Reforming Juvenile Justice A Developmental Approach (2013) / Chapter Skim
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6 Preventing Reoffending
6 Preventing Reoffending
Pages 139-182
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From page 139... ...
Effectiveness lies in the system's ability to (a) intervene with the right adolescent offenders and (b)
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. Overwhelmingly, the research on risk for future delinquency has demonstrated the presence of risk markers, with much less evidence that these risk indicators are risk factors related to later delinquency.
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For an overview, see Table 6-1. This table shows the largest effect sizes for particular risk markers at different ages.
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. Third, there is no evidence that there are unique risk markers associated with serious delinquency, chronic delinquency, or violent delinquency.
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examined risk markers for serious delinquency in a sample of 5,935 eighth graders drawn from 11 different communities throughout the United States. They compared nonoffenders to nonviolent offenders and to serious violent offenders across 18 risk markers.
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. Adolescent offenders differ on a gradient of risk for future offending, with no distinct set of risk markers associated with the most serious and chronic offending, and approaches that use this general framework for risk have the most solid empirical basis.
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The challenge of assessing adolescent offenders regarding the most reasonable level and type of intervention once they have come to the attention of the juvenile justice system remains unsolved. ASSESSING RISK OF FUTURE CRIME AND NEED FOR SERVICE INTERVENTION Many areas of health and social service practice have come to rely more on actuarial methods for screening and assessing individuals.
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From page 146... ...
, and focusing on predicting reoffending in special populations of juvenile offenders (e.g., juvenile sex offenders) (Prentky and Righthand, 2003)
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From page 147... ...
Risk/needs assessment instruments perform well for assigning adolescent offenders to groups with different likelihoods of future offending, and the predictive accuracy of these approaches has increased as refinements have been developed (Andrews, Bonta, and Wormith, 2006; Howell, 2009)
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From page 148... ...
Current Challenges The orientation described above opens up the possibility for probation staff or the court to match adolescents more effectively with specialized treatment providers and for the court to monitor the provision of appropriate services. This latter task is rarely done effectively by the courts and represents perhaps the most fundamental payoff from advances in the assessment of adolescent offenders.
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From page 149... ...
. By monitoring the appropriateness of the court actions taken and the interventions provided, a local juvenile justice system can implement a system of graduated sanctions, assigning more intensive interventions to the most serious adolescent offenders with the most cumulative risk.
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. Limiting system involvement among adolescent offenders is often considered an indicator of progress in and of itself.
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. Making risk/ needs assessment a functional component of juvenile court practice thus takes professional commitment, adequate data systems, accurate information about service provision, and a reorientation of judges and court personnel about the mission of the juvenile court.
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EVIDENCE-BASED SERVICES FOR JUVENILE OFFENDERS Academics and practitioners have pursued a number of related activities over the last two decades that have enriched our understanding of what interventions work with juvenile offenders. Most notably, evidence about the effectiveness of intervention programs with adolescent offenders has expanded in scope and strength.
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From page 153... ...
Program Effectiveness Research Clinical trials of interventions with adolescent offenders over the past 25 years have become increasingly sophisticated scientifically and, as a result, more convincing in their claims that interventions can actually produce sizeable reductions in criminal involvement of adolescents. Recent research on interventions with juvenile offenders has, in general, been more rigorous than previous work in documenting the adolescents treated, the interventions tested, and the effects of treatment involvement.
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From page 154... ...
Using welldefined methods for determining the adequacy of a program evaluation as well as combining the reports, the analyst can derive a general estimate of the effect size of an intervention approach, that is, the reduction in the rate of rearrest associated with programs of a particular type. Meta-analyses of intervention programs with adolescent offenders (Andrews, Bonta, and
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From page 155... ...
affects the subsequent community outcomes of adolescent offenders in that setting (Schubert et al., 2012)
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Some researchers have raised the possibility that group treatments create a "contagion effect," in which adolescent offenders learn about and are reinforced for criminal involvement. The evidence for such an effect is at best equivocal, with results indicating that the level and structure of adult supervision is key to producing a positive effect from group interventions.
