Resistance as ‘Escapist Practice’

This study examined the relationship of age and gender with risk of arrest among adolescents and young adults who were intensive adolescent users of public mental health services. Data were obtained from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH) and juvenile and criminal courts. Participants were youths receiving DMH adolescent case management services sometime in 1994-1996 who were born between 1976 and 1979 (781 males and 738 females). They were cross-matched to document arrests between age seven and 25. The study examined age at first arrest, age-specific risk, and the relationship between arrest history and arrest risk by gender and age. Most males (69%) and almost half the females (46%) were arrested by age 25. First arrest was most common before age 18. As in the general population, males' arrest patterns were more concerning than those of females, although patterns were of concern in both groups. Most female arrestees had multiple arrests, many as adults. No gender differences were observed for several factors, including risk of first arrest over age 18. Risk was far greater for those arrested in the previous year than for those never arrested. Findings justify concerns of public mental health systems regarding justice system involvement of adolescent clients. Risk of first arrest was significant from early adolescence through age 24, indicating a need for arrest prevention into young adulthood. The heightened arrest risk at all ages among those who were recently arrested demarcates a population in need of immediate intervention.

Youth with involvement in foster care and the juvenile justice system, often called dual-status youth, are at increased risk for negative outcomes as they transition into adulthood, including homelessness, and involvement in the adult criminal justice system. Increase of interest in the phenomenon of youth dual involvement within the last decade, reveals focus on challenges associated with the dual-status population, the importance of multi-system collaboration, and foster care factors contributing to juvenile delinquency. This study aims to build on the current literature, through exploration of how dually-involved youth make sense of their experiences in the juvenile justice and foster care systems; and what youth believe are their unique challenges of being in two systems? This phenomenological study engaged ten individuals in Houston, Texas, between the ages of 18 and 24 years old, and previously involved in the juvenile justice and foster care systems. Research subjects participated in-depth, semi-structured, and audio-recorded interviews, disclosing their experiences in two systems. Interviews were transcribed and entered in the qualitative analytical program, Atlas.ti, where common themes of participant responses were extracted. Accounts from participants highlighted three key experiences: (1) experiences of and leading to dual involvement, (2) traumatic experiences, and (3) absence of normalcy. Study results are categorized based on their pathways to dual-involvement. This current study offers rich insights into how dually-involved youth make sense of their experiences in the foster care and juvenile justice systems. Implications for enhanced service provision among child welfare and juvenile justice professionals are offered.

Mental Health and the Juvenile Justice System: Where Has History Taken Us?

PROTOCOL: The impact of juvenile system processing on delinquency

Although studies reveal substantial mental health treatment needs among youths in the juvenile justice system, far less is known about young offenders transferred to adult criminal court. This statewide study examined the mental health needs of young offenders who committed serious crimes and were transferred to adult court and subsequently incarcerated in a prison for adults. Sixty-four boys aged 16 and 17 years who were incarcerated in the Texas adult correctional system completed the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-Version 2 (MAYSI-2), a mental health screening measure widely used in the juvenile justice system. Scores from the youths in adult prison were compared with those of a matched sample of youths in juvenile correctional facilities, drawn from the MAYSI-2 normative data. Youths in adult prison reported substantial symptoms of mental health problems. Most youths surveyed (51%) scored above the highest clinical cutoff (the "warning" range) on at least one MAYSI-2 subscale. For every clinical subscale except suicide ideation, the majority of youths (54% to 70%, depending on the subscale) scored above the "caution" range. Juveniles in adult prison reported higher rates of symptoms than did those in juvenile correctional facilities (effect sizes ranged from d=.18 to d=.65, depending on the subscale). Although the mental health needs of youths in the juvenile justice system are well documented, this study reveals that mental health treatment needs appear to be even more pronounced in the small subgroup of youths transferred to the adult criminal justice system and incarcerated in adult prison.

