1), 95–110. Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Ageton, S. S. (1985). Explaining delinquency and drug use. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Elliott, D. S., & Menard, S. (1996). Delinquent friends and delinquent behavior: Temporal and developmental patterns. In J. D. Hawkins (Ed.), Delinquency and crime: Current theories (pp. 28–67). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. (2009). America’s children: Key national indicators of well-being, 2009. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Feld, B. C. (1998). Juvenile and criminal justice systems’ responses to youth violence. In M. Tonry & M. H. Moore (Eds.), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research. Vol. 24: Youth Violence (pp. 189–261). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Forst, M. L., Fisher, B. A., & Coates, R. B. (1985) Indeterminate and determinate sentencing of juvenile delinquents: A national survey of approaches to commitment and release decision-making. Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 36 (2), 1–12. Frazier, C. E., Bishop, D. M., & Lanza-Kaduce, L. (1999). “Get tough” juvenile justice reforms: The Florida experience. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 564, 167–184. Gagnon, J. C., & Richards, C. (2008). Making the right turn: A guide about improving transition outcomes of youth involved in the juvenile corrections system. Washington, DC: National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth, Institute for Educational Leadership. Graham v. Florida, 120 S. Ct. 2011, 78 USLW 4387 (2010). Holland, P., & Mlyniec, W. J. (1995). Whatever happened to the right to treatment? The modern quest for a historical promise. Temple Law Review, 68, 1791–1835.

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Human Rights Watch. (2002). Backgrounders: Race and incarceration in the United States. New York, NY: Author. Human Rights Watch. (2008). The rest of their lives: Life without parole for youthful offenders in the United States. Executive summary. New York, NY: Author. In re Gault. (1967). The Supreme Court of the United States, 387 U.S. 1. In D. L. Parry (Ed.), Essential readings in juvenile justice (pp. 87–101). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. In re Winship. (1970). The Supreme Court of the United States, 397 U.S. 358. In D. L. Parry (Ed.), Essential readings in juvenile justice (pp. 102–105). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-446, § 302, 118 Stat. 2803 (codified as amended at 20 U.S.C. § 1415 (2004). Retrieved from www.ed.gov/offices /osers/idea/the_law.html Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 (JJDPA) (P.L. 93-415, 88 Stat. 1109) and subsequent reauthorizations (1977, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2002). Kent v. United States. (1966). The Supreme Court of the United States, 383 U.S. 541. In D. L. Parry (Ed.), Essential readings in juvenile justice (pp. 79–86). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Knoll, C., & Sickmund, M. (2010). Delinquency cases in juvenile court, 2007. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. Krezmien, M. P., Leone, P. E., Zablocki, M. S., & Wells, C. (2009) Juvenile court referrals and the public schools: Nature and extent of the practice of five states. Unpublished manuscript, University of Maryland. Krisberg, B. (2005). Juvenile justice: Redeeming our children. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lerner, R., Taylor, C. & von Eye, A. (Eds.). (2002). Pathways to positive development among diverse youth. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley. Livsey, S., Sickmund, M., & Sladky, A. (2009). Juvenile residential facility census, 2004: Selected findings. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. Masten, A. S., & Powell, J. L. (2003). A resiliency framework for research, policy and practice. In Luthar, S. (Ed.), Resiliency and vulnerability: Adaptation in the context of childhood adversity (pp. 1–29). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Mears, D. P., & Travis, J. (2004). Youth development and reentry. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 2(1), 3–20. Mennel, R. M. (1972). Origins of the juvenile court: Changing perspectives on the legal rights of juveniles. Crime and Delinquency, 18, 68–78. Mohr, H. (2008, March 2). 13,000 abuse claims in juvie centers. USA Today. Retrieved from www.usa today.com/news/nation/2008-03-02-1668706373 _x.htm Muller, E. (2005). The juvenile justice system and youths with disabilities. InForum: Brief Policy Analysis. Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Directors of Special Education. National Center for Health Statistics. (2008). Estimates of the July 1, 2000–July 1, 2007, United States resident population from the Vintage 2007 postcensal series by year, county, age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major /dvs/popbridge/popbridge.htm Nellis, A., & King, R. S. (2009). No exit: The expanding use of life sentences in America. Washington, DC: Sentencing Project. Nye, F. I., Short, J. F., & Olson, V. (1958). Socioeconomic status and delinquent behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 63, 381–389. Office of the Surgeon General. (2001). Youth violence: A report to the Surgeon General. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved from www.surgeongeneral.gov/library /youthviolence Osgood, D. W., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., & Johnston, L. D. (1989). Time trends and age trends in arrests and self-reported illegal behavior. Criminology, 27 (3), 389–418. Poe-Yamagata, E., & Jones, M. A. (2007). And justice for some: Differential treatment of youth of color in the justice system. Oakland, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Pollard, J. A., Hawkins, J. D., & Arthur, M. (1999). Risk and protection: Are both necessary to understand diverse behavioral outcomes in adolescence? Social Work Research, 23(3), 145–158. Pope, C. E., Lovell, R., & Hsia, H. M. (2002). Disproportionate minority confinement: A review of the research literature from 1989 through 2001. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. (1967). The task force report:

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Juvenile delinquency and youth crime. Washington, DC: U.S Government Printing Office. Puzzanchera, C., Adams, B., & Sickmund, M. (2010). Juvenile court statistics 2006–2007. Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice. Puzzanchera, C., & Sickmund, M. (2008). Juvenile court statistics 2005. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. Quinn, M. M., Rutherford, R. B., Leone, P. E., Osher, D. M., & Poirier, J. M. (2005). Youth with disabilities in juvenile corrections: A national survey. Exceptional Children, 71, 339–345. Saleebey, D. (2005). The strengths approach to practice. In D. Saleebey (Ed.), The strengths perspective in social work practice (4th ed., pp. 49–58). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Scott, E., & Steinberg, L. (2008). Rethinking juvenile justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sherman, F. (2005). Juvenile detention reform for girls: Challenges and solutions. Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation. Sickmund, M. (2009). Delinquency cases in juvenile court, 2005. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. Sickmund, M., Sladky, A., & Kang, W. (2008). Easy access to juvenile court statistics: 1985–2005. Retrieved from www.ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/ezajcs/ Skiba, R. J. (2000). Zero tolerance, zero evidence: An analysis of school disciplinary practice. Bloomington: Indiana Education Policy Research Center. Snyder, H. N., & Sickmund, M. (2006). Juvenile offenders and victims: 2006 national report. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. Teplin, L. A., Abram, K. M., McClelland, G. M., Dulcan, M. K., & Mericle, A. A. (2002). Psychiatric disorders in youth in juvenile detention. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 1133–1143. Torbet, P., Gable, R., Hurst, H., Montgomery, I., Szymanski, L., & Thomas, D. (1996). State responses to serious and violent juvenile crime: Research report. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Bureau of the Census. (2005). Interim projections of the population by selected age groups for the United States and the States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2030

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[Data file]. Retrieved from www.census.gov /population/projections/SummaryTabC1.pdf U.S. Department of Education. (2005). Twenty-seventh annual report to congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Jessup, MD: Education Publications Center. U.S. Department of Education. (2006). National Evaluation and Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Children and Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, or At Risk (NDTAC). State and national fast facts. Retrieved from www.neglecteddelinquent.org U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1981). Crime in the United States, 1980. Retrieved from www.fbi.gov/ucr U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation (2008). Crime in the United States, 2007. Retrieved from www.fbi.gov/ucr U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation (2009). Crime in the United States, 2008. Retrieved from www.fbi.gov/ucr

