Elsevier

Aggression and Violent Behavior

Volume 7, Issue 4, July–August 2002, Pages 353-363
Aggression and Violent Behavior

Juvenile justice and mental health: Youth and families in the middle

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1359-1789(01)00062-3Get rights and content

Abstract

Addressing the mental health needs of youth in the juvenile justice system is a key imperative for all stakeholders interested in preventing and reducing juvenile delinquency. Despite the substantially higher rates of mental health disorders among these youth, services and approaches are fraught with barriers including inadequate assessment, fragmentation, and deficit-based intervention. Comprehensive, system-level reform is necessary to better address the needs of youth with mental health disorders entering the juvenile justice system. Using a public health approach to youth violence as an overarching framework, the need for a community-based, family-centered, strength-based system of care philosophy is outlined.

Section snippets

Scope of the problem

Community leaders, policymakers, funding agencies, and the public have begun to recognize that youth violence is a complex public health problem in this country Commission for the Prevention of Youth Violence, 2000, Snyder & Sickmund, 1999, Thornton et al., 2000. In 1997, 20% of all arrests involved a juvenile. Juveniles accounted for a large percentage of arrests for robbery (30%), vandalism (43%), and property crimes (35%), including arson (50%). The increase in juvenile violent crime rates

Evidence of comorbidity in young offenders

Youth involved with the juvenile justice system frequently have more than one co-occurring mental and/or substance use disorder, making their diagnosis and treatment needs more complex Coalition for Juvenile Justice, 2000, Justice for Juveniles Initiative, 1999. Indeed, Teplin's (2001) preliminary findings through the Northwestern Juvenile Project indicated that two-thirds of juvenile detainees in the baseline sample have one or more alcohol, drug, and/or mental (ADM) disorders (see also

Traditional approaches to intervention: what does not work

Significant functional impairment in home, school, and community frequently leads these children, youth, and their families to seek help from multiple public and private agencies. Unfortunately, the human service arena is often fragmented by separate agency mandates and funding streams, thus, adding to the burden of youth and families already facing tremendous obstacles. Many of the challenges facing the juvenile justice field as it endeavors to improve outcomes for youth and families are not

Traditional approaches in juvenile justice: what does not work

During the 1990s, much legislation emerged across the nation mandating the transfer of youth offenders to adult courts (Mendel, 2000). This punitive practice, driven by the notion of “adult time for adult crime,” has been shown to have particularly harmful effects on delinquent youth. The recent Surgeon General's Report on Youth Violence (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), in its evaluation of prevention/intervention strategies, has labeled waivers to adult court as an

Need for system reform

Shorr (1997) addressed the breadth of comprehensive change necessary to help youth and families achieve positive outcomes, arguing that new approaches are required in order to reach more than a token number of children, families, and neighborhoods. These new approaches can no longer rely on what former Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary John Gardner called “the vending-machine approach to change,” in which you respond to a social problem by inserting a coin that delivers a law that is

Importance of system level change in juvenile justice

The very nature of services offered to families and children must fundamentally change to address the alarming statistics of juvenile delinquency and criminality. Emerging research supports the efficacy of a community-wide, comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to strengthen and support families to reduce juvenile delinquency Cocozza & Skowyra, 2000, Melton & Pagliocca, 1992. A number of factors must work together to achieve positive outcomes: (a) services that are individualized and

Shifting to a public health approach to youth violence

Given this review of the system improvement necessary in both mental health and juvenile justice, it is proposed that the public health approach, as articulated by Mercy and colleagues Mercy & Hammond, 1999, Mercy et al., 1993, offers an overarching framework for a comprehensive, scientific approach to youth violence prevention and intervention. Before Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's Workshop on Violence and Public Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1986) in 1985,

Need for a system of care approach in juvenile justice

We propose that a comprehensive community-based approach to service improvements and systems reform, System of Care, which has been utilized almost exclusively in the mental health arena, and is consistent with the public health model, would be effective in the juvenile justice arena as well. Support comes from the annual report of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice (2000) which stated: “Youth have a better chance of success when receiving treatment in the least restrictive, most appropriate

Putting the pieces together: community-based systems of care

In accord with steps one and two of the public health approach, our proposed prevention/intervention model devotes attention to local prevalence of juvenile delinquency as well as identifies relevant risk and protective factors. Based on a developmental orientation, it is assumed that at any given stage of development, young people with unique mixes of strengths and limitations seek to master developmental tasks, and they do so in different communities and across different social contexts. A

Conclusions

The System of Care approach offers a viable, holistic, and distinctly humanistic opportunity to create a comprehensive, interrelated prevention and intervention service delivery system within which families—the critical element in raising healthy, competent, law-abiding youth—are at the core; and as a practical model to effectively prevent youth violence and promote community justice. It holds the promise to operationalize Krovetz's (1999) assertion, based on resiliency theory, that “…if

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