This research delineates the concept of Juvenile Delinquency and unfurls the rudimentary underpinnings, requisites and contours of the Juvenile Justice System in Pakistan. In the second half of 20th century, the concern for protection of best interest of juveniles has attracted attention under international conventions and national legislation, whose overarching and overriding aim is to deal and manage this crucial issue of juvenile delinquency while keeping in view the ‘best interests of the child’ and ‘safeguard of their fundamental rights’. However, unfortunately some basic shortcomings persist in the overall Criminal Justice System of Pakistan to which Juvenile Justice System is a part, inter alia, overcrowding and inhuman conditions of detention centers, incapacitated staff of the prisons, callousness, abuse and exploitation at the hands of police, pathetic prosecution system and an overwhelmed judicial system whose eventualities culminate in problems for pre-trial offenders awaiting their trials, a fragile probation and parole system and lack of other diversionary measures to detention that can help reduce a great chunk of prisoners from already brimmed prisons. Juvenile Justice System particularly focuses upon not bringing the juvenile offenders encounter formal Criminal Justice System rather puts emphasis on alternate measures for the rehabilitation, re-socialization, and re-integration of the juveniles into the society. This research elaborately seeks to highlight the issues surrounding Juvenile Justice System in Pakistan and puts forward certain recommendations for the improvement of the said System with the aim of assisting policy and law makers to establish practicable strategies, translating Juvenile Justice System ‘on paper’ to ‘in practice’. For conduct of research doctrinal method has been employed with analytical and critical approach.

The juvenile justice system was developed in the late 19th century as a separate justice system for juvenile offenders. Although the juvenile justice system was initially distinct from the criminal justice system and firmly focused on rehabilitation, a series of court cases over the past 50+ years gradually reduced some of the differences between the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The result was a more adversarial context for the disposition of juvenile cases. In recent years, however, several cases from the Supreme Court of the United States and some state courts have acknowledged key differences between adolescent and adults, which has led to a dramatic shift in how juvenile offenders are handled in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

A growing body of research indicates that the majority of juveniles in the justice system have a diagnosable mental health disorder. With juvenile justice systems typically inadequately equipped to meet the treatment needs of these juveniles, increasing reliance is being placed on intersystem cooperation between the juvenile justice and adolescent mental health systems. The system of care (SOC) model has become a popular strategy for fostering intersystem coordination and collaboration and for diverting youth from the justice system to the mental health system. Local-level data from the first state to implement a SOC model on a statewide basis are analyzed. Interrupted time series analysis is used to assess whether implementation of an SOC is associated with a decrease in out-of-home placements ordered by the juvenile justice system. In 11 of 14 court jurisdictions no significant decreases in court-ordered out-of-home placements associated with SOC implementation are observed. The implications of the findings from this study for juvenile justice policy implementation are discussed.