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U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation (2010). Crime in the United States, 2009. Retrieved from www.fbi.gov/ucr Villarruel, F. A., & Walker, N. E. (2002). ¿Donde esta la justicia?: A call to action on behalf of Latino and Latina youth in the U.S. justice system. Washington, DC: Building Blocks for Youth. W. Haywood Burns Institute. For Juvenile Justice Fairness and Equity. DMC Fact Sheet, www.burnsinstitute .org/downloads/BI%20DMC%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf Wald, J., & Losen, D. J. (2003). Defining and redirecting a school-to-prison pipeline. New Directions for Youth Development, 99, 9–15. Williams, J. R., & Gold, M. (1972). From delinquent behavior to official delinquency. Social Problems, 20(2), 209–229. Zahn, M. A., Brumbaugh, S., Steffensmeier, D., Feld, B. C., Morash, M., Chesney-Lind, M., . . . Kruttschnitt, C. (2008). Violence by teenage girls: Trends and context. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency.

Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice Edited by Francine T. Sherman and Francine H. Jacobs Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

CHAPTER

3

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System PAULA BRAVERMAN

AND

ROBERT MORRIS

T

his chapter begins with a detailed profile of the physical and mental health of youth currently in the juvenile justice system and an overview of some of the salient findings presented in these studies. The data offered confirm, unsurprisingly, that these youth have greater health challenges and less access to quality health care than would be considered acceptable in most communities in this country. Although juvenile justice involvement may provide an opportunity to improve the health of these youth by providing services that may not be available or accessible at home, being incarcerated can also compromise their health and well-being. Clearly, the more potentially efficacious point at which to intervene is before youth enter the system altogether. The second section of this chapter, then, provides an ecological view of the factors associated with both juvenile delinquency and poor health status, in an attempt to stimulate the thoughtful development and implementation of primary prevention efforts to address these two overlapping concerns.

(Council on Scientific Affairs, 1990; Golzari, Hunt, & Anoshiravani, 2006) who commonly present with unaddressed physical and mental health needs at higher rates than the general adolescent population (Forrest, Tambor, Riley, Ensminger, & Starfield, 2000; Morris et al., 1995; Sedlak & Bruce, 2010; Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Although many of their health problems are the same as youth in their age group (e.g., dermatologic, respiratory, dental, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, and metabolic problems), youth in the juvenile justice system are at greater risk for other medical issues. In part, this is because many of these youth engage in high-risk behaviors, including violence, substance abuse, and unsafe sexual activity (Morris et al., 1995; Litt & Cohen, 1974). A recently published study summarized data from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP). This survey, conducted by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), utilized audio computerassisted self-interview surveys from a representative sample of 7,073 youth age 10–20 years in residential placement throughout the United States in the spring of 2003 (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). This self-reported information obtained directly from youth echoes and confirms the other published studies in the literature, which report on specific clinical

OVERVIEW Youth entering correctional facilities are a high-risk, medically underserved population 44

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

data obtained by health-care professionals. The SYRP report also clearly demonstrates the disconnect between the need for physical and mental health services and the provision of appropriately matched services for youth in custody. In this chapter, we sketch out the dimensions and characteristics of these health needs.

PHYSICAL HEALTH This section provides an overview of the health needs of youth in custody. Where available, more detail is provided on specific physical health conditions. Extent of Health Problems Data from the SYRP provide an overview of the extent of health needs among youth in custody (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Approximately two thirds of youth reported a physical health-care need including dental, vision, or hearing (37%); illness (28%); injury (25%); and other unspecified physical health problems (29%). Males were more likely than females to report treatment needs related to injuries while females were more likely than males to report health-care needs related to illness, vision, dental, and hearing. This data are similar to other previously published studies described below which, although not in most cases nationally representative data, provide additional detail not presented in the SYRP report. The most comprehensive study evaluating the health issues of youth in the juvenile justice system was published in 1980 and described 88,106 youth admitted over 11 years to a secure detention facility in New York (Hein et al., 1980). In that survey, 46% of youth were found to have a medical problem. The

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diagnoses ranged from minor dermatologic complaints to traumatic injuries, drug overdoses or drug abstinence, psychiatric issues, and other body systems complaints. Particular note was made of dental issues, positive tuberculosis tests, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, abnormal Pap smears, and signs of abuse and medical neglect. Of the 3,353 teens admitted to the infirmary, 20% had unresolved medical problems that required follow-up after release from detention. Two studies provide a national perspective on the risk taking behaviors that contribute to health problems among juvenile justice youth. The first is a 1991 survey conducted by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care included 1,801 minors from 39 correctional facilities in the United States (Morris et al., 1995). These youth were predominantly younger than age 18 (mean age of 15.4 years old in short-term facilities and 15.8 years old in long-term facilities) and had rates of substance abuse, trauma, sexual activity without protection, suicidal ideation, and violence that were higher than general high school populations. The recently published SYRP confirmed the high rates of self-reported mental and emotional problems, substance abuse, and traumatic experiences. This report included a comparison of reported alcohol and drug use to data from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health demonstrating higher lifetime use among youth in custody (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Another recent study of 819 youth admitted to a detention center in Alabama over an 18-month period in the mid-1990s found that 16.5% had been hospitalized prior to detention for sports injuries, trauma, or medical reasons (Feinstein et al., 1998). Over one third had medical problems related to trauma from fights or stab and gunshot wounds. Of the

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youth studied, 16.7% had received previous treatment for mental illness, and 6.7% had been treated for substance abuse. In addition, 6.4% reported being on a prescription medication at the time of admission. The most common condition was asthma, with others including orthopedic problems (scoliosis, fracture), mental illness, pregnancy, and hearing problems (chronic otitis media, perforated tympanic membranes). Moreover, 10.6% had a medical condition that required medical follow-up after release. Similar results were found among a broader sampling of youth in 15 detention and long-term facilities in the Maryland Juvenile Justice System during the same time period (Shelton, 2000). In that study, over 45% had an identified medical condition. Specific Health Conditions The following section provides more detail on several specific health conditions. Trauma As discussed by Feinstein et al. (1998), the causes of injury in these youth are diverse (see Baker, Cunningham & Harris, Chapter 11, this volume). Several additional studies provide detail. In the 1991 National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) study, almost 70% of youth had been involved in at least one fight in the previous year, and one quarter of these youth had resulting injuries that required medical care (Morris et al., 1995). Three quarters of these youth reported that a weapon was involved in at least one of these fights. Selfinjury was also common, with one fifth having considered suicide, 15.5% making at least one attempt, and 8.2% injured during an attempt in the previous year. In the Maryland study, almost one fifth had an injury, including burns, musculoskeletal, and head trauma, with 12%

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reporting lack of treatment for these injuries (Shelton, 2000). Additional detail about the nature of traumatic events was provided by Woolf and Funk (1985) in a review of almost all the medical records (369) of 10- to 17-yearolds who were admitted to a secure residential facility in North Carolina over a 4.5-year period beginning in 1978. One quarter of these youth were female, and over half had an injury requiring medical attention. One third of injuries were sports related, 20% caused by fights, 13% self-inflicted, 9% suicide attempts, 8% vocational, 3% horseplay, and 11% designated as “other.” Musculoskeletal injury (33%) was most common, followed by scratches/bruises (27%). Fourteen percent had lacerations requiring closure; 7% had a fracture; and over one quarter required referral outside the facility for further evaluation. The authors concluded that facilities must pay attention to maintaining physical safety from accidental and purposeful injury, including suicide attempts. Dental Dental issues also stand out as a significant health problem for youth in the juvenile justice system. Bolin and Jones’s (2006) study of a random sample, including 419 dental screenings conducted on 12- to 17year-olds from the Juvenile Detention Center in Dallas County, Texas, between September 1999 and December 2003, found that one half had untreated decay. High-urgency dental problems, such as infection, tooth or jaw fracture, pulpitis, or severe periodontal disease with bleeding, were identified in 6.2% of youth. Moderate-urgency conditions in 13.1% included cavitated asymptomatic decay or moderate gingivitis. This study highlighted the challenges in providing comprehensive dental care to this population unless they are long-term detainees.

