Report in Brief

Juvenile justice is a highly varied process that is shaped by law and driven by local practice. Youth coming into the justice system— usually after an arrest by law enforcement— are screened and assessed by various organizations and individuals. The charges against them are reviewed for legal sufficiency, and a formalized court process may be used to establish their culpable commission of a criminal act. If the case merits some type of intervention, other actors in the justice system attempt to match the youth with an appropriate and cost-effective program or sanction. The availability and suitability of programs often influences the outcome of earlier decisions.

There is a mutual need between the surplus of young workers in Central America and the demand for unskilled labor in the USA. Yet the refusal of the federal government to make its immigration policies economically relevant and rational has engendered lawlessness in our local communities. Using survey data from 160 day laborers from Palisades Park, New Jersey, patterns and correlates of wage theft against undocumented migrant workers were examined. In this sample, 728 separate incidents of wage theft were perpetrated with $238,112 in back wages owed to 112 victims over the period of 12 months. Day laborers with a history of violent victimizations in the USA and those displaying symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome were at the highest risk of becoming wage theft victims. The politico-legal depersonalization of undocumented workers creates incentives for legitimate businesses and ordinary citizens to prey on these vulnerable migrants. The market victimizes what the state has criminalized. Without a timely realignment, the disjuncture between the economic inclusion of cross-border migrant workers and their legal exclusion will continue to erode the rule of law and to hurt the long-term economic wellbeing of the American society.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, increasing numbers of arrests among juveniles and older youth were disproportionately responsible for the growing rate of violent crime. In recent years, however, young people contributed an even larger share to the declining rate of violent crime. In fact, young people appear to be leading a second crime drop in the United States. 

______________________________________

Project Staff
Doug Evans, co-PI
Jeffrey Butts, co-PI
Kathy Tomberg
Rhoda Ramdeen 

Funding
$90,000. Justice Fellowship.
 

There is More than One ‘System’ in Juvenile Justice

by Jeffrey A. Butts, April 24, 2013

Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Mental health is one important issue in a bundle of issues affecting public understanding of juvenile crime and juvenile justice. Others in the same bundle include substance abuse, family violence, head injuries and various forms of trauma. Together, these influence juvenile justice policy and practice in profound ways. They are also easily misunderstood.

Gail Wasserman and her colleagues at Columbia University published a study in 2010 showing that mental health disorders are found in larger numbers as researchers look more deeply into the justice system. From intake, to detention and corrections, the prevalence of disorders grows as studies collect mental health screening data at ever-deeper stages of the justice process. By the time researchers analyze prevalence data in the deepest part of the system (secure facilities) mental health and substance abuse disorders affect two-thirds or more of the population.

So, what’s the problem? It’s the sloppy way that practitioners and policymakers sometimes discuss these findings. Advocates in the mental health sector often characterize such studies as showing that the vast majority of youth in “the juvenile justice system” have diagnosable mental health disorders. Upon hearing this claim, it is natural to infer that mental health problems must be the main reason that young people end up in juvenile justice. Thus, our efforts to prevent and reduce juvenile crime should focus on mental health.

Mental health issues cannot be the main reason young people come into the justice system if, as Wasserman and her colleagues demonstrated, only one-third of youth at an early stage of justice processing (intake) have any diagnosable disorders. (If we had good mental health screening data at an even earlier stage of processing — i.e., arrest — the number of affected youth would likely be lower and probably closer to the figures found in the general population – 15 – 20 percent.)

Equating the deepest end of juvenile justice with “the system” distorts the significance of whatever problems affect the youth in secure care. Young people in secure facilities represent a small proportion of the entire youthful offender population. We know from national data stored at the National Center for Juvenile Justice that just 20 percent of all youth referred to juvenile court are held in detention for any time at all while awaiting court proceedings, and fewer than 5 percent end up in secure facilities.