This research utilised a range of deterministic and stochastic analyses to establish whether Queensland's juvenile justice system processes Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders differently. The impetus for this research stemmed from the continued high rates of Aboriginal over-representation within Australia's criminal justice system, despite diversionary measures to reduce such over-representation, and a commitment by the Queensland Government to reduce by 50% the number of Aboriginal peoples in custody by the year 2011. There are two competing hypotheses concerning the cause of this over-representation, (i) external factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage, unemployment or substance abuse, or (ii) systemic disparity within the criminal justice system. For this research, disparity is defined as the unacceptable use of discrimination; discrimination can be appropriate if it is used to define or enhance a situation, such as discriminating between offenders who are recidivists and those who are first time offenders. The inappropriate use of discrimination occurs for example, when harsher sentences are issued to offenders based on non-legal factors such as race or gender. Systemic disparity is therefore used here to represent the inappropriate use of discrimination against an offender by the criminal justice system. The second hypothesis, one of systemic disparity, provided the framework for this research, which posed the following primary question: Is there quantifiable evidence to support the existence of disparity acting against young male Aboriginal offenders within Queensland's juvenile justice system? Two separate but complementary studies were designed to address this issue: the pathways study and the trajectory study. The pathways study utilised 20,648 finalised appearances for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders in Queensland's juvenile courts, during 1999 to 2003. Three custodial decision-making stages (police custody, remand, and sentencing) were examined and two questions initially posed: Does the custodial decision made at one stage of the juvenile justice system impact on a subsequent custodial decision-making stage? Does criminal history, Aboriginal status, offence type or an interaction of these factors significantly influence the probability of (i) detention in police custody (ii) court remand (iii) a custodial order at sentencing? It was recognised that other legally relevant factors such as family structure and stability, school attendance and community ties might also influence these custodial decisions; however, for the purposes of this research it was not possible to include these variables in the analyses. Controlling for criminal history, findings from logistic regression analyses indicated that being detained in police custody increased the odds of being remanded into custody, and being remanded into custody increased the odds of a custodial order. Whilst Aboriginal status was not a consistent factor at any of these three custodial stages, there was clear evidence of disparity acting against the young male Aboriginal offender, particularly early in their criminal career. To examine these disparities further, these three custodial stages were modeled as eight processing pathways: four of which resulted in a custodial order and four in a noncustodial order. Using this processing model, a third question was posed: Do young Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal male offenders have different custodial pathways? Findings indicated that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders were in general, processed along similar custodial pathways that did not include police custody, remand or a custodial order. However, young male Aboriginal offenders were less likely than equivalent non-Aboriginal offenders to have been processed along this pathway and more likely to be processed along the pathways that included remand. It was found that young offenders with a chronic criminal history were more likely to be processed along these remand pathways, and Aboriginal offenders were more likely to have a chronic criminal history than non-Aboriginal offenders; there was clear evidence of disparity at specific custodial stages of the system. In addition, as young male Aboriginal offenders progressed deeper into the system there was evidence of cumulative disparity, particularly along the remand pathways, meaning that the probability of being in custody increases as the offender progresses from one custodial stage to the next custodial stage. Given the existence of disparity, acting within the juvenile justice system and against the young male Aboriginal offender, it was important to formulate viable solutions to such disparity, particularly in light of the Queensland government's commitment to reduce Aboriginal offenders in custody by 50%. Deterministic analyses and computer simulations were used to test the viability of various reduction scenarios suggested by the data. Despite in some instances, different results from the deterministic analyses and the computer simulations, overall findings indicated that to reduce custodial disparity whether at the remand stage, the custodial order stage, or in custody overall (the summation of police custody, remand and custodial orders) that reducing remand, regardless of whether the young offender had been in police custody or not, was the best overall solution. The trajectory study built on the findings of the pathways study, which had identified criminal history as an important factor in the processing pathways of young male Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders. Using the semi-parametric group based method, the criminal trajectories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders in Queensland were modeled. These trajectories were based on the finalised appearances of two cohorts of young offenders aged 10 to 17 years of age: those born in 1983 and 1984 and who had turned 18 years of age in 2001 and 2002 respectively. All of these young male offenders had entered the adult system when they turned 17 years of age, and this data provided their complete juvenile history in Queensland. Prior analyses using this method had not considered Aboriginal status or race as a determining factor in these trajectory models, nor had these models been validated either internally or externally in published works. For this research, internal validity was considered as the correct classification of offenders into trajectory groups, and external validity as the ability to reproduce these results in a second or subsequent sample of juvenile offenders. Two questions were therefore posed in the trajectory study: Do young Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal male offenders have different criminal trajectories? Can the predicted model(s) be validated, both internally and externally? Initial findings indicated that the optimal trajectory models selected on prior knowledge and the Bayesian Information Criterion did not validate internally. This finding brought into question the trajectory results of other published works that had not internally validated their models. The models finally selected as optimal indicated that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders did not have a common criminal trajectory and could not be modeled as one population. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young offenders were modeled by a low-frequency group, a late-onset group, and a chronic trajectory group. However, the young male Aboriginal offender was more likely than the non-Aboriginal to have been in the chronic or the late onset group and less likely to have been in the lowfrequency group. External validation utilised an innovative but simple method that utilised all of the data in the modeling process along with a sample of this same data for validation purposes: 10% of the criminal profiles, which were characteristic of the trajectory groups, and a further 5% of randomly selected profiles were chosen for validation. All of the characteristic profiles, but only 50% of the randomly selected profiles were validated, and of the latter, the majority not validated was in the late-onset group. In total, 79.2% of the Aboriginal trajectories and 85.6% of the non-Aboriginal criminal trajectories were correctly externally validated. Overall, there are two important implications from this research for government. First, even though young male Aboriginal offenders are more likely to have a chronic criminal history than non-Aboriginal offenders, this factor does not account for all of the observed disparity acting against the young Aboriginal offender within Queensland's juvenile justice system: there is evidence of disparity within the system that is unaccounted for by either offence type or criminal history. Second, given this chronic criminal history, systemic solutions to systemic disparity whilst viable, will not ultimately resolve this problem: they are only short-term measures at the end of a very long justice system. Longer-term solutions are needed to address external factors such as socio-economic disadvantage, unemployment and substance abuse in Aboriginal communities, before these young people are exposed to the system. Continuing to concentrate on systemic solutions, to such an entrenched problem as Aboriginal overrepresentation and disparity, is a misdirection of system resources and is inconsistent with social justice.

