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A national study of clinical directors examined professional development (PD) focused on mental health provided to professionals in juvenile justice facilities for adjudicated youth. A total of 85 clinical directors responded to a mail survey (45% return rate). The survey questions related to (a) topics of staff training and the basis for choosing topics, (b) which professionals participated in each PD topic, (c) training format and frequency of PD, (d) recommended attributes of PD, (e) methods of evaluating PD, and (f) adequacy of PD and how can it be improved. For each topic, PD was typically provided once per year and face to face, rather than online. PD participation rates were commonly in the 30% and 40% ranges for professionals other than clinical directors and counselors, with teachers, correctional officers, administrators, and teaching assistants receiving PD the least. Rarely did PD include recommended attributes of PD, and it was commonly viewed as ineffective. Implications for research and practice related to PD and its relationship to youth reentry from juvenile justice facilities are discussed.

Since Miller v. Alabama (2012), 18 states and the District of Columbia abolished juvenile life without parole sentences. This thesis examines the arguments, norms, logic, and messages utilized at each state since Miller to support the elimination of juvenile life without parole sentences. The arguments either stem from the nature of children or the nature of the sentence itself. Scientific studies that confirm the distinctive psychological attributes of youth has been adduced to argue for the diminished culpability of children, the inability of the sentence to serve its penological goals, children’s capacity of change, and the fallacy of the predictive enterprise to determine the incorrigibility of a juvenile offender. The harshness of the sentence itself, domestic and foreign practice, the prohibition of the sentence under international human rights law, the fiscal and behavioral benefits of offering the possibility of parole, and the racial disparities of the sentence have also been argued at the state-level. The effectiveness of the arguments above may be enhanced when they are delivered by formerly incarcerated youth or victims of violence or when they are reframed as a religious ideal to a more conservative, religious audience.

According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2014), approximately 50,821 adolescents are held in residential placement facilities on any given day in the United States. Data suggests that about 20% of these adolescents suffer from mental health issues (Shelton, et al., 2011). This paper reviewed studies of three different group work-based treatment interventions: mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and dialectical-behavioral therapy. The analysis will examine whether these interventions can effectively reduce maladaptive cognitions and decrease self-destructive behaviors, and whether they can be applied to adolescents aged 12-19 in correctional settings. Five studies met inclusion criteria; however, due to limitations including small sample sizes, a lack of follow up, a variety of behaviors being measured, and a range of different types of skills groups, several were excluded. For the purposes of this review, the term “residential setting” will refer to correctional settings, inpatient psychiatric settings, and residential settings, and the terms “youth,” “juveniles,” and “adolescents,” will be used interchangeably.

Justice-involved youth are at increased risk of contracting HIV and STIs. HIV/STI prevention programs for justice-involved youth are typically implemented with detained and/or incarcerated youth. The majority of arrested youth is diverted from juvenile detention and/or placement and remain in the community. These youth, known as court-involved, non-incarcerated (CINI) youth, are exposed to the same sexual health risks as their detained and/or incarcerated peers, but have greater opportunities to engage in sexual risk-taking and less access to needed sexual health care and intervention. Providing CINI youth with sexual health programming and HIV/STI prevention interventions is vital to ensuring these youths' long-term sexual health as well as addressing a major public health issue. This study examined differences in sexual health knowledge and engagement in risky sex behaviors among 625 young adults with and without juvenile arrest histories. Young adults were identified as former community youth if they had not been arrested prior to age 18; former CINI youth, if arrested before age 18 and only detained for no more than 30 days; or former incarcerated youth if arrested before age 18 and placed within a post-adjudication juvenile justice facility for more than 30 days. Results revealed that participants held similar degrees of sexual health knowledge, with greater familiarity of HIV than STI information. Notably, former CINI youth engaged more frequently in risky sex behaviors than did former community youth. Further, the prototype-willingness model was applied to sexual risk-taking in this young adult sample to identify areas warranting future sexual health programming for CINI youth. Favorable impressions of sexually promiscuous peers and willingness to have unprotected sex appeared to positively influence former community and former CINI youths' engagement in risky sex behaviors. Results are discussed in the context of modifying existing sexual health programming and substance use treatment for former community and former incarcerated youth as well as implementing peer-based HIV/STI interventions to better meet CINI youths' unique sexual health needs.

