Interventions
Most juvenile justice, child welfare, and school resources currently focus on adolescent juvenile offenders and problem children whose behaviors are already persistent or on education and behavior management programs for youth in middle and high schools rather than on children in elementary schools or preschools. Interventions usually seek to remediate disruptive behavior, child delinquency, and serious and violent offending after these behaviors have emerged.
The Study Group concluded that prevention is a better approach. Of all known interventions to reduce juvenile delinquency, preventive interventions that focus on child delinquency will probably take the largest “bite” out of crime. Specifically, these efforts should be directed first at the prevention of persistent disruptive behavior in children in general; second, at the prevention of child delinquency, particularly among disruptive children; and third, at the prevention of serious and violent juvenile offending, particularly among child delinquents. “The earlier the better” is a key theme in establishing interventions to prevent child delinquency, whether these interventions focus on the individual child, the home and family, or the school and community.
Support for prevention and early intervention was generally endorsed by practitioners. An opinion survey of practitioners conducted by the Study Group found that nearly three-quarters (71 percent) thought that effective methods were available to deal with child delinquents to reduce their risk of future offending. On the other hand, only 3–6 percent of the practitioners thought that current juvenile justice, mental health, or child welfare programs were effective in achieving this goal (Farrington, Loeber, and Kalb, 2001).
Following a public health approach to intervention, the Study Group recommended preventive and remedial interventions that focus on known risk factors and on knowledge of the behavior development of juveniles (see figure 3). However, the Study Group cautions that there is no single magic bullet for preventing or correcting child delinquency. Investigation of interventions for child delinquency clearly demonstrates that multiple risk factors, their relationships with one another, and their complexity pose important challenges for implementing interventions. Comprehensive public health interventions should focus on changing both the conditions and institutions that influence offending in the community (Farrington, 1994, 2000).
In addition, mental health, welfare, and juvenile justice interventions for child delinquency must deal with the multiple problems stemming from dysfunctional families.
Promising Interventions
The most promising school and community prevention programs for child delinquency focus on several risk domains (Herrenkohl et al., 2001). The Study Group recommends integrating the following types of school and community prevention programs:
- Classroom and behavior management programs.
- Multicomponent classroom-based programs.
- Social competence promotion curriculums.
- Conflict resolution and violence prevention curriculums.
- Bullying prevention.
- Afterschool recreation programs.
- Mentoring programs.
- School organization programs.
- Comprehensive community interventions.
Several unique programs
have demonstrated that interventions with young children can reduce later
delinquency. The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project focuses on 3- and
4-year-olds at risk for school failure. In this program, treatment group
participants, when compared with control group participants, showed a
number of benefits across a range of prosocial functioning indicators,
including fewer than half the lifetime arrests (Schweinhart, Barnes, and
Weikart, 1993). The Elmira Prenatal/ Early Infancy Project sent nurses
to the homes of pregnant, unmarried women in households with low socioeconomic
status. These visits began during pregnancy and continued to the end of
the second year after the child’s birth. By the time the children
were 15 years old, the positive impact of the visits was reflected in
a decrease in children’s reports of arrests, convictions, violation
of probation, consumption of alcohol, sexual activity, and running away
from home (Olds et al., 1998). As another example, Webster-Stratton (1998)
has developed a comprehensive and successful training program for parents
of Head Start children that includes a focus on social skills and prosocial
behavior.
The Study Group’s analyses of three recent service delivery studies—the Great Smoky Mountains Study of youth in North Carolina, the Patterns of Care program in San Diego, CA, and the southwestern Pennsylvania Costs of Services in Medicaid Study (Burns et al., 2001)—strongly indicate that the first step toward obtaining effective treatment is to provide families with access to mental health and other services. While the very early detection of emotional and behavior problems is a public health goal, results have not been encouraging. The delay between symptom onset and help seeking is apparent, and the rates of mental health interventions in juvenile justice are extremely low. Clearly, a mechanism for obtaining timely, specialized help is imperative. Such help could also alleviate the high cost of care—both psychiatric and general medical—for youth with the diagnosis of conduct disorder.
It is extremely important to communicate to mental health and other services what treatments are effective. For example, many juvenile offender intervention programs, such as Multisystemic Therapy (MST) (Henggeler, Pickrel, and Brondino, 1999), have had a significant impact on reducing the rates of felonies. Currently, OJJDP is testing the ability to disseminate MST in a large, three-city study, with the goals of identifying effective methods for dissemination, retraining clinicians, and developing approaches to ensure quality implementation.
