Special Themed Section on Emerging Findings From the Frontlines of Juvenile Justice Transformation

The last decade is notable for the re-envisioning of juvenile justice practice and strides to reform the juvenile justice system. The National Research Council’s (2013) report Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach provided seven recommendations for transformation: providing accountability without criminalization, providing alternatives to system involvement, and increased family engagement. The RFK Research Council for Juvenile Justice outlined the operational capacities that would be needed to achieve these aims (Tuell and Harp, 2019), including the need for collaborative leadership, positive youth development programs, better implementation of risk and needs tools, and quality assurance infrastructure. Similarly, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges passed a resolution indicating the need for probation supervision to reflect principles of adolescent development including the use of positive reinforcement, family engagement, and personalized plans based on need rather than offense type. Collectively reform efforts have resulted in structured risk and needs tools for case planning, the use of diversion for minor offenses, use of incentives, family engagement, collaborative leadership, reduced use of detention and youth homes, depopulation of residential facilities, and other areas.

In this special themed section, we desired to highlight findings in transformative areas of juvenile justice operations. Our initial goal was not to focus on ancillary treatment programs, probation programs, court processes, diversion, and/or leadership training. That is, we were interested in scholarly studies that examined fundamental transformations in system operations. We discovered that there was little academically oriented research that was being devoted to documenting, studying, and measuring the impact of these transformation, and that there are few efforts to advance our knowledge about both how to do transformation and the resulting impacts of these transformations. We were primarily interested in system change at the macro-level to help inform others about what transformation no the ground looks like, and how it affects the operations of a juvenile justice system.

To our surprise, we were disappointed in how few scholars are studying the juvenile justice transformation process, especially as it relates to systems and system operations. We did find, in our call for papers, that there were exciting and novel efforts to advance micro-level changes, which may lead to greater changes over time. That is, these papers document the beginning of early adopters of policy and programmatic change that could be the instigator for later policy reform. We are grateful to the authors that were interested in sharing their results and their efforts to help select juvenile justice agencies become early adopters of efforts to broaden the perspective of how agents of juvenile justice can improve youth outcomes. In this special themed section, we present these innovations with the sole goal of illustrating some of the novel efforts in the field, and helping to illustrate where the field can grow to reduce the demand on the juvenile justice system for youth that are engaged in a variety of disruptive, potentially harmful behaviors.

We begin with a study by Kathry Anne A. Cunningham, Noah R. R. Gubner, Kristin Vick, Jerald R. R. Herting, and Sarah Cusworth C. Walker to realign juvenile justice with behavioral health principles, including those for positive development. This article covers a novel probation model, opportunity-based probation (OBP), that integrates neuroscience, brain development, and behavior change into a new approach for probation officers. OBP uses an incentive model to work with youth (and their families) by providing clear short-term goals to achieve. Officers involve the parents in the guidance process and rewarding of youth for achievement of the goals. This quasi-experimental designed showed an impact on new arrests but not technical violations, mixed results that should be examined in future work. OBP however illustrates that it is positive to integrate neuroscience into supervision practices.

Another study focused on a novel approach to dealing with youth substance use disorders. Katherine Elkington, Gail Robson, Corianna Sichel, Jacqueline Lee, and Gail Wasserman detail Family Connect which is a behavioral health system linkage intervention. The intervention uses a Linkage Specialist that works with the probation and behavioral health systems, as well as the family. These specialists provide boundary-spanning services that support the youth and family in acquiring services that address their needs. A quasi-experimental design assesses the impact on 18 dyads and 95 control groups on a myriad of care efforts—referrals, intake, and initiate treatment. The linkages are supported in this pilot data to increase access to care. And, families and youth found the intervention to be acceptable.

A third intervention study by Sydney Ingel, Lynnea Davis, Danielle S. Rudes, Faye S. Taxman, Taylor Hartwell, Tess Drazdowski, Michael McCart, Jason Chapman, and Ashli Sheidow uses contingency management or rewards for youth with a substance use disorder. Officers are trained to use the rewards and to work with parents to also use rewards. This qualitative study focused on the perceptions of officers, an understudied population in juvenile justice research, on rewards. Overall officers valued parental involvement, and in fact found the reward system to be beneficial to engage parents.

The last article in our series tackles the issues of the emergence of COVID-19 and its impact on the juvenile justice system. Ashley Lockwood, Jill Viglione, and Jennifer H. Peck used self-report survey data from juvenile justice administrators to learn about the challenges they encountered, the strategies used to respond to COVID-19 and maintain the integrity of their services, and the pressing issues in the juvenile justice (community) system. Administrators revealed how they responded, adapted, and ensure the safety of their staff and the youth they supervise. This study has implications regarding the flexibility of juvenile justice agencies and their efforts to provide safe, secure services.

This special themed section illustrates some of the innovations that are occurring in the field of community supervision by finding ways to incentive parents to be part of the intervention with their youth, by providing rewards instead of sanctions which is a core feature of developmental science (youth respond to positives over negatives), and by being adaptive to the surrounding environment. These studies cover an array of agencies and the theme is clear—juvenile justice agencies are prepared to make significant shifts in core operations (e.g., probation and decision-making) to more effectively engage families and youth. The studies are particularly promising in the many ways they are transferring officer power and sharing decision-making with parents, linkage facilitators, and others that are directly involved in the lives of the youth. This is encouraging progress. This call for papers also highlighted for us that a number of justice system transformation efforts are not documented in the academic literature. Supported through nonresearch government or private funding, the field may be losing valuable information about successful and unsuccessful innovations. To capture the knowledge being produced by these efforts, the field might consider funding university-based researchers to study system-level efforts with community partners and government-funded technical assistance providers. This is an exciting time in the field and over the next few years we will be exploring how additional systemic transformations are advancing calls for de-criminalization, community-based diversion, and ongoing The National Research Council’s (2013) Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Committee on Law and Justice; Committee on Assessing Juvenile Justice Reform. In: R. J. Bonnie, R. L. Johnson, B. M. Chemers, & J. A. Schuck (Eds.), Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach. The National Academies Press.