This thesis examines the current Chinese youth criminal justice system. Specifically, it observes the changes that have been made since the well-publicised reforms of 2012 which ostensibly embraced a rights-based approach to juvenile justice. With a mixture of doctrinal research along with an empirical study, the thesis considers the relevant international legal instruments as benchmarks, and begins an evaluation regarding whether China has reached these standards, or whether it still falls short of expectations. Thesis (PhD(Law))--University of South Australia, 2016. Includes bibliographical references (pages 271- 292)

Hiring and maintaining quality staff members is crucial in juvenile correctional facilities. Unfortunately, staff turnover is much more common in correctional agencies than other areas of government work. Although several studies have looked at rates and predictors of employee turnover in adult correctional facilities, few have assessed the issue among juvenile correctional staff. Therefore, this study was guided by two main questions: (1) what are the current turnover rates among frontline staff members at Delaware's public juvenile correctional facilities, and (2) what are the main factors that lead to frontline staff leaving? To answer the above questions, this study used a mixed-methods approach consisting of three stages. In the first stage, total rates of voluntary turnover were provided by an administrator from Delaware State's Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) Personnel Department. The voluntary turnover rates for juvenile correctional officers in Delaware's public facilities for 2011 and 2012 were 7 percent and 13 percent, respectively. This is slightly less than voluntary turnover rates from previous studies on juvenile correctional staff. The next two stages of research were designed to assess the best predictors of intentions to leave for Delaware's frontline staff members. Specifically, the second stage consisted of interviews with 14 staff members from five residential facilities across Delaware. The interviews increased our understanding of how aspects of job satisfaction and organizational commitment apply to this particular sample of employees and provided greater insight into two recently developed aspects of employee turnover theory: Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI). More importantly, three aspects of employee turnover for this sample were discovered: commitment to youth, career stepping stone and job expectations. The discovery of new variables supports the idea that it is important for researchers assessing employee turnover to conduct face-to-face interviews with employees prior to analyzing survey data. The final stage of research compared three models of employee turnover. The first was based on Lambert's 2001 model of correctional officer turnover which stemmed from employee turnover theory. The second model was designed to assess improvement in predicting intentions to leave by incorporating two concepts, Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI), that have not been tested in many studies on employee turnover. The last model that was tested incorporated the three new variables that were created based on the interviews in stage two. Intentions to leave was used as the outcome variable in this study. It measures the extent to which a person desires to leave his or her job. It was chosen for two reasons: 1) Samples consisting of employees who have quit can take years to obtain and 2) Assessing employees intentions to leave could be more useful to administrators. The sample for the last stage of this study consisted of 102 frontline staff members from five of Delaware's six facilities. The data for the last portion of this study were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). This method was appropriate because it could assess the impact of both direct and indirect measures. However, because the sample size for this study was not adequate to run any of the models in full, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was also incorporated. Results from the quantitative portion of this study showed that there were several variables that predicted intentions to leave for this sample. Similar to most studies that look at intentions to leave, job satisfaction and organizational commitment were two of the strongest predictors of intentions to leave. In terms of individual characteristics, race/ethnicity was the only statistically significant predictor. What was especially interesting about this result was that when previous studies found a race effect, it was that African Americans had higher levels of intentions to leave. This was not the case for this sample. Along these lines, race/ethnicity was significantly associated with one of the factors from Job Embeddedness, organizational fit, which assesses if employees believe they are an appropriate match for their job. Interestingly, whites had lower levels of organizational fit which resulted in higher levels of intentions to leave. Findings from this study have implications for the correctional literature and employee turnover theory. This study supported a long history of employee turnover studies that have found job satisfaction and organizational commitment to be the best predictors of employee turnover. At the same time, this study also found a new predictor of employee turnover specific to juvenile correctional officers: commitment to youth. This stands to have a major impact on future research on employee turnover, not just for juvenile corrections but also studies in the larger body of employee turnover in that this study made it clear that one model does not fit all workers. The concept, commitment to youth, applies only to employees who work with youths. And, the particular way commitment to youth was measured in the present study would only apply to those who work with at-risk youths. Therefore, this study should be viewed as an important step towards understanding the relationship between commitment to youth and decisions made by juvenile correctional officers. This study also had important implications for administrators of juvenile correctional facilities. A major finding stemming from the interviews, which was subsequently confirmed by the quantitative analysis, was that support from coworkers is vital to the overall performance of staff. In fact, subjects reported that a lack of support from coworkers was the difference between a good day and a bad day, and that it was never the juveniles that created a bad day for staff; it was their coworkers. Based on this finding, it is vital that administrators stress the importance of not only working as a team, but also the importance of respecting fellow staff members, especially in front of youths. To do this, administrators should encourage supervisors to demonstrate this type of behavior every day and stress the importance of it during trainings, especially the impact it can have on the residents; several staff members discussed how the youthful offenders can easily detect bad feelings among staff.

