Best Practices for Serving Court Involved Youth with Learning, Attention and Behavioral Disabilities. Monograph Series on Education, Disability and Juvenile Justice.

This monograph, one of a series on youth with disabilities and the juvenile justice system, focuses on best practices for reducing delinquency and preventing recidivism. This essay notes that, because of the connection between disability and delinquency, it is likely that a significant portion of court-involved, disabled youth can be expected to manifest social skill deficits and thus be difficult to manage. However, interventions that are skill based, use positive discipline, teach self-control, social cognitive skills, and problem solving, and which involve the youth's family are shown to reduce recidivism as well as to increase a youth's prosocial behavior, commitment to school, and trust in working with systems. The monograph identifies eight types of research-based effective practices for working with court involved youth. These practices include: (1) individual juvenile planning; (2) skill-based interventions (including counseling, social skills training, academic and vocational interventions, and life skills/multimodal approaches); (3) medical interventions (including medication and substance abuse treatment); (4) behavioral systems; (5) family involvement; (6) the use of individualized transition planning (such as wrap-around planning and supports); (7) effective staffing; and (8) the ongoing assessment of program effectiveness. Five model programs are described. Appended is a sample Individualized Justice Plan for youth with disabilities. (Contains 59 references.) (DB)