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The Effects of Involvement with the Juvenile Justice System

Continuing the discussion begun in the first session of the workshop, in the second session four presenters—Linda Teplin, Northwestern University; Catherine Gallagher, George Mason University; Vera Lopez, Arizona State University; and Airto Morales, W. Haywood Burns Institute—looked specifically at the effects of involvement with the juvenile justice system on young people of color, their families, and their communities. A question- and-answer period followed the presentations.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM INVOLVEMENT

Linda Teplin, Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University’s Medical School and director of the health disparities and public policy program in the school’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, began with good news about the juvenile justice system. Nationwide, juvenile arrests have dropped by more than two-thirds since 1999, when they exceeded 2.5 million. The number of incarcerated juveniles has dropped by 59 percent since 1999, and court cases have dropped by half since 1999, when they were 1.7 million.

But “the situation is still terrible,” she said. About 800,000 children are arrested every year, and approximately 44,000 children younger than 18 are currently held in facilities. About 30 percent of those are being held just because they are awaiting adjudication of their case, and “the consequences of being involved in the juvenile justice system are horrific,” said Teplin. Such involvement interrupts a child’s education, disrupts social connections, alienates loved ones, and limits opportunities for employment and college admission.

Furthermore, the “elephant in the room” is the disproportionate incarceration of youth of color, Teplin observed. African Americans are 13 percent of the general population but represent more than 40 percent of youth and adults who are incarcerated. Of young African American inner-city males, one in four has been arrested by age 18 on average. The rates of involvement with the juvenile justice system are 86 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic White, 142 for Hispanic, 261 for Native American, and

433 for African American youth; the latter is about five times the rate for non-Hispanic White youth. One in 17 non-Hispanic White, one in six Hispanic, and one in three African American youth are incarcerated in a state or federal prison at some point during their lives.

Since 1995, the Northwestern Juvenile Project has been conducting a large-scale longitudinal study of youth who entered detention in the late 1990s. It sampled more than 1,800 youth, ages 10 to 17, as they entered the temporary detention center in Cook County, Illinois. They were interviewed, tracked, and re-interviewed over more than 20 years, which has revealed “all kinds of dire statistics,” according to Teplin. Nearly 80 percent scored below average on IQ tests. About 70 percent of males and 80 percent of females had been physically abused. “It’s why a lot of these girls run away, leave home, get involved in the sex trade, and get involved in trading drugs,” said Teplin. Two-thirds of boys and three-quarters of girls had one or more mental disorders when they entered detention. Half had one or more substance use disorders.

Even more discouraging is what happened to them after they left detention. Of the 1,800 children, 10 percent are dead today. Within 6 years of leaving detention, 61 had died, with a median age of 32. Ninety percent of the males who died and more than 40 percent of the females were victims of homicide, mostly from firearms. “Their death rate is twice that of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and is most similar to people in their late 50s and early 60s,” said Teplin.

Their rates of incarceration as adults were also extremely high, especially for males and African Americans. Almost 90 percent of males and half of females experienced adult incarceration after baseline. Similarly, by 12 years after baseline, when participants had a median age of 28, 90 percent had had one or more substance use disorders. About three-quarters had had an alcohol use disorder, and over 80 percent had had a marijuana use disorder, though the rates of other drug disorders, including cocaine and opiates, were relatively low.

The researchers have also looked at eight positive outcomes 12 years after detention: educational attainment, gainful activity, desistance from criminal activity, interpersonal functioning, parenting responsibility, residential stability and independence, mental health, and abstaining from substance abuse. These results, too, were “depressing,” said Teplin. Even among White girls, less than 40 percent achieved at least six of these eight positive outcomes (Figure 3-1). For African American males, less than 10 percent had achieved at least six of the eight outcomes. Just 4 percent of females and 2 percent of males achieved all eight.

Teplin drew several conclusions from these data. Children are often detained because other systems fail. They are also detained because of where they grew up. When children attending schools in the wealthy

North Shore of Chicago use drugs or get in fights, their school calls their parents rather than the police. But in inner-city schools, the police are called and children are incarcerated. They miss school for a few weeks, cannot keep up, become disheartened, miss more school, begin spending time on the streets, and are rearrested. Teplin suggested that the inappropriate incarceration of youth be reduced by involving them in other systems, including the larger mental health system. “If we can improve these systems, it will be less likely these kids will fall through the cracks.” Another suggestion she made was to link children to proper services. “This won’t be cheap,” she said, but it can help break a cycle of poverty that is far more expensive in the long run. “If we . . . prevent kids from entering the juvenile justice system, only then can we break this cycle of disorder.”