BackgroundVery little research has examined the relationship between resilience, risk, and the service use patterns of adolescents with complex needs who use multiple formal and mandated services such as child welfare, mental health, juvenile justice, and special educational supports. This article reports on a study of 497 adolescents in Atlantic Canada who were known to have used at least 2 of these services in the last 6 months. It was hypothesized that greater service use and satisfaction with services would predict both resilience, and better functional outcomes such as prosocial behavior, school engagement and participation in community.MethodsYouth who were known to be multiple service users and who were between the ages of 13 and 21 participated in the study. Participants completed a self-report questionnaire administered individually. Path analysis was used to determine the relationship between risk, service use, resilience, and functional outcomes. MANOVA was then used to determine patterns of service use and service use satisfaction among participants.ResultsFindings show that there was no significant relationship between service use history and resilience or any of the three functional outcomes. Service use satisfaction, a measure of an adolescent's perception of the quality of the services received, did however show a strong positive relationship with resilience. Resilience mediates the impact of risk factors on outcomes and is affected positively by the quality, but not the quantity, of the psychosocial services provided to adolescents with complex needs.ConclusionsResults show that resilience is related to service satisfaction but not the quantity of services used by youth. Coordinated services may not increase resilience or be more effective unless the quality of individual services is experienced by an adolescent receiving intervention as personally empowering and sensitive to his or her needs.Keywords: Resilience, Child welfare, Mental health, Juvenile corrections, Educational supports, Service use, Service satisfaction, Adolescents, Contextual risk

Most incarcerated juvenile offenders have progressed through an often disconnected system of alternative education that may begin with in school suspension, removal to district alternative education programs (DAEPs), referral to juvenile justice alternative education programs (JJAEP) and ultimately to state run juvenile corrections facilities, typically operated by a state’s Youth Authority (YA) or Youth Commission (YC). Correctional education programs are guided by contrasting theories of correction and education, often creating a gap in student learning. According to one Youth Authority, 30-70% of their system’s juvenile inmates are serviced by Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), predominantly for Learning Disabilities and Emotional Disorders (ED), further emphasizing the need to understand juvenile corrections education programming. The purpose of this study was evaluate the curriculum and teacher practices at the Ardmore Boot Camp1 facility, located in a southwestern state, to identify variables that may impact inmate academic achievement in the correctional setting. The contextual framework for this evaluation was a combination of Differential Association Theory, Social Learning Theory, and the CIPP Evaluation model. A variety of data sources was analyzed, such as test scores, program records, surveys, interviews, and student level data will be analyzed. A descriptive analysis was conducted using student pre- and post-test scores from the TABE for male residents of the Ardmore Boot Camp from November, 2003 to April, 2007 (n=186), using a 3X2 repeated measures General Linear Model design with Independent Variables (IV) of student TABE scores at Time 1 and Time 2 and Dependent Variables (DV) including Race and Special Education eligibility. Teacher instructional practices and opportunity to learn were evaluated using Porter’s model of opportunity to learn. Program documents were analyzed and compared to established domain standards. Results of this evaluation assist in the development of a framework of juvenile corrections education programming. Results may also inform correctional education programming and policy.