Purpose The main aim of the study is to identify the training needs of juvenile justice professionals working with Muslim minors and young people. The Italian juvenile justice system faces numerous challenges in protecting the well-being of young people of Islamic faith under its care. These individuals, often subjected to psychological violence due to the double stigma of being both immigrants and Muslims, may experience low levels of well-being. Combined with the psychological stress of arrest and detention, this can increase their vulnerability. In the absence of adequate protective factors, these conditions may facilitate a path toward criminal careers, from which disengagement is particularly difficult. Design/methodology/approach An online questionnaire was administered to 74 helping professionals (50% response rate) operating in custodial and non-custodial facilities of the Juvenile Justice Center of Sicily Region (Italy), who work with young people and young adults of Islamic faith. Findings Nearly half of operators (45.9%) self-reported poor or sufficient multicultural competences. The most critical training needs identified were intercultural communication (73%), psychological support (68%) and intercultural approaches (68%). Language barriers and ethnic prejudice emerged as the primary challenges for young Muslims (76% each), followed by cultural identity issues (57%). Operators reported limited access to cultural mediators (mentioned by 75.5% as a barrier) and insufficient collaboration with local Islamic associations. Only 20.3% of respondents indicated adequate institutional provisions for religious practices (halal food, prayer spaces and spiritual care). Research limitations/implications The study’s findings were not nationally representative. Juvenile justice in Italy varies significantly between regions due to differences in available resources and the specific characteristics of migration flows. However, Sicily hosts four of Italy’s 17 juvenile detention facilities and serves as a primary entry point for migration flows from Africa. Furthermore, while sharing fundamental principles with other European countries, the Italian system has distinctive features that make international comparisons challenging. Practical implications Based on the findings, the Universities of Padua, Verona, Bari and Palermo, together with the Department of Juvenile and Community Justice, signed a letter of intent in February 2025 to define collaboration modalities and initiate an operational agreement. Such initiatives can serve as protective factors for young Muslims’ well-being, fostering individualized interventions and integrated support. Originality/value This contribution provides a snapshot of the training needs of practitioners working with Muslim young people. At present, there are no other similar studies in Italy; in fact, it has also been authorized by the Department of Juvenile and Community Justice, which is headquartered in Rome (Italy).

One of the main rationales for the separation of the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems, is the need to protect young people from victimization. It is assumed that, by separating adolescents from adults, the risk of victimization in the former system will be reduced. However, there is still global scarcity of comparative data on the experience of victimization among youth processed through these two justice systems, from which such conclusions can be reached. This study compares self-reported victimization among fifty (50) boys who were processed through the juvenile justice system with an equal number who were processed through the general adult criminal justice system in Lagos (mean age = 16.3 ± 2.0 years). Results showed that the odds of forced confessions (OR = 7.9, CI = 2.7- 37.2 p < 0.001) and torture (OR = 17.0; 4.6 − 63.1) was significantly higher when arrested by the regular police compared with the juvenile police. In the course of detention, however, there was no statistically significant difference in the odds of reporting most other forms of victimization between the two groups. The study concludes that, as far as victimization of young inmates is concerned, boys detained in juvenile institutions did not fare better than those detained in adult prison.

This article describes the potential contributions of psychological assessments to the processing of youths in juvenile justice and correctional systems. Standardized psychological assessment instruments and procedures are shown to be superior to the informal and unstandardized procedures often employed in these systems, and they are also shown to lead to more effective decisions about youths. Major types of assessments relevant to juvenile justice and correctional systems are reviewed as are models for introducing psychological services into the systems.

Examine the impact of Colorado's Medicaid mental health carve-out program on children in child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Medicaid claims and encounter data for two experimental managed care sites and one comparison fee-for-service site are used to estimate a two-part model of inpatient, outpatient, and residential treatment center utilization, controlling for patient characteristics. The study finds that juvenile justice and child welfare populations were more strongly affected by managed care than the general youth population, regarding reduced utilization of inpatient and outpatient services. Increases in Residential Treatment Centers use were greater for juvenile justice than either the child welfare sample or the total sample. Youth in child welfare increase utilization of outpatient services. Most utilization effects are stronger for not-for-profit than for-profit managed care organizations. The experience of Colorado implies that a mental health carve-out affects patterns of care for youth and differentially so for youth in juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Controlling for population characteristics, the effects are stronger for not-for-profit than for-profit managed care organizations.

State Mental Health Policy: Mental Health Transformation: Moving Toward a Public Health, Early-Intervention Approach in Texas

An examination of the effect of area-level characteristics on juvenile justice and child welfare referrals using multivariate Bayesian spatial modeling.