The high prevalence rate of mental health disorders in secure facilities suggests that the justice process is likely to divert young people with fewer problems while holding onto those with more problems. This is, in fact, what we want the justice system to do. Service needs in the deep end, however, are not a suitable guide for designing interventions for all youth coming into contact with the larger system. Prevention and early intervention should focus on supportive and restorative services, youth development and skill-building approaches, while services in the deep end should include a stronger focus on mental health and substance abuse. As juvenile justice professionals, we need to pay close attention to our words and to the policy conclusions they may suggest.

According to Council Speaker Christine Quinn: “These pilot programs are the first step in what I hope will be an approach we take in every corner of this city. Furthermore, by addressing both the demand and supply sides of gun violence, I believe we can not only save lives, we can transform the potential of young people headed down the wrong path” (Press Release, December 21, 2012). 

Each pilot program incorporates the shooting incident crisis management system recommended by the 2012 report from the Council-sponsored Task Force to Combat Gun Violence. The crisis management approach is designed to provide immediate support after violence occurs and to engage community members in educational and prevention efforts to reduce and de-escalate future incidents. Each project is also expected to implemement the public health oriented violence-reduction strategy known as Cure Violence, which was developed at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Finally, additional support services are to be connected with each Cure Violence program to provide needed supports for at-risk youth, their families, and communities, including mental health services, school based conflict mediation services, job training and placement services, and legal services.

______________________________________

Project Staff
Jeffrey Butts, PI
Ric Curtis 
Sheyla Delgado
Ernest Drucker
Richard Glover
Laura Negredo
Charles Orrett
Jeremy Porter 
Rhoda Ramdeen
Kathy Tomberg

Funding
$250,000. New York City Council
Brendan Cheney, Council Staff Liaison
 

Interpreting the Juvenile Incarceration Drop

by Jeffrey A. Butts, March 20, 2013
Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

On March 17, Nate Balis and Tom Woods from the Annie E. Casey Foundation responded to my JJIE opinion column from March 7 in which I cautioned that it was too soon to claim intentional reform as the cause of recent declines in juvenile incarceration. Nate and Tom argue that policy and practice reforms around the country have at least contributed to the decline. They cite specific examples of states where substantive reforms in juvenile justice were followed by marked shifts in juvenile incarceration.

Nate and Tom make some valid points, and I’m willing to concede two of them. First, they chide me for writing that “incarceration numbers follow the crime rate,” and they are right to do so. I did not intend to characterize the relationship between crime and incarceration as consistent and predictable. I was describing the statistical trends portrayed in my John Jay College data brief. The trends from 1995 to 2010 show a percentage decline in juvenile incarceration that closely tracks the percentage change in juvenile arrests and court referrals.

My observation was accurate, but the sentence was misleading. I would never argue that the relationship between crime and incarceration is always direct and proportionate. In fact, I’ve made the opposite point in previous publications. In our 2011 report on juvenile justice realignment, for example, Doug Evans and I wrote: “The scale of incarceration is not simply a reaction to crime. It is a policy choice.”

Second, Nate and Tom correctly note that my argument generalizes from national data that might obscure important variations among states. This is certainly true, but while the state-level patterns they describe are encouraging, they are not sufficient to establish a causal connection between reform and lower incarceration. Reliable evidence requires more than convenient correlations. Even if we observe a number of instances when state reforms are followed by lower incarceration, we have to test whether the causal hypothesis holds up in the absence of reform? If we lined up all the states according to whether they had enacted meaningful reforms in their juvenile justice systems, would their incarceration trends line up in the same way, with high reform states showing more decline and low reform states showing less? Moreover, does the relationship persist over time and under varying circumstances?

If we had reliable data with which to track system reforms across jurisdictions and in a standard metric, we might be able to disentangle all of the competing influences on the use of incarceration, and we might be able to identify the extent to which recent changes in juvenile incarceration were due to intentional reform or to larger social forces, including crime trends. Of course, it is far easier to imagine such an analysis than to create one. Measuring juvenile justice reform is very difficult because policies and practices vary so much from place to place, and because the organizational components of juvenile justice systems are themselves dependent on local legal culture.