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From page 157... ...
, a focus on the most serious adolescent offenders, a matching of the needs of the offenders and the program orientation, and a demonstration that the program implementation has followed the program model are all associated with larger reductions in rearrests (Lipsey et al., 2010)
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From page 158... ...
Most adolescent offenders maintain contact with their families throughout and in spite of court involvement, and parents are usually the constant thread through the patch of service providers working with these adolescents. That is not to say that parents and family members are always positive influences on adolescents; some unknown percentage of parents and family members contribute to the chaos and corruption in an adolescent's development.
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It is worth emphasizing the connection between the specificity and focus of an intervention and impact. Programs with clear guidelines and methods developed over successive trials appear to have positive effects when administered by the program developers.
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Careful, quality program implementation has been identified as one of only a few factors (in addition to the presence of therapeutic intervention philosophy and serving high-risk offenders) linked to better outcomes for adolescent offenders after other aspects of programming were controlled (Lipsey, 2009)
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From page 161... ...
These accreditation systems have also provided a goal for many program developers and service providers. Becoming a Blueprints program, for example, is a certification of achievement and opportunity to develop beyond current operations; a certified status such as this makes an agency stand out in its field of competitors and gives it a marketing tool for expansion to other locales.
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. Estimates are that, even with the current level of knowledge about what constitutes effective intervention with adolescent offenders, only about 5 percent of youth eligible for evidence-based programs participate in one (Hennigan et al., 2007; Greenwood, 2008)
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Recognizing and accounting for the tendency of service providers to alter program characteristics to make them more appropriate to the clients, culture, or resources of their locale poses a serious challenge to the effort to move juvenile justice services toward more effective, evidence-based practice. One way to address the issue of program drift is to increase efforts to ensure model fidelity throughout the life of the intervention.
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, and only rigorous scientific designs can separate the wheat from the chaff. Continuous evaluation can provide information about how well any program is specifically addressing the needs and behaviors of adolescent offenders involved with it (Thornberry, 2010)
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Instead, data about program operations is used to apply a quality improvement model to help programs move toward consistent use of practices that have been shown to improve performance across a range of programs. As stated above, careful reviews of meta-analysis results as well as reviews of the organizational features of successful interventions have identified general principles that increase the likelihood of putting a program into place that works with serious adolescent offenders (Lipsey et al., 2010)
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From page 166... ...
Although it is clearly necessary to develop more innovative and proven methods for intervening with adolescent offenders, it is also critical to make sure that these services can be put into practice as designed. Ongoing organizational assessment and quality improvement are essential tasks for improving the design, delivery, and ultimate effectiveness of services for juvenile offenders.
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From page 167... ...
Our analysis covers benefit-cost analyses of programs explicitly designed to reduce juvenile crime.4 There are a number of analyses of program effects on a range of outcomes for children and youth, including schooling, earnings, teen pregnancy, and sometimes crime as well (Aos et al., 2004; Small et al., 2005; National Research Council and Institute of 4 Appendix A provides a more extensive discussion of how benefit-cost analysis is applied to juvenile justice programs.
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From page 168... ...
Although impressive, these findings are actually conservative; existing benefit-cost analyses measure the interventions' costs well but usually omit some important and possibly large categories of benefits. For juvenile offenders in group or foster homes, the benefits of multidimensional treatment foster care exceed its costs by $33,300.
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From page 169... ...
exceed their costs by roughly $65,500, $57,300, and $16,000 per participant, respectively. For the small group of juvenile sex offenders, sex offender treatment yields large benefits that exceed the high treatment cost by nearly $25,000 per participant.6 Six program models meant to limit the penetration of adolescent offenders into the juvenile justice system have benefits that substantially exceed costs.