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

Reproductive Health Youth in the juvenile justice system engage in high-risk behaviors including unprotected sexual activity, which place them at risk for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV infection, as well as pregnancy and parenthood. The following sections provide additional information on reproductive health issues among these youth. Sexual Activity/Contraception Adolescents in the juvenile justice system have high rates of sexual activity and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) compared to other adolescent populations. The 1991 NCCHC study found that most of these youth had four or more lifetime sexual partners (Morris et al., 1995), a rate much higher than reported during that same time frame in the general population of high school youth. Similarly, STD incidence was double that of the general population. Use of contraception or condoms at last intercourse was reported by three quarters of high school youth compared to only one half of incarcerated youth, and 40–50% of high school youth used condoms as compared to less than one fifth of incarcerated youth. STD/HIV The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) 2009 Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report (CDC, 2010) found that the overall rate of chlamydia positivity among detained adolescent girls age 12–18 was 14.8% (4.7% for females age 12 and 16.2% for those age 16) while adolescent boys had an overall positivity rate of 6.6% (1.2% for males age 12 and 10.1% for those age 18). The overall rate of gonorrhea positivity for females was 3.9% (1.8% for females age 12 and 4.4.% for those age 16), while the overall positivity rate for males was 1.0% (0.1% for males age 12 and 1.4% for those age 18). Rates for syphilis, which are available in the 2007

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Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report (CDC, 2008a), were much lower, with the median rate of a serologic positivity of 0.2% (0.0–2.1%) for adolescent girls and 0.1% (0.0–0.9%) for adolescent boys. These rates are similar to data collected in a comparable study conducted between 1996 and 1999 (Mertz, Voight, Hutchins, Levine, & Jail STD Prevalence Monitoring Group, 2002). Results from one juvenile detention facility (Oh et al., 1994) found that 50% of gonorrhea and 90% of chlamydia infections were asymptomatic, while another study (Mertz et al., 2002) found even higher rates of asymptomatic infection, with only 2.7% of those with chlamydia and 7.3% of those with gonorrhea having symptoms. These studies indicate that most STDs will be diagnosed only by active screening. Unprotected sex with multiple partners, prostitution, injection drug use, and substance abuse by incarcerated youth puts them at risk for hepatitis B and C as well as HIV infection. The high rate of STDs also increases risk for HIV (CDC, 2008b; Elkington et al., 2008; Harwell, Trino, Rudy, Yorkman, & Gollub, 1999; Kim, McFarland, Kellogg, & Katz, 1999; Morris, Baker, Valentine, & Pennisi, 1998; Teplin, Mericle, McClelland, & Abram, 2003). The rate of hepatitis B in incarcerated adolescents ranges from 0–6% and the prevalence of hepatitis C virus is 2–3.5% (Weinbaum, Lyerla, & Margolis, 2003). Youth aged 13–17 admitted to a juvenile detention center in San Francisco between 1990 and 1995 showed an HIV-1 antibody–positive prevalence of 0.32% among 2,780 tests conducted (Kim et al., 1999). Serum specimens collected between 1990 and 1992 from adolescents in 33 correctional facilities found a rate of 0.3% (range 0–6.8%) (Sweeney, Lindegren, Buehler, Onorato, & Janssen, 1995). Despite the documented need for identifying youth with STDs, the 2004 Juvenile

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Residential Facility Census reported that only 18.5% of facilities offered STD testing for all adolescents on admission (Gallagher & Dobrin, 2007). Further, 8.3% of facilities did not make STD testing available, and the rest provided testing only when it was requested or deemed medically necessary. Similarly, only 4.3% of the facilities tested all youth for HIV, and 28.1% did not have HIV testing available. Pregnancy/Parenting Self-reported rates of parenthood among incarcerated teens are higher than in the general adolescent population. The nationally representative SRYP study found that 14% of youth in custody in 2003 reported having a child. Males (15%) were more likely to report having a child than females (9%). This compares to rates of 2% for males and 6% for females age 12–20 in the general population. Of those who were already parents, 12% were expecting another child indicating a female who was currently pregnant or a male whose female partner was pregnant. Overall, 20% of both males and females in the SYRP study were already parents or expecting a child (Sedlak & Bruce, 2010). These SYRP data add information to other studies, which have found that approximately one third of teens in juvenile correction facilities report that they have ever been pregnant (Lederman, Dakof, Larrea, & Hua, 2004; Williams & Hollis, 1999). The 2004 Juvenile Facilities Census study reported that at least 2.1% of girls are currently pregnant at any particular point in time (Gallagher, Dobrin, & Douds, 2007). Further in-depth study of pregnancies in the juvenile justice population is needed, since teen pregnancy rates vary by race/ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic level and are continuously evolving. Fatherhood among adolescent males is also an important issue that needs further

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investigation. One study, of 125 adolescent males age 14–17 incarcerated in a juvenile correctional facility in 1994, found that one quarter had fathered a pregnancy and of those who were fathers, 41% had fathered more than one pregnancy (Nesmith, Klerman, Oh, & Feinstein, 1997). Pregnancies in these youth are complicated by underlying problems of substance abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder, and complex decisions about postdelivery options (Hufft, 2004). In addition, these young women may need an altered schedule with additional rest and may have higher caloric requirements. Most juvenile justice facilities do not have arrangements for infant residency or visitation, and the majority of facilities do not have parenting classes (Breuner & Farrow, 1995; Hufft, 2004; see Pinderhughes, Craddock, & Fermin, Chapter 9, this volume). Attention must be paid to the potential for postpartum depression and other psychological consequences. Despite these high pregnancy rates and the constellation of health issues they raise, the 2004 Juvenile Facilities Census found that only 15–17% of all facilities had universal pregnancy testing of all girls on admission (Gallagher, Dobrin, & Douds, 2007). Further, 4.5–6.6% did not provide pregnancy testing, and the rest performed testing only when it was deemed medically necessary or requested by the adolescent. Prenatal services are also lacking in some correctional facilities and approximately one quarter to one third of facilities had no obstetrical services (Gallager, Dobrin, & Douds, 2007). Another study with data from 430 facilities in 41 states found that one third failed to provide prenatal services and 60% of the facilities with detained pregnant youth had at least one obstetrical complication (Breuner & Farrow, 1995).