Until we have such an analysis, we are left to speculate about why some juvenile justice systems are using incarceration much less than they did 15 to 20 years ago. Is it largely the result of falling crime, or is it due to the efforts of advocates and reformers?  When we know the answer to this important question, we will know whether we should rely on existing strategies for future improvements in juvenile justice policy and practice. 

Are We Too Quick to Claim Credit for Falling Juvenile Incarceration Rates?

by Jeffrey A. Butts, March 7, 2013
Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

The youth justice field is in a celebratory mood. Last month, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Justice Policy Institute released major reports on the declining rate of juvenile incarceration in the United States. On a per capita basis, juvenile confinement is down more than 40 percent compared with the mid-1990s. In some states, the numbers are even more striking, with declines of 66 percent in Tennessee, 65 percent in Connecticut, and 56 percent in Louisiana.

Why is this happening? A consensus emerged in recent months. Juvenile justice advocates and practitioners see falling incarceration rates as products of reform. Juvenile courts, probation departments, and youth services agencies — so the argument goes — are using community-based rehabilitation programs rather than locking up young offenders. Numerous articles and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other national papers echo these claims.

As we celebrate falling incarceration numbers, those of us who work in juvenile justice should take a few moments to contemplate the true origins of the decline. We venture onto thin ice — empirically — if we conclude that incarceration is down because of changes in practice and policy.

Incarceration numbers follow the crime rate. As I demonstrated in a recent data brief, the decline in youth incarceration is largely consistent with the crime drop. More important, placement decisions in juvenile court are generally unchanged. The proportion of juvenile court cases resulting in out-of-placement is about the same today as it was in 1995. When juvenile crime numbers drop 40 percent in 15 years, it makes sense that juvenile incarceration numbers fall as well.

We all love good news, but it could be risky to claim the credit. After all, if we in the juvenile justice field claim that we caused the drop in incarceration with intentional reform, it will be fair to blame us if crime numbers rise in the future. “See what you did,” the usual conservative interest groups will say, “you asked us to reduce incarceration and now look — youth crime is going back up!”

In claiming the recent trends as the effects of reform, we also risk complacency. If we think that we already “got this,” we may miss a critical opportunity to lock down recent gains and create a permanently different way of thinking about youth justice.

The best research suggests that incarceration was never really effective in terms of public safety. We went on an incarceration binge in the 1980s and 1990s not because we thought it was smart and effective, but because rising crime numbers frightened us and we had not worked very hard to design and implement better solutions. It is not clear that things are all that different today.

The litmus test for youth justice reform is whether we can maintain our course even in the face of another crime scare, and not the fact that we use less incarceration during a time of falling crime.

Congratulating ourselves for the incarceration decline at this point in time is a bit like me boasting that I lost 10 pounds following a bout with the flu. Sure, I made genuine progress toward my goal weight, but does anyone doubt what will happen if I fail to change my diet and exercise habits?

When it comes to juvenile justice, I wonder if we have really changed our incarceration habits.

Juvenile justice advocacy groups in the United States are celebrating the nation’s falling rate of juvenile incarceration. How do we explain this welcome trend? Some see it as evidence of reform, suggesting that cities and states around the country are handling more young offenders with community-based programs rather than with incarceration or other forms of out-of-home placement. Is this accurate?

New center models holistic, age-appropriate, therapeutic approaches

February 21, 2013 by Kaukab Jhumra Smith, Youth Today

… Reducing capacity at secure residential facilities frees up scarce resources for developing quality wrap-around services within the community, said Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “If we increase the juvenile justice budget by 10 times, we would not have these (secure) buildings,” Butts said. “We would have a full-time teacher and a social worker and a cognitive therapist and a job placement coordinator. We would just create teams of support around that kid and try to recreate the good parenting that they’re lacking.”

[read the article]