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. The authors provide a brief overview of
the extent to which delinquency and mental illness co-occur; why treatment for
these individuals requires a system of care; intervention models; and the
juvenile justice systems role in providing mental health services to delinquent
youth. Current and future advancements and implications for practitioners are
provided.
The juvenile justice
(detention, probation, youth corrections facilities, etc.) system is currently faced with the task of
providing mental health assessments and treatment services for its youth, as
there is greater reliance on the juvenile justice system to do so. According to
Garascia (2005), the juvenile justice system was originally both a rehabilitative
and preventative approach, emphasizing the needs and rights of children over
the appeal to punish them [1]. In accordance
with The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the ultimate
goal of juvenile justice was to divert youth from the formal, punitive
processing of the adult justice system. This in turn resulted in the use of
community-based programs rather than large institutions. The 1980s to the 1990s
presented an interesting shift in the justice system’s treatment of juvenile
offenders. Prior to the 1980s, juveniles were seen as rehabilitative; however,
due to a short-lived surge in violent delinquency, protecting the community
became the primary goal [2,3,4]. Consequently,
the juvenile justice system developed an approach that uses a
punishment/criminalization perspective over a rehabilitative/medicalization
perspective [2,3,5]. Similar to the
zero-tolerance attitude of the education system, in the early 1990s more than
half of the states in the U.S. made revisions that allowed for juvenile
offenders to be easily prosecuted in the adult criminal court and began to pass
more punitive laws to address adolescent crime [2,6]. Although youth have
committed violent and nonviolent crimes at a lower rate in the past few
decades, Harms (2002) posits that the number of youth processed via the
juvenile justice system has increased [7]. In 1960
approximately 1,100 delinquency cases were processed daily, while in 2009
juvenile courts handled about 4000 delinquency cases daily, and in 2013,
approximately 2900 delinquency cases were processed daily [8]. The National
Juvenile Justice Council (NJJC) estimates that the number of delinquency cases
increased 30% between 1985 and 2009, however there was a 9% decrease between
1985 and 2013 [8]. More
specifically, delinquency caseloads involving drug offenses, person offenses,
and public order offenses increased, while property offense cases decreased between
1985 and 2013 [8]. The number of
delinquency cases involving detention peaked in 2002, but decreased 44% through
2013 to the lowest level since 1985 [8]. According to the
NJJC, despite the decrease in the volume of delinquency cases involving
detention, the proportion of cases detained was larger in 2013 (21%) than in
1985 (19%).Between 1985 and 2013, the likelihood that a delinquency case would
be handled informally (without petition for adjudication) decreased [8]. Although there
was an intermediary increase, 31% of all delinquency cases resulted in either
adjudication or waiver to criminal court in 2013, much similar to the 30% of
all cases in 1985 [8]. It appears that
some efforts have been made in the most recent years to decrease the number of
youth cases processed in the juvenile justice system; however, this may be done
by processing cases more informally or transferring cases to adult court…
Full article at:
By:
- 1School of Psychology and Counseling, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA 23464, USA. leeunde@regent.edu.
- 2Youth Development Institute, New York, NY 10013, USA. leeunde@regent.edu.
- 3School of Psychology and Counseling, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA 23464, USA. aryswas@mail.regent.edu.
- 4Youth Development Institute, New York, NY 10013, USA. aryswas@mail.regent.edu.
- Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2016 Feb 18;13(2). pii: E228. doi: 10.3390/ijerph13020228.
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