Minorities are overrepresented in Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system. Though members of minority groups make up just one-fifth of the state’s juveniles between the ages of 10 and 17, they account for far more than one-fifth of those arrested, detained, adjudicated, disposed and committed. This disproportionality is a source of great concern in a juvenile justice system that guarantees fair ...

Psychopath. The word alone evokes powerful emotions and images. Attaching that label to a juvenile offender is a serious charge, and should be done so with caution, especially given that the standard assessment tools for psychopathy were originally developed for adults, not juveniles. As the MacArthur Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice has shown, and as the U.S. juv...

Responding to urgent calls for effective interventions to address young offenders' multiple and interconnected problems, a new variant of an existing empirically-validated intervention for drug-using adolescents, Multidimensional Family Therapy (MDFT)-Detention to Community (DTC) was tested in a two-site controlled trial. This article (a) outlines the rationale and protocol basics of the MDFT-D...

Since its creation, New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) has used child and family development research to bridge the chasm between child welfare and juvenile justice policy and practice. OCFS's major challenges have been to help the staff and stakeholders of the merged child welfare and juvenile justice agencies develop a common culture and design new financial and prog...

T he Task Force on Community Preventive Services presents recommendations in this supplement to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine relating to the transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal justice system. 1,2 The questions the Task Force considered are whether transfers reduce or prevent violent crimes by people younger than 18 by means either of individual deterrence (reducing futur...

The juvenile justice system in the United States is experiencing a social movement aimed at responding to the mental and emotional problems of delinquent youths. Ironically, this movement arose in the wake of a decade of reform in juvenile justice that had set aside the system's 100-year tradition of rehabilitation for delinquents in the interests of their punishment and a primary emphasis on p...

This review describes the results of all published research reports and dissertations through September 2011 that have evaluated or used the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-Version 2 (MAYSI-2). The instrument was released in 2000 and is now widely used in the U.S. for brief mental health screening at entry to juvenile justice programs. The review describes the results of studies using ...

At a recent meeting of the states’ administrators of juvenile correctional programs, the host asked one of them, “In your opinion, what are the three most pressing issues in juvenile justice facilities today?” The administrator answered without hesitation, “Mental health, mental health, and mental health.” He would probably have given a different answer if he had been asked the question 15 year...

Poverty among individuals is an enduring condition in almost all societies. The responses by governments to poverty, however, have varied. In the United States, President Lyndon Johnson sought to address poverty through the creation of the Great Society programs in the 1960s. In effect, he declared a War on Poverty. Later, especially during the Republicans’ takeover of the government in the 198...

Background To provide successful treatment to detained adolescents, staff in juvenile justice institutions need to work in family-centered ways. As juvenile justice institutions struggled to involve parents in their child's treatment, we developed a program for family-centered care. Methods The program was developed in close collaboration with staff from the two juvenile justice institutions ...