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE Currently available studies indicate that adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system have rates of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders that exceed those of the general adolescent population (Desai et al., 2006; Fazel, Doll, & Langstrom, 2008; Vermeiren, Jespers, & Moffitt, 2006). Some authors have suggested that the juvenile justice system has become the placement of last resort for youth with mental health disorders who are not receiving care in their communities (Martin, 2006; see also Beyer, Chapter 1, this volume). The SYRP (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010) does not provide diagnostic data; however, the report demonstrates the extent of self-reported mental and emotional problems. More than 60% of youth reported being easily upset, quick to lose their temper, and often angry. Fifty-one percent reported being unable to do what they wanted over the previous several months because of worry or being nervous and 52% felt lonely “too much of the time.” Determining the exact prevalence of these mental health and substance abuse disorders, including the specific subcategories of mental health diagnoses, has been challenging. A significant proportion of adolescents have multiple diagnoses (comorbidity) and/or

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co-occurring psychiatric and substance abuse diagnoses. While there are no national prevalence statistics on specific mental health diagnoses available for this population in the United States, studies from both the United States and other countries show prevalence rates ranging from approximately 50% to 100% when disruptive behavior disorders are included (Boesky, 2002). It is estimated that approximately one quarter of youth in the juvenile justice system have a severe mental health disorder that requires immediate treatment (Shufelt & Cocozza, 2006). Study Limitations The difficulty in determining the exact extent of mental health and substance abuse problems is related to the fact that most of the published studies have limitations in study design and data collection methodology (see Table 3.1). A few of these limitations warrant further discussion. The timing of the reported evaluations varied from the detention setting to longer term facilities. This is important because the stress of incarceration may affect the accuracy of mental health diagnoses, exacerbating various symptoms including suicidal ideation and self-injury/mutilation behaviors (Boesky, 2002). In addition, the source of information is also crucial and varies in these studies. Many studies

Table 3.1. Limitations and Variations Within the Literature on Reports About Mental Health and Substance Abuse Disorders Among Youth in the Juvenile Justice System  Data are specific to certain states and individual facilities or are from other countries.  Nonstandardized measures and different diagnostic instruments or techniques are used.  Sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, family environment, socioeconomic status, and criminal behavior are not comparable.  The timing of the evaluation varies from recent detention to postadjudication settings.  Potential bias exists based on selection of youth referred for psychiatric assessment.  Input from parents or teachers is not always added to youth self-report. Sources: Boesky, 2002; Shufelt, 2006; Teplin et al., 2002; Vermeiren, 2006.

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rely on self-reported impairment by youth, which may not be as accurate as when observations by parents and others, such as teachers, are included (Vermeiren et al., 2006). However, information from other informants is not always helpful. While one study found that one third of parents added substantial new information (Ko, Wasserman, McReynolds, & Katz, 2004), other studies found that adolescents actually reported higher rates of disorder and impairment than did their parents (Ko et al., 2004; Kramer et al., 2004). Certainly, reports from parents or other adults may lead to incorrect diagnoses when they include inaccurate or biased information (Boesky, 2002; Ko et al., 2004; Kramer et al., 2004). Parents and other adults may not be cognizant of the adolescent’s behavior or symptoms or may deny existing problems or accept different levels of behavior (Boesky, 2002; Vermeiren et al., 2006). The variation in sociodemographic variables between studies is important because mental health disorders result from a combination of inherited biological or psychological vulnerabilities, along with environmental stressors and supports as well as individual coping skills (Vermeiren et al., 2006). Studies of small samples of girls or ethnic minorities may significantly limit the interpretation of data since mental health diagnoses vary by gender and ethnicity (Shufelt & Cocozza, 2006; Teplin, Abram, McClelland, Dulcan, & Mericle, 2002). Comparisons within and between studies is also complicated by the fact that these youth have been exposed to different environmental experiences, which may include family conflict, physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, neglect, experience with the foster care system, parental mental health and substance abuse, exposure to violence in their community, and easier access to drugs and alcohol (Boesky, 2002; Vermeiren et al., 2006).

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Prevalence Youth in the juvenile corrections system have a high prevalence of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders, with noted differences in rates when considering race/ethnicity and gender. These disorders also do not occur in isolation. Co-morbid psychiatric disorders and co-occurring psychiatric and substance abuse disorders have been documented in multiple studies. Overall Prevalence Based on a review of the worldwide literature from the 1960s through the 1990s, Roberts, Attkisson, and Rosenblatt (1998) found a mean prevalence rate of 16.5% (range 6.2%–41.3) for mental health disorders among adolescents in the general population. This compares to estimates of 50–100% of youth in the juvenile justice system with mental health disorders when conduct disorder is included (Boesky, 2002). The issue of whether to include disruptive behavior disorders such as conduct disorder in the prevalence analyses has been raised in the literature as an interesting issue, since conduct disorder diagnoses may reflect behavior that the juvenile will age out of naturally. When assessing selfreported behavior among adolescents, delinquency is very common, and multiple studies have demonstrated that the majority of adolescents in the general population participate in behaviors that would be considered delinquent (Moffitt, 1993). These behaviors are usually transient and part of the normal adolescent development, which include imitation of antisocial models/styles and social reinforcement. In fact, most of the adolescent offenders (85%) known to the criminal justice system stop offending by age 28 and severe persistent antisocial behavior over time is only found in approximately 5% of males. Those youth with early onset in childhood are more likely to be

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

persistent than those who begin these behaviors during adolescence (Moffitt, 1993; Ruchkin, Koposov, Vermeiren, & Schwab-Stone, 2003). Until recently, the 1991 NCCHC study was the only published multisite study in the United States that identified self-reported substance use and mental health risk behaviors among youth in corrections (Morris et al., 1995). This study found that more than 80% of these youth had smoked cigarettes and almost all had tried alcohol. Although marijuana was the most commonly used illicit drug, 25.6% of females and 13.1% of males had used other drugs including injection drugs. Suicidal thought in the previous 12 months was not uncommon, with 21.8% having seriously considered suicide, 19.5% having made a plan, 15.5% with at least one attempt, and 8.2% having been injured by an attempt in the previous 12 months. The 2003 SYRP study (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010) found that 85% of youth had lifetime use of “any illegal drug,” and 50% had used an illegal drug other than marijuana. Lifetime alcohol use was reported by 74% of those surveyed, while 84% had used marijuana/hashish, 30% cocaine/crack, 26% ecstasy, 22% crystal meth, 19% acid/LSD, and 7% heroin. More than one half of these youth reported being drunk or high on drugs multiple times a week during the months leading up to being in custody. In addition, one fifth of those surveyed reported prior suicidal ideation; 22% had past suicide attempts. In order to better characterize the specific mental health and substance abuse issues among these youth, several recently published studies have attempted to eliminate some of the previous study design issues by using randomly selected youth, including more ethnic/racially diverse subjects, and using standardized screening and assessment instruments (Shufelt & Cocozza, 2006; Teplin et al., 2002;

