Introduction

Identifying and responding to juvenile substance use and abuse are central to the mission of the juvenile justice system. The reasons are clear:

• Of the approximately 2.4 million juvenile arrests each year, more than 203,000 are for drug charges (Snyder, 2002). As of October 27, 1999, nearly 109,000 juvenile offenders were in custody in juvenile residential placement facilities; approximately 9,880 of these youth (9 percent) were held for drug charges (Sickmund, forthcoming).
  
  
• Many youth in the justice system have a substance use disorder (Atkins et al., 1999; Gray and Wish, 1998; Marsteller et al., 1997; Teplin et al., 2002), and many more regularly use illicit substances (Crowe, 1998; Dembo et al., 1993, 1999; Feucht, Stephens, and Walker, 1994; Kang, Magura, and Shapiro, 1994).

Juveniles are not likely to be candid about their use of drugs and, like adult detainees, juveniles in detention are especially reticent. Juvenile justice authorities should, therefore, be prepared to identify sub-stance use problems among detainees and to use this information to provide treatment and diversion (Gray and Wish, 1998; Crowe, 1998; Bilchik, 1998; Cocozza, 1992; Teplin, 2001).

The Northwestern Juvenile Project is a study of 1,829 juveniles sampled from intake at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago, IL. Researchers gathered extensive self-report data on substance use and collected urine samples for drug analysis. This Bulletin describes the self-report and urinalysis findings, with the goal of providing practical guidance for juvenile justice policymakers and administrators planning drug detection and treatment programs.

The Bulletin has four sections. The first presents background information on the effects of substance use and abuse on adolescent development, demonstrating the significant role of this factor in delinquency. The second section reviews literature on the measurement of illicit substance use in detained and securely confined juvenile populations and assesses the state of the science. The third section presents empirical findings from the Northwestern Juvenile Project on the relative merits of self-report and urinalysis measures and on the prevalence of illicit substance use among detained juveniles by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and type of substance. The final section discusses the implications of these findings.

The authors conclude that presently there is no single reliable method for detecting substance use and abuse among juvenile detainees. The best approach to reliable assessment uses a combination of existing methods, together with information from a range of other sources that indicate a youth’s involvement with drugs.

Detection and Prevalence of Substance Use Among Juvenile Detainees	OJJDP Bulletin • June 2004