Mental health screening and assessment is crucial within juvenile correctional facilities (JC). However, limited information is available about the current screening and assessment procedures specifically within JC … The purpose of the current study was to obtain information about the mental health screening and assessment procedures used in JC throughout the United States (p. 379).

This article examines the confluence of mental health needs and racial disparities within the juvenile justice system.

Youth in Juvenile Hall are often at a critical crisis point. By the time a youth reaches Juvenile Hall, they have often been metaphorically “screaming for help” for a very long time. In other words, it may be that no one is paying attention to the family’s challenges and dysfunctions, the youth’s trauma or emotional pain or serious learning disability.

The well-documented statistics regarding the academic struggles of incarcerated youth are disconcerting, and efforts to improve reading performance among this population are greatly needed. There is a dearth of research that provides rich and detailed accounts of reading intervention implementation in the juvenile corrections setting … The present study attempted to address this gap in the research base by developing a grounded theory of literacy intervention implementation in one juvenile correctional school (p. 1).

Within the past decade, reliance on the juvenile justice system to meet the needs of juvenile offenders with mental health concerns has increased. Due to this tendency, research has been conducted on the effectiveness of various intervention and treatment programs/approaches with varied success. Recent literature suggests that because of interrelated problems involved for youth in the juvenile justice system with mental health issues, a dynamic system of care that extends beyond mere treatment within the juvenile justice system is the most promising.

Horowitz, Jake, and Arna Carlock

Pew Charitable Trusts Public Safety Performance Project (Philadelphia, PA)

“Percentage of youth in residential facilities for truancy, running away, or supervision violations increases … States send less than half as many youth to residential facilities as they did in the late 1990s, but new data from the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention show that many juveniles in out-of-home placements were not confined for serious and violent crimes.”

Little is known about what factors contribute to African American youth desisting from offending … Researchers investigated whether youth possessed protective factors and whether developmental change took place after contact with the juvenile justice system. It was hypothesized that having protective factors would decrease the likelihood of recidivism and the impact of each factor would differ by gender. Findings indicate African American youth have protective factors across a range of domains. However, little developmental change occurs after contact with the juvenile justice system.

While researchers have found that African American youth experience higher levels of juvenile justice involvement at every system level (arrest, sentencing, and incarceration) relative to their other ethnic counterparts, few studies have explored how juvenile justice involvement and number of contacts might be correlated with this broad range of problems … adolescents who reported juvenile justice system involvement versus no involvement were 2.3 times as likely to report mental health problems, substance abuse, and delinquent or youth offending behaviors.

The Standardized Program Evaluation Protocol (SPEP) is a validated, data driven rating scheme for determining how well an existing program or service matches the research evidence for the effectiveness of that particular type of intervention for reducing the recidivism of juvenile offenders. The SPEP scheme is based on a meta-analysis of over 500 studies conducted by Dr. Mark Lipsey and his colleagues over the last 30 years.

This report explains how jurisdictions have integrated the JJSIP [Juvenile Justice Systems Improvement Project] and the JJRRI [Juvenile Justice Reform and Reinvestment Initiative] into a successful “evidence-based decision-making platform, consisting of validated risk and needs assessment tools, structured decision-making tools to assist in the better matching of the needs of youth involved in the juvenile justice system with the correct level of supervision and types of services, and evidence-based programs and services (p. 3).