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Wasserman, McReynolds, Ko, Katz, & Carpenter, 2005; Wasserman, McReynolds, Lucas, Fisher, & Santos, 2002). All of these studies utilized versions of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC), a highly structured psychiatric interview based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria. The Teplin study, conducted between 1995 and 1998, involved 1,829 youth at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center; Wasserman and colleagues’ studies, conducted in 1998 and 2001, involved 991 youth at probation intake in eight Texas counties and 292 youth in secure placement in New Jersey and Illinois. Shufelt’s 2006 study included youth from three previously understudied areas—Louisiana, Texas, and Washington— and involved over 1,400 youth from 29 different programs and facilities with oversampling of two understudied populations: Hispanic and Native American youth. A comparison of the results of these newer studies shows consistent findings, including prevalence rates within a smaller range of 45.7–70.4% for psychiatric and substance abuse diagnoses. Both the Teplin and Shufelt studies were able to demonstrate that the prevalence rates were not explained solely by disruptive behavior disorders, as both authors similarly found that when conduct disorder was eliminated from the diagnostic categories, 60.9% (Teplin) and 66.3% (Shufelt) of youth had a psychiatric or substance use disorder. Shufelt found that 45.5% of youth still had mental health diagnoses when both substance use and conduct disorder were eliminated, indicating a high level of mental illness in this population. Table 3.2 compares the results of these studies. Comorbid and Co-occurring Disorders Comorbidity of two or more psychiatric diagnoses as well as co-occurring psychiatric and

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Disorder

Rate Males %

Rate Females %

Any Disorder Any Affective Major depressive Any Anxiety Disorder1 Generalized anxiety Panic disorder Obsessive-compulsive Separation anxiety disorder2 Any Disruptive Behavior3 ADHD Oppositional–defiant Conduct disorder Any Substance Abuse

44.8–68.5 5.9–18.7 5.1–13 17.4–26.4 2.1–7.1 0.3–4.8 4.8–8.3 12.9–25.1 20–44.9 1.2–16.6 3.1–14.5 18.3–37.8 26.3–50.7

49.5–81.0 13.0–29.2 11.4–21.6 29.0–56.0 3.1–7.3 1.5–3.0 5.7–10.6 18.6–32.8 20–51.3 0.5–21.4 10.5–17.5 16.8–40.6 22–55.1

1 Only Teplin (2002) included “separation anxiety” in the data for the “Any Anxiety” category. 2 Separation anxiety disorder subcategory data is from Teplin (2002) and Wasserman (2005). 3 Teplin (2002) did not include ADHD under the “Any Disruptive Behavior” category; ADHD was reported as a separate category. Note: All subcategories under the bolded “Any” headings are from Teplin (2002) and Wasserman (2002, 2005). Sources: Shufelt et al., 2006; Teplin et al., 2002; Wasserman et al., 2002, 2005.

substance abuse disorders have been documented in multiple studies in the United States and other countries (Abram, Teplin, McClelland, & Dulcan, 2003; Atkins et al., 1999; Dixon, Howie, & Starling, 2004; Domalanta, Risser, Roberts, & Risser, 2003; Lederman et al., 2004; Robertson, Dill, Husain, & Undesser, 2004; Shufelt & Cocozza, 2006; Teplin et al., 2002; Ulzen & Hamilton, 1998; Vreugenhil, Doreleijers, Vermeiren, Wouters, & van Den Brink, 2004). In the study by Shufelt and Cocozza (2006), 79% of youth with a mental health disorder had two or more diagnoses with 60% having three or more mental health diagnoses. Further, 60.8% of youth with a mental health diagnosis also had a co-occurring substance use disorder, and this association was more common among youth with disruptive behavior disorders and mood disorders. Youth with substance use

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disorders commonly abuse multiple substances. McClelland, Elkington, Teplin, and Abram (2004) found that approximately one half of youth had one or more and one fifth had two or more substance use disorders. For those with an alcohol use disorder, 80% also had a drug use disorder, and for those with a drug use disorder, 50% also had an alcohol use disorder. Youth who have substance use problems are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behavior, which places them at increased risk for STDs and HIV/AIDS. This increased risk includes youth with co-occurring substance use and other mental health diagnoses (Teplin et al., 2005). Racial/Ethnic Differences Utilizing a standardized diagnostic tool, Teplin et al. (2002) found that non-Hispanic whites had the highest rates of mental health disorders, and African American youth had the lowest. Hispanic youth fell in between these two groups. This difference, however, does not mean that minority youth do not have mental health/substance abuse treatment needs. In fact, concern has been raised in the literature that the actions of minority youth may be considered simply criminal behavior rather than the result of an emotional problem, making it more likely for them to become involved in the criminal justice rather than the mental health system (Boesky, 2002). Successful access to services may also be affected by important racial and/or ethnic differences in attitudes toward diagnosis and treatment of mental health and substance abuse. Some insight can be found from a qualitative study utilizing focus groups of African American youth in a detention center with diagnosed mental health disorders (Shelton, 2004). Youth in this study believed it was unacceptable to have a mental health disorder, and some were secretive about their experiences with mental

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

illness, illustrating the need for awareness about cultural issues in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Low mental health service utilization among African American and Hispanic youth when compared to non-Hispanic white youth was also addressed by Rawal, Romansky, Jenuwine, and Lyons (2004). They found a need for addition services since all youth, regardless of race or ethnicity, had low service utilization rates. However, minority youth had evidence of more multisystem needs, and African American youth had higher scores for caregiver problems including motivation to provide care. They note that lower mental health service utilization among minorities may be related to a culture that places a stigma on mental health issues and relies on family members and non-mental health professionals. Gender Differences The better designed studies consistently found that females are more likely than males to have any psychiatric disorder, and specifically to be diagnosed with internalizing disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders (Shufelt et al., 2006; Teplin et al., 2002; Wasserman et al., 2005). In general, both females and males had similar rates of substance use disorders. However, within the category of substance abuse, Teplin and colleagues (2002) found that females had higher rates of a substance use disorder other than alcohol or marijuana. Another problem more commonly found among females is physical, sexual, and emotional abuse (Mason, Zimmerman, & Evans, 1998; McCabe, Lansing, Garland, & Hough, 2002). These findings were confirmed in the nationally representative data in the SYRP report (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Victims of physical or sexual abuse engage in riskier sexual behavior compared to their peers who do not report abuse (Hayes, 2009;

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Mason et al., 1998). As documented in data collected in the 1991 NCCHC study, victims of sexual abuse also had a twofold increased likelihood of reporting a history of STD as well as suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts (Morris et al., 1995). As summarized in a recent OJJDP report, when considering both genders, rates of physical abuse vary from 11% to 73%, while sexual abuse ranges from 10% to 68% (Hayes, 2009). The SYRP data showed that, in a nationally representative sample, 42% of females and 22% of males reported past physical abuse while 35% of females and 8% of males experienced prior sexual abuse (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Specific Mental Health Disorders Published studies provide additional information on specific mental health disorders among youth in the juvenile justice system. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)/ Dissociative Disorder Several studies have specifically addressed PTSD and trauma with dissociation among delinquent youth. In addition to having higher rates of PTSD than general community samples, delinquent youth also report significant histories of witnessing and experiencing interpersonal violence. Dissociative disorder, which is associated with abuse and neglect, is also found in this population (Abram et al., 2004; Carrion & Steiner, 2000; Cauffman, Feldman, Waterman, & Steiner, 1998; Ford, Chapman, Hawke, & Albert, 2007; Steiner, Garcia, & Matthews, 1997). Suicide Suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are a major concern for youth in the juvenile justice system. Both the 1991 NCCHC study and 2003 SYRP found that a history of suicidal ideation and attempts were common in this population (Morris et al.,