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Costs Ratio Costs Institution Aggression replacement therapyc $66,954 $1,473 $65,481 45.5 .93 Functional family therapyc 60,639 3,198 57,341 19.0 .99 Family integrated transitionsc 27,020 10,968 16,052 2.5 .86 Sex offender treatmentb 60,477 35,592 24,885 1.7 n/a Boot campb 0 –8,661 8,661 n/a n/a Wilderness challengeb 0 3,350 –3,350 n/a n/a Group or Multidimensional treatment 40,787 7,739 33,047 5.3 n/a Foster Home foster carec Parole Regular surveillance-oriented 0 1,301 –1,301 n/a n/a parole (versus no parole supervision) b Intensive parole supervisionb 0 7,015 –7,015 n/a n/a Probation Aggression replacement therapyc 36,043 1,476 34,566 24.4 .93 Functional family therapyc 37,739 3,190 34,549 11.9 .99 Multisystemic therapyc 29,302 7,206 22,096 4.1 .91 Intensive probation supervisionb 0 1,735 –1,735 n/a n/a
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Institution Behavior modificationb 42,706 Cognitive-behavioral therapyb 7,744 Counseling, psychotherapyb 50,304 Education programsb 109,834 Life skills education programsb 13,908 Diversion Diversion with services (versus 3,982 regular juvenile court) b Other family-based therapy 40,281 programsb NOTE: n/a = estimate not available.
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From page 172... ...
The Monte Carlo results in the last column of Table 6-2 imply that one can be highly confident that aggression replacement therapy, family integrated transitions, functional family therapy, multisystemic therapy, and victim offender mediation are successful programs from a benefit-cost perspective. The probabilities that these approaches pass a benefit-cost test are all at least .86.
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From page 173... ...
Because program evaluations have not measured this second-round impact on crime, benefit-cost analyses cannot include its benefits.10 Recognizing these reasons why benefits are understated further strengthens our earlier conclusion: states and localities can invest in a variety of programs for juvenile offenders that, if implemented well, have demonstrated effectiveness for reducing reoffending and pay large dividends. SPECIFIC DETERRENCE So far, we have focused mainly on the role of providing appropriate rehabilitative services to move an adolescent onto a more positive developmental track, away from continued offending.
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The research on the applicability of deterrence models to adolescent decision making about criminal involvement, however, is rather limited. Most of the studies of the mechanisms of deterrence, with both adults and
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to exert an effect on involvement in later offending. Most notably, this line of research so far indicates that deterrence operates to curtail future offending in serious adolescent offenders, although the mechanisms of its operations may still be different in some dimensions from those observed in adult samples.
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From page 176... ...
. A recent, well-controlled analysis of the effects of institutional placement versus probation, however, indicated no reduction, or increase, in rearrest or self-reported offending among serious adolescent offenders associated with placement in a juvenile institution versus assignment to probation (Loughran et al., 2009)
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From page 177... ...
These simple regularities have implications for how to most usefully frame and respond to criminal involvement. Implications for Assessment The fact that adolescents are moving targets has implications for how one characterizes and assesses adolescent offenders.
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From page 178... ...
In addition, involvement in anti social activity, like many other adolescent behaviors, changes over time and has some relation to the developmental status of an adolescent. Considerable evidence exists that a high proportion of adolescent offenders reduce or stop their antisocial behavior as they move into their mid-20s (Broidy et al., 2003; Piquero, 2008b)
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From page 179... ...
As seen in the review above, interventions with the most success at altering the level of subsequent offending provide opportunities for an adolescent to develop successfully in a supportive social world. Model programs like those cited above work systematically with multiple aspects of the adolescent's world, including the family, the school, and the community.
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From page 180... ...
It is thus only logical, but nonetheless imperative, that the services provided to adolescent offenders foster positive, prosocial development. The developmental differences between adults and adolescents should be an orienting consideration in how assessments and interventions are designed for the juvenile justice system and how this system should differ systematically from the adult criminal justice system.
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From page 181... ...
There is no convincing evidence that confinement of juvenile offenders beyond a minimum amount required to provide sufficiently intense services for them to benefit from this experience, either in adult prisons or juvenile correctional institutions, appreciably reduces the likelihood of subsequent offending. To the extent that preventing reoffending is the primary policy consideration, juvenile court dispositions should avoid lengthy confinement, adolescents should be tried in criminal court only in the most serious cases of personal violence, and criminal court sentences should avoid confinement of adolescents in adult prisons.
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