JUSTICE CONTACT AND HEALTH OUTCOMES

In the 20th century, theories of juvenile offending tended to focus on delinquency through the lens of urbanization, immigration, and lower--

class status, observed Katherine Gallagher, professor at George Mason University. These theories tended to attribute offending to lower-class values, being unprepared for middle-class status competition, and a lack of adequate formal and informal social control—while largely overlooking the fact, Gallagher added, that middle- and upper-class children were offending as well without getting caught or punished.

By the 1990s and the early part of the 21st century, prevailing theories about offending cited impulsivity and low self-control, including heightened risk taking, a need for immediate gratification, low levels of focus and attention, disrupting behaviors, a need for excitement, and a lack of willpower. Even more provocatively, offending was tied to race and ethnicity through such factors as low verbal IQ, poorly developed conscience, and lack of guilt, both physiologically and psychologically. Many of these concepts were embodied in what became known as the marshmallow test: that a conclusive measure of willpower was whether a child would choose to consume one marshmallow immediately or wait and receive two marshmallows. “I definitely would have failed,” said Gallagher. “I was definitely one of the kids who was not so much interested in long-term planning.”

Gallagher spent the first 4 years of her graduate education tracking more than 600 children through a state system from their time of admittance, meeting with them every 6 months for 3 years. “What I could tell immediately is those kids weren’t really different from me, [they] simply had more problems,” most or all of which were not of their own making. They came from families that were on the verge of collapse, where parents, for example, could not afford transportation because they needed to pay for child care, where children were exposed to lead poisoning, where other children needed attention, or where mental health and disease burdens were high.

Gallagher compared average life expectancies in different neighborhoods of Baltimore, which differ by more than 20 years from wealthy neighborhoods to poor neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancies have the highest levels of death from firearms, infant mortality, lack of access to health care, and other negative indicators. They are also the neighborhoods with the highest percentages of people of color.

In juvenile justice facilities, a series of reports have documented high rates of violence, abuse, use of isolation, restraint, suicide, and crowding, Gallagher said. Researchers also have found a lack of appropriate health care, mental health care, suicide screening, and access to basic services and education. Professionals tended not to be well trained, and very few juvenile justice residential facilities were accredited by any kind of body—just 53 of 1,370 such facilities, according to one study. As Gallagher observed, “Deliberate indifference is the binding standard of care.”

Youth involved with the juvenile justice system also tend to have higher levels of health problems not related to risk behaviors, including respiratory, hearing, vision, and dental problems, among others. In addition, they have greater exposure to chronic stress, which results in the mobilization of multiple systems as they respond to changing environmental demands and chronic burdens. In turn, self-regulation and coping can be directly compromised by chronic stress and its impact on physiological and psychological resilience, said Gallagher.

Involvement with the juvenile justice systems adds more stressors to the lives of youth and families, especially youth of color and their families. It further increases the difficulty of paying attention, exhibiting self-control, and planning. She noted that this also contributes to high blood pressure, high levels of neuroendocrine hormones and startle response, PTSD, diminished problem-solving capacity, and other problems.

Gallagher, too, emphasized the disproportionate impact juvenile justice involvement has on youth of color. Race and ethnicity have long been tied to disadvantage and poverty, both of which are chronic stressors, and disadvantage has systematically kept communities of color from gaining wealth through social exclusion. This means that people of color, especially those in poverty and without other resources, are more likely to experience psychophysiological stress.

CHILDREN OF COLOR IN THE ARIZONA JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM

Vera Lopez, professor of justice and social inquiry at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, also discussed the many ways in which broad trends at the national level interact with the lives of individual youth at the local level. She began by noting that, throughout history, societal perspectives have shaped how youth are viewed, and those perspectives vary by race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status, particularly in a border state like Arizona. Conceptions of youth have also shaped juvenile justice policy and practice, from the idea of saving wayward youth in the first part of the 20th century to that of punishing dangerous youth beginning in the 1980s to that of treating youth in the 21st century. For example, the emphasis on blaming young men of color was fueled by media coverage of marauding gangs of Black and Latino youth causing mayhem, and this media coverage affected policy, the treatment of youth, and the fate of communities of color.