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1995; Sedlak & McPherson, 2010), and several studies utilizing nationally representative samples have been published specifically addressing suicide within juvenile facilities. The first was a national census of public and private juvenile justice facilities in the United States during the years 2000 and 2002, which found that the leading cause of death in these facilities was suicide (20 out of 62 deaths) (Gallagher & Dobrin, 2006a). The second study included an analysis of suicides between 1995 and 1999 in public and private juvenile facilities and found that staff should be aware of most suicidal youth because a history of mental illness, as well as a current diagnosis of depression, was found in two thirds of victims and more than onehalf were taking a psychotropic medication (Hayes, 2009). In that study, hanging was the method of suicide in virtually all (98.7%) of the cases and two thirds of victims were in single occupancy rooms. Approximately one half of the deaths occurred between 6 PM and midnight, which includes the time frame youth were less likely to be alone. For those on room confinement, they were most likely to commit suicide during waking hours when they should have been involved in other interactive activities. This study suggests the need for further research to better understand the reasons for and role of confinement in suicide attempts in juvenile facilities. Reduction in suicides among juveniles in confinement may be possible by suicide risk screening and training staff in suicide prevention, as these efforts resulted in lower rates of suicide in the facilities described in an OJJDP report (Hayes, 2009). This finding is similar to that of Gallagher and Dobrin (2006b), that facilities screening all youth within 24 hours of admission had a lower suicide risk. Suicide prevention strategies need to be improved, as only one fifth of the facilities in the 2009 OJJDP report had the seven key components

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needed for suicide prevention in juvenile facilities (Hayes, 2009). Psychotropic Medications There are no national data on the use of psychotropic medications in the juvenile justice system, but data from two studies conducted in Pennsylvania and Oregon found that almost one half of youth in detention facilities and over two thirds in longer term facilities receive psychotropic medication as part of their mental health treatment plan. Although ideal treatment plans for mental health issues may include psychotropic medications, the length of stay, attitudes of the parent and adolescent, and resources for continuity of care need to be considered in prescribing these medications (Desai et al., 2006). The challenges of mental health screening, assessment, and continuity of care illustrate the complexity of designing and implementing effective treatment for youth in the juvenile justice system. Health-Care Standards Challenges exist in the provision of quality health care to youth in correctional facilities. The NCCHC has published standards for health services for youth in correctional facilities (NCCHC, 2004). However, data analyzed by Gallagher and Dobrin from the Juvenile Residential Facilities Census (2000, 2004; see Gallagher & Dobrin, 2007) and Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (2003; see Gallagher & Dobrin, 2007) found that the overwhelming majority of facilities were not accredited by NCCHC and that there were significant deficits found when comparing reported practices to NCCHC standards (Gallagher & Dobrin, 2007). In addition, there are challenges related to the continuity of care between community health-care providers and health-care providers in the correctional

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

system (Feinstein et al., 1998; Morris, 2001). In part, continuity is made more difficult by the prohibition on utilizing federal money (i.e., Medicaid benefits) to treat youth while they are incarcerated as well as, in many cases, termination rather than suspension of benefits resulting in a delay in reinstatement once the youth is released back into the community (Gupta, Kelleher, Pajer, Stevens, & Cuellar, 2005; Perez, Ro, & Treadwell, 2009).

FACTORS RELATING TO DELINQUENCY AND HEALTH STATUS We have just reviewed the literature on the physical and mental health status and treatment findings for youth in the juvenile justice system. Overall, the research shows that in most domains of physical and mental health, these youth fare worse than their counterparts outside of the juvenile justice system. The following section begins to explain why that is, and suggests responses, by reviewing the literature on factors associated with both delinquency and poor health status. These factors range from the biologic to the cultural and cover the ecological domains of individual, family, community, and social institutions. As these interrelated factors compound, the likelihood of delinquency may increase along with the risk of poor health and reduced access to health care. Thus, understanding them is essential to preventing delinquency and improving youth health. Socioeconomic Status Nearly 13 million children live in poverty (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2009), and socioeconomic status affects both health status and self-reported delinquency.

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Emerson points out that relative child poverty appears to be associated with health status, particularly in the macroeconomic aspect of the health of nations (2009). Child poverty is associated with unintentional injuries, juvenile homicide, low educational achievement, dropping out of school, poor peer relationships, feeling lonely, and mental health problems (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2007), all of which also tend to be found in delinquent youth as documented in the SYRP data (Sedlak & McPherson, 2010). Poverty is related to mortality risk, with the highest risk for 18- to 27-year-olds whose income is below the median of $20,190 (Rehkopf, Berkman, Coull, & Krieger, 2008). Adverse childhood experiences, such as frequent moves often associated with unstable socioeconomic circumstances, appear to be related to various health risks such as smoking and suicide (Dong et al., 2005). Economically disadvantaged communities with neighborhood violence and deviant peer groups may put middle childhood youth at particular vulnerability for antisocial behavior (Ingoldsby & Shaw, 2002; Seidman et al., 1998). Girls who live in poverty-stricken neighborhoods and who are victims of violence themselves are 2.2 times more likely to have behaved violently in the past year compared to girls who were not victimized. Girls from neighborhoods with poverty and homicides have higher rates of aggression (Molnar, Browne, Cerda, & Buka, 2005). Poverty is related to race and ethnicity in these findings; in 2007, Black and Hispanic juveniles were 3 times as likely to live in poverty as nonHispanic White youth (OJJDP, 2007). More generally, Leventhal and BrooksGunn reported the results of a comprehensive review of research on the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent wellbeing. High socioeconomic status (SES) led to

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positive life achievement, while low SES and residential instability was related to poor behavioral/emotional outcomes (e.g., increased delinquency and problem behaviors in adolescents) (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000). Sampson (2003) elaborated on social characteristics of communities and neighborhoods as they affect health disparities in the inner city. Both articles point to a need to understand the functions of communities in order to improve the health of their citizens. This is particularly evident in a British study of 5- to 10-year-olds in deprived neighborhoods who displayed higher levels of antisocial behavior at school entry and less improvement in antisocial behavior between ages 5 and 10. That behavioral finding was offset by neighborhood collective efficacy but only in deprived neighborhoods, leading the authors to suggest that neighborhood efficacy had a protective effect in young children (Odgers et al., 2009; see Hawkins, Vashchenko, & Davis, Chapter 12, this volume). Race and Culture Minority youth are disproportionately present both in the delinquency system and in the population of youth with reduced access to health care and poor health. Although there is a range of explanations offered, youth of color are represented among arrests and delinquency placements disproportionate to their presence in the population, and this disparity permeates the juvenile custody system including longterm facilities (see Bell & Mariscal, Chapter 6, this volume). This disparity remained stable over the last decade, with a slight decrease of the minority population in custody from 62% in 1997 to 61% in 2003 (Snyder, 2008; Snyder & Sickmund, 2006) and an increase in 2006 to 66% (OJJDP, 2007). Except for Vermont, Black youth’s custody rates in 2003