Juvenile Justice Programs
Because children are malleable, adolescence has generally been recognized as “a stage of developmental immaturity that rendered youths’ transgressions less blameworthy than those of adults and required a special legal response” (Grisso, 1996). Traditionally, juvenile courts do not adjudicate very young, first-time offenders and step in only when such institutions as families, social and child protective services, and schools fail in their efforts with children.
Unfortunately, the juvenile court has long served as a dumping ground for a wide variety of problem behaviors of children that other institutions (e.g., social, mental health, and child protective services) fail to serve adequately (Kupperstein, 1971; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995). Although collaboration between juvenile justice and child and adolescent social services was once considered the cornerstone of a comprehensive childcare system, the two systems are severely fragmented. The deinstitutionalization and diversion policies of the past 25 years have turned child delinquents away from juvenile courts, resulting in sparse program development for these children.
Although few programs in the juvenile justice system are explicitly designed for child delinquents, new models are being developed. Currently, only a few well-organized, integrated programs for child delinquents exist in North America (Howell, 2001). Most of them involve coordinated efforts among police, the public, prosecutors, judges, schools, and mental health services. These programs have yet to be evaluated, and their long-term success may depend on receiving consistent funding from year to year. Several of the most promising programs are listed below:
- Michigan Early Offender Program. This program provides specialized, intensive, in-home interventions to youth who are age 13 or younger at the time of first adjudication and who have two or more prior police contacts (Howitt and Moore, 1991).
- Minnesota Delinquents Under 10 Program. This program includes interventions such as sending parents an admonishment letter from the county attorney, referring delinquents to child protective services and other agencies, identifying diversion programs, identifying children in need of protection or services petitions, and targeting early intervention for high-risk children (see, e.g., Stevens, Owen, and Lahti-Johnson, 1999).
- Toronto Under 12 Outreach Project.
This fully developed Canadian program emphasizes a multisystemic
approach combining interventions
that target children, parents, schools,
and communities. It includes a
centralized police protocol to expedite
services for children who engage in delinquent activity (Hrynkiw-Augimeri, Pepler, and Goldberg, 1993).
- Sacramento County Community Intervention Program. This program provides services coordinated by a community intervention specialist who conducts an indepth, strength-based family assessment, including physical and mental health, substance abuse, economic strengths/needs, vocational strengths/needs, family functioning, and social functioning (Brooks and Pettit, 1997).
All multisystemic programs designed to deal with child delinquency rely on particular approaches and programs targeting the child, the family, peers, the school, and the community. Many programs either have proven to be effective or hold promise within these domains, such as Parent Management Training (Patterson, Reid, and Dishion, 1992), Functional Family Therapy (Sexton and Alexander, 2000), and MST (Henggeler, Pickrel, and Brondino, 1999). In terms of peer interventions, care must be taken when delinquent or highly disruptive children are brought together for group therapy because of the potential contaminating effects (Dishion, McCord, and Poulin, 1999). Peer interventions are best undertaken in conjunction with other programs (Coie and Miller-Johnson, 2001). School programs (e.g., the Good Behavior Game and the FastTrack Program [Herrenkohl et al., 2001]) and community programs (e.g., Communities That Care [Hawkins and Catalano, 1992]) may help alleviate risk factors for child delinquency.
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Child Delinquents, Incarceration, and Legal Sanctions
The Study Group found no studies showing that incarceration of serious child delinquents results in a substantial reduction in recidivism or the prevention of later serious and violent offending. In addition, victimization by older, serious delinquent offenders in correctional facilities may fuel criminal propensities in child delinquents. Likewise, the Study Group does not advocate increased legal sanctions for nonserious child delinquents. Instead, more programs that specifically target child delinquents are needed, including specific procedures on how to deal with child delinquents when there is an absolute need for their detention. Nonserious child delinquents can best be dealt with in the mental health and the child welfare systems, with a focus on interventions involving the children’s parents. |
A community policing program has also demonstrated some success in working with child delinquents. The OJJDP-funded New Haven Child Development–Community Policing Program (Marans and Berkman, 1997) brings police officers and mental health professionals together to provide each other with training, consultation, and support and to provide direct interdisciplinary intervention to children who are victims of, witnesses to, or perpetrators of violent crimes.
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