Most recently, the treatment of youth has been medicalized, said Lopez. Yet many youth in the juvenile justice system still do not receive adequate treatment by trained mental health professionals. Only about two-thirds of youth with a diagnosed mental health disorder, and only

about one-third of youth with a diagnosed substance use disorder, receive treatment, and youth of color are less likely to receive treatment than are White youth (Skowyra and Cocozza, 2007; Teplin et al., 2005). Furthermore, African American youth receive harsher sentences than do White youth with similar mental health problems, and White youth are more likely to be placed under community supervision while Latino and African American youth are more likely to be confined (Dohrn, 2004).

Even when treatment is offered in juvenile justice facilities, it often is inadequate, fails to include family members, and does not take contextual factors or structural barriers into account, said Lopez. “Treatment is still very much individually focused,” she said. The emphasis is on “your responsibility, what you can do, your coping mechanisms.” In addition, staffing levels, training, and budgets tend to be constrained. “As a result, many youth do not receive the treatment that they need,” Lopez observed.

Juvenile justice professionals have perceptions of individuals and systems that influence their actions, such as who gets recommended for mental health and substance abuse treatment versus who is criminalized. As an example, Lopez cited the stereotyped views that continue to be held by judges, lawyers, probation officers, therapists, and others about system-involved Latinas—that they are quiet, for example, or that they are sexually promiscuous, uncooperative, and violent. “These implicit biases may seep into interactions at all levels, particularly if there’s a lack of training around this.” She quoted a judge from a state other than Arizona reflecting on how he thinks about and treats Latinas:

“I’m not suggesting that this juvenile justice judge’s views reflect everybody,” Lopez said, but “some of these attitudes are out there at all levels, and this person was frank enough to share this.”

Lopez also reflected on the tension between punishment and rehabilitation in juvenile correction facilities. Such facilities can resemble college campuses, but they also have cells, lockup, razor-wire fences, a rehabilitative clinical staff, and a security control staff. Views of youth can vary from their being neglected and abused to being dangerous and manipulative. Meanwhile, a lack of trained staff and limited resources can result

in inadequate treatment. The on-line staff or contractors who have very little day-to-day involvement with the youth may provide mental health and substance use treatment, said Lopez, which can lead to “serious consequences.”

This lack of resources continues once youth leave a facility. In a series of interviews with 65 girls, Lopez found that they wanted to go to school, get a good job, keep busy, and stay away from negative influences. But they also thought that they would largely have to go it alone once they left a facility.

Lopez offered a number of suggestions for moving beyond the individual level toward programmatic, systemic, and policy solutions. Alternatives to court involvement and confinement would be at the top of the list, she said. “How can we keep young people in communities and give them adequate health care, including mental health care and substance abuse treatment, if that’s what they need?” If confinement cannot be avoided, enhanced and evidence-based programming should be the standard in juvenile correctional facilities and associated settings, she added.

Lopez also proposed other alternatives to out-of-home placements. Multisystemic therapy is costly, “but it works,” she said. Change will require new policies, decisive action, and more funding to get programs and practices in place on the ground, she said.

She also advised gender-responsive and culturally tailored interventions and programming. A system-wide, social justice, critical caring approach could avoid stigma and develop trust while avoiding cultural stereotypes and deficit thinking. “I encourage people to go beyond cultural competency training, which tends to reinforce cultural deficit thinking about Latinos and particularly Latinas,” she said. Structural issues such as poverty, racism, and discrimination also need attention, even if they are difficult to study quantitatively.

The families that are affected by the juvenile justice system have many strengths, she concluded. People should “resist the idea of trying to go in and tell parents, families, and communities the right way to do things, as if we have all the solutions. They should be partners.” In addition, people of color are disproportionately impacted by criminal justice systems, and they need to be part of the conversation at all levels, Lopez said. “We know that the war on drugs had a huge negative impact on Black communities. That goes back to how we socially construct problems, how we racialize problems, and who gets treatment.” The current opioid crisis, for example, is being treated differently than the situation that resulted from the war on drugs. “I always say, go back in history, go back in time, think about who gets invited to the conversations.”

EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICES PLUS

In 1995, after returning home from the military, Airto Morales, site manager at the W. Haywood Burns Institute, found himself facing an 18-year prison sentence. After appealing, he pled guilty to two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and spent 10 years in prison. When he left prison, he became involved with a program called Project Rebound at San Francisco State University, which helps formerly incarcerated individuals become students. That led to a job with the counseling and criminal justice program at San Francisco State University, which enabled him to work with young people while taking advantage of his own experiences, and then to a job as a site manager at the Burns Institute, where he travels to jurisdictions across the nation to bring people in the juvenile justice system together with community members.