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exceeded rates for White youth across the states (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Black youth accounted for 38% of all youth in custody in 2003 (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006) and 41% of all males in custody in 2006 (OJJDP, 2007). Asian youth are an exception. In 1997, they comprised 4% of the juvenile population but only 2% of youth in secure detention (Hsia, Bridges, & McHale, 2004), and in 2006, they comprised 5% of the population but only 1% of youth in secure placement. Similarly, numerous studies report that racial and ethnic minorities have poor health and health care overall. For example, Shi and Macinko (2008) examined changes in medical care experiences between 1996 and 2002 for various racial groups and found that, although there were some fluctuations, racial minorities reported difficulties accessing care, worse health care, and worse health indicators that further declined in 2002. Flores and TomanyKorman (2008a) found similar results, as did Simpson and colleagues (2005) reviewing 2000–2002 data. The REACH 2010 Risk Factor Survey conducted in 21 minority communities showed that racial minorities had substantially greater socioeconomic risk factors and health burden than the general U.S. population, with type and degree varying somewhat among communities (Liao, Tucker, & Giles, 2004). The RAND Corporation in 2004 reported a wide range of socioeconomic, health, safety, and educational disparities faced by boys and men of color in California, all of which could increase the risk of offending and problems accessing health care. These included higher poverty rates of 27% as compared with 19% in the general population, higher HIV/AIDS rates than White peers (6.9 times higher for African Americans and 3.1 times higher for Latinos) and a higher likelihood of being imprisoned. Educational

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

gaps compared to White youth, as evidenced by a lack of a high school diploma, are twice as high for African American youth and 7 times as high for Latinos (Davis, Kilburn, & Schultz, 2009). Likewise, substantial health disparities are found in Native American/Alaska Native youth compared to the general population (Castor et al., 2006). In a report on adolescent health and youth of color, the National Association of Social Workers pointed out that Native American youth have the worst health of any racial group and highest rate of violent death compared to “any other racial or ethnic group” (Clark, 2001). Ethnic minority youth also report less regular participation in physical exercise. A review of the scientific literature by Elster, Jarosik, VanGeest, and Fleming (2003) compared 31 studies addressing adolescent racial and ethnic disparities in health care, concluding that racial and ethnic disparities, independent of socioeconomic status, exist in selected areas of adolescent health care (Elster et al.). Similar disparities for oral health are found among racial/ethnic minorities (Dietrich, Culler, Garcia, & Henshaw, 2008). Flores and Tomany-Korman (2008b) observed that children in non-English-speaking homes experienced multiple disparities in medical and oral health, access to care, and use of services, adding another factor that relates to the racial disadvantage in health care. Engagement in psychiatric care in particular is an issue that may not just be related to access (see Oliveri, Towery, Jacobs & Jacobs, Chapter 18, this volume). Many Americans are reluctant to take psychiatric medications even though they are effective, and their reluctance may have cultural roots. Croghan’s study found that the majority of respondents would not take psychiatric medications (Croghan et al., 2003). This finding may help explain some of the factors related to whether

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detained youth continue on psychiatric medications when they are released. There are ethnic differences in perspectives toward depression in that African American and Latino youth and their parents have less knowledge about antidepressants and are less willing to seek treatment (Chandra et al., 2009). Thus, these negative factors are not confined solely to delinquent youth, but rather result in poor mental health outcomes in the communities from which delinquents come. Family Structure, Abuse/Neglect, and the Foster Care System Family dysfunction, and specifically abuse and neglect, can lead to involvement in the foster care system. Youth in foster care (a number of whom will transition to the juvenile justice system) suffer poor health, and have chronic medical conditions, mental disorders, and substance abuse problems (Currie & Tekin, 2006; see Baker, Cunningham & Harris, Chapter 11, this volume). In general, suffering greater levels of abuse leads to a greater likelihood of engaging in delinquency (Grogan-Kaylor, Ruffolo, Ortega, & Clarke, 2008; Malmgren & Meisel, 2004; Stewart, Livingston, & Dennison, 2008). However, the contribution of foster care alone as a cause of delinquency and poor health cannot be separated from the various types of severity and duration of abuse that lead to foster care placement. An additional confounding element is the appropriate disposition of foster children who may commit minor offenses such as hitting a staff member or fighting in a group home. There is the tendency to send these children to the juvenile justice system with no right of return to the child welfare system. Ross, Conger, and Armstrong (2002) discuss this effect and suggest the need for a “human services” model with the “objective of

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achieving real working partnerships at the front line (see Ross & Miller, Chapter 17, this volume). There is also a link between poverty (Farrington, 1989; Kirk, 2008), family disruption (Kirk, 2008; Sampson & Laub, 1994) and self-reported delinquency. Family disruption influences juvenile violence, leading to three interconnected states—poverty, family disruption, and violent delinquency (Sampson & Laub, 1994). Children from two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty than children from single-parent families, 8% vs. 17%. Single-mother households have much higher rates of receiving public assistance (62%) and food stamps (61%) compared to two-parent families, 32% and 23%, respectively (OJJDP, 2007). Youth living with both biologic parents are less likely to engage in problem behaviors and crime regardless of whether the neighborhood is well or poorly kept. In fact, family structure predicts problem behaviors more than does race or ethnicity (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). However, neighborhood characteristics, including social networks and Hispanic ethnicity, may influence parent-tochild aggression, with physical aggression leading to more severe child maltreatment (Molnar, Buka, Brennan, Holton, & Earls, 2003). Hispanic and African American youth are more likely to live in single-parent households (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). In 2007, 57% of Black youth lived with one parent, compared to 31% of Hispanic children and 23% of White children (OJJDP, 2007). Characteristics of parental supervision can help reduce delinquency so that a high level of parental supervision is associated with low delinquency (Fischer, 1983). Positive family communication (i.e., open vs. closed communication) with a youth’s parents also helps deter delinquency (Clark & Shields, 1997). Parents

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of delinquent youth tend to lose control of their children, as evidenced by their inability to turn their children away from maladaptive behaviors and toward prosocial activities. This, in turn, can interfere with the parents’ effectiveness in obtaining services for their children because of parental feelings of helplessness and inability to engage their children in agreeing to attend services. The Smith Sterns (1999) suggest that new approaches are necessary to empower parents and enhance cooperation between parents and social service agencies. The pathway from foster care to the delinquency system is more pronounced among youth of color. Youth of color make up the majority of foster youth (Clark, 2001). NonWhite children, given in-home abuse avoidance services as opposed to no services, had a lower risk of juvenile corrections entry. However, youth receiving mental health services had a high risk of entering the juvenile correctional system (Jonson-Reid, 2002). The same author reporting on children receiving child welfare services in California reported similar outcomes for non-White children. However, girls who experienced foster placement or group home placement had higher rates of involvement with the juvenile corrections system than girls not placed out of home (see, e.g., Sherman & Greenstone, Chapter 7, this volume). Further, children who were reported as neglected were more likely to be incarcerated compared to those who were reported as being physically or sexually abused. The authors felt that children receiving no services were at greatest risk for incarceration (Jonson-Reid & Barth, 2000). Education Educational failure leads to unemployment and possibly criminal behavior. Again, these factors are interrelated, with poor education

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

leading to low SES, which is related to both poor health and health access and to involvement in the delinquency system. Hispanic and African American youth drop out of school more often compared to White youth. In 2005, 2.8% of White, 7.3% of Black, and 5% of Hispanic youth dropped out of school (OJJDP, 2007). Youth who neither attend school nor work have an increased risk of engaging in high-risk and delinquent behaviors (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Lowincome families, defined as those in the bottom fifth income bracket, also have higher dropout rates with 8.9% of low-income youth dropping out compared to 1.5% of high-income families who are in the top fifth income bracket (OJJDP, 2007). Biologic Factors Intrinsic factors, such as genetic variations, appear to contribute to behavioral traits leading to delinquent acts, and recent research shows that the origins of adult illness and behavioral abnormalities may be biologic (Shonkoff, Boyce, & McEwen, 2009). Youth who carry the short allele form of the serotonin transporter–linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) gene that is found in 40% of the general population are prone to impulsivity, low self-control, binge drinking, and substance use (Brody et al., 2009). Other genetic variations involving monoamine oxidase A (Passamonti et al., 2006) and serotonin (Lesch & Merschdorf, 2000) influence impulsive, aggressive behaviors. Serotonin transporter– promoting gene polymorphism is associated with violence in relation to personality disorders, impulsiveness, and childhood attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Retz, Retz-Junginger, Supprian, Thome & Rosler, 2004). The combination of violent behavior, impulsiveness, and ADHD also may be related

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to dopamine D3 receptor gene polymorphism (Retz, Rosler, Supprian, Retz-Junginger & Thome, 2003). There are a number of other genes that may be involved in antisocial behavior combined with ADHD (Langley, 2009) and ADHD and impulsivity (Ribases et al., 2008). Finally, there appears to be a subset of children with ADHD and antisocial behavior associated with variations in the catechol-Omethyltransferase (COMT) gene (Caspi et al., 2008). Although these genetic variations account for a small number of incarcerated youth, further research is likely to discover more of these inborn tendencies to engage in delinquent behavior. Some of these antisocial behaviors that are genetically related may be modified by prevention programs that can override the genetic predisposition (Brody et al., 2009). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides another tool to evaluate maturation and disruption in brain function in normal adolescence and pathologic states. Giedd and his colleagues followed brain architecture during childhood into early adulthood and found that the brain continues to change through the early 20s. The frontal lobes, where executive functioning resides, is one of the last areas to mature (Rhoghel & Giedd, 2006). These authors point out that changes in the brain’s structure and the size of various areas of the brain correspond to enhanced strengths or weaknesses in brain function such as memory capacity. They also note that brain maturation includes interactions between genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors. They define environmental factors as both outside environment and internal “physiologic milieu.” Thus, individuals who are stressed beyond their capacity to cope will develop “compensatory physiologic responses and behaviors that in time may affect brain structures” (p. 726). This can be part of a normal or abnormal learning process.

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Preliminary MRI studies of youth with developmental disorders show consistent changes in brain structure compared to controls, although the physiologic meaning of these changes is not well understood. Childhood-onset schizophrenia, Williams syndrome, ADHD, and fetal alcohol syndrome all demonstrate abnormal brain morphology with some areas of decreased size. Although the abnormalities vary in these disorders, there also are some similarities among them (Toga, Thompson, & Sowell, 2006). Although not directly related to these neuroimaging studies, many authors have measured various aspects of adolescent decision-making processes compared with that of adults. When engaged with peers, adolescents are more likely than adults to make decisions associated with increased risk. This scenario, which is called “hot cognition,” is compared to “cold cognition” when decisions are made in controlled or nonemotional circumstances (Gardner & Steinberg, 2005). Modecki (2007) reviewed the gaps in the maturity of judgment literature and found that adolescents “display less responsibility and perspective relative to college students” (p. 89). There was no difference between nondelinquent youth and delinquent youth with regard to maturity of judgment, but high-level-delinquency youth have significantly lower maturity of judgment compared to low-level-delinquency youth (Modecki, 2007). Recent work utilizing functional MRI studies of normal adolescents 11–13 years old find that sleep deprivation may be related to compensatory increases in reward-driven behavior, possibly increasing risky behavior because of less activation of the caudate (part of the ventral striatum) that is related to reward-related brain function (Holm et al., 2009). Thus, there may be an interaction between brain

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maturation and sleep deprivation, which is often found in adolescents engaged in delinquent behavior at night. A recent review of childhood roots of health disparities amplifies the effects of poor environment on young children, bringing our understanding to a new theoretical plane. The authors argue that the origins of adult illness and behavioral abnormalities result from biological disruptions caused by toxic stress beginning prenatally and continuing through childhood. Unless there are protective relationships to buffer the effects of stress, the individual develops maladaptive coping mechanisms that are reinforced by permanent changes in the brain and other organs. They further point out that protective and stressful events affecting one generation can have positive or negative effects for several successive generations that are facilitated by epigenetic changes in DNA methylation and histamine modification of chromatin in response to experiences that can influence the next generation (Shonkoff et al., 2009). Although not part of their argument, there is the possibility of a multiplying effect in that parents who have experienced severe childhood trauma will pass on a genetic predisposition for poor adaptation to stress and compound the effect by lacking the ability themselves as parents to provide supportive relationships to their children. These children are likely to experience substantial, perhaps “toxic stress” because they remain embedded in the poor social climate of their parents. At the extreme, the children experience child abuse, chronic neglect, emotional abuse, extreme poverty, family violence, and parental drug abuse (Shonkoff et al., 2009). Shonkoff and colleagues (2009) also point out the long-term effects of this stress on personal well-being, including heart disease; high blood pressure; obesity; early aging; pulmonary disease; depression; alcoholism; teen pregnancy; smoking; anxiety; aggression;

The Health of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

and poor mental flexibility, memory, and other cognitive processes. These observations lead to an understanding that the poor health and health disparities of many disadvantaged social groups have an early biologic basis that becomes evident as the person ages and illuminates the link between health disparities and delinquency. They make a strong case for early childhood interventions to reduce the risks of both physical and mental health impairments. They also point out that once these early processes take effect, it is very difficult to reverse the early biological damage. A related article reinforces these concepts and makes clear the difficulty in changing behavior in delinquent youth. Abram, Choe, Washburn, Romero, and Teplin (2009) followed 1,653 youth for about three years after detention and found significant functional impairment across one or more of the eight domains. One fifth (21.6%) of youth had marked global impairment. Only 7.5% had “no noteworthy impairment.” It would be expected that those youth who had substantial functional impairments would also have problems accessing health care after being released from detention. These data also reinforce the difficulties of changing behavior and functioning that may have roots in early childhood toxic experiences. Poor compliance with health care may also be related to the normal developmental course of brain maturation discussed in the MRI studies above. The associated lag in appropriate and non-risk-taking decision making could play a role in some youth not seeking health care or not cooperating with health-care recommendations. This may be compounded by poor parental supervision or disordered communities, and these immaturity dynamics could play a significant role in impeding the seeking of health care because there is no outside control on the youth’s behavior.

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CONCLUSION While additional national research is needed, existing literature confirms the sense in the field that youth in the juvenile justice system fare worse than their counterparts in the general population in most domains of physical and mental health. This is explained in part by the compelling confluence of demographic, family, and youth traits related to both the onset of delinquent behaviors and disparities in health care. Youth from lower socioeconomic strata, minority race and ethnicity, and disorganized families, including abused youth, are more likely to be involved in delinquency, and the same elements impede health care. Currently, it is not known if delinquent youth receive worse health care than nondelinquent youth of similar backgrounds. It may be that both groups suffer equally because of their social status. However, nondelinquent youth may have more supportive functional family structures that help ameliorate the risk of poor health care. At the time youth are incarcerated, there is a window of opportunity to address their existing health problems. However, although the health needs of these youth become evident and need to be addressed when they become involved in the juvenile justice system, primary prevention efforts, which address disparate socioeconomic and personal health risk factors before youth are involved in the justice system, may be most effective and most likely will require multiple approaches. Thus, it is important to view the causes and remediation of poor health care in detained and incarcerated youth from the broader perspective of their social, economic, and demographic origins. Efforts to improve the health status of this underserved population may also reduce the incidence of delinquency because the etiology of both is similar. Universal health

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