Before the juvenile justice system existed, youth went to the same prisons as adults, where they faced tremendous levels of abuse—“physical abuse, mental abuse, sexual abuse,” Morales observed. One of the first people to seek reform was John Augustus, a bootmaker in Massachusetts who is known as the “father of probation.” In the 1840s, Augustus began to bail community members out of jail and help them acquire a vocation. Similarly, the juvenile court system, corrections system, and social services all spring originally from the community. “What does that tell us?” asked Morales. “Communities should always be at the table when we start talking about reform.”

Since its establishment, the juvenile justice system has been influenced by many societal forces, Morales pointed out. One is racial and ethnic disparities in policing, policies, and adjudication. When youth are pulled over by the police because of their color, they are subject to a disparity that runs through the entire society. Religious thinking also has shaped the juvenile justice system. For example, Morales pointed out, stubborn child laws at the state level that allow parents to punish their children for being disobedient are rooted in the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible, which calls for stoning a rebellious son (Rosenberg and Rosenberg, 1976). In addition, slavery still influences the criminal justice system, said Morales, especially the legacy of the racial hierarchical relationship between slave master and slave (Gotlieb and Flynn, 2021).

At various times, the notion of rehabilitation has been emphasized in criminal justice, but Morales labeled rehabilitation “a disingenuous position for the system.” After 10 years in prison, he came to the understanding “that there was no rehabilitation, at least in the California justice system.” The only way to get a certificate of rehabilitation in California is to appeal to the governor upon release for a pardon, he pointed out.

The Burns Institute believes, Morales said, that “those who are closest to the problem should be part of the solution.” It gathers data on such issues as racial and ethnic disparities, gender, geography, and offense and then works with community stakeholders to change policies. The institute emphasizes a well-being model for people who find themselves in the youth justice system. It also looks at how systems are funded and the influence that funding has on the system. “When I was locked up in a level-four maximum security institution, it cost anywhere from $75,000 to $120,000 per year to keep me incarcerated,” said Morales. “I wasn’t worth that much even when I was in the military. But if you give me that money, I will make it.”

The many flaws in the juvenile justice system call for a “deep conversation,” said Morales. This conversation needs to include the history of the youth justice system, the history of the adult system, and existing policies that exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities. It also needs to take the obvious flaws in the system into account. For example, young people can be sentenced to very long prison terms, Morales pointed out. He described one teenager who was sentenced to two 25-year-to-life sentences. “He never graduated. He never went to a school dance. He wasn’t even the trigger person. He was in the car waiting. But in California, at the time, if you committed a crime and didn’t basically cooperate with the government, you would find yourself in the same situation as your crime partners were in.”

Morales suggested an approach he called evidence-based practices plus. Evidence-based practices are essential, but people who have been through the system know best how to navigate through it.

He also pointed out that “we think of the criminal justice system as one big system, but it’s not.” The police, the courts, probation, and social services are all systems, “and nobody’s really talking to each other,” Morales said. “There’s this huge disconnect. . . . All of these systems have different policies in practice.” Collaborations among different systems can help meet needs that are not being met today, he said. When someone has a mental health issue, for example, families often do not have any recourse other than calling 911, in which case the police get involved. But the police are not trained or prepared to meet this kind of need. “We need to start thinking bigger in terms of other alternatives when folks are suffering from those things,” Morales commented.

Such collaborations also need to be done in such a way that people are not criminalized when they say there were incarcerated or treated, which risks exacerbating the problems they are already facing. People “who have never been in the system might not understand.”

DISCUSSION

Following the speaker presentations, Kathi Grasso, legal and policy independent consultant, moderated a question-and-answer period directed to the four speakers.

The Role of the Community in Research

A prominent topic of discussion during the question-and-answer period was the role of the community in research and of researchers in the community. Lopez began by mentioning a clinical internship she did during graduate school at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, in which community members were included in the research team. “They would bring in community members not as tokenized members but as actual members who were paid for their services,” she said. They could both represent the community’s interests and make introductions to community members. “It was very intentional in terms of whose perspectives were there and making sure that they weren’t just exploiting” the community members.

She also described the responsibility researchers have to do more than gather data from a community and then retreat to their institutions. For example, she volunteers at a weekly trauma-informed program for women who have been arrested for prostitution, partly because a community member asked her to help. Researchers “need to get out of the Ivory Tower,” she said. “We need to go into the communities. We need to get to know the people we’re working with.”

Morales said that one of the jobs he had upon his release was working for the University of California, San Francisco, for a community partnership resource center. When the university asked community members what the community needed most, “number one was to address the violence that was occurring in the community,” said Morales. “Number two was to address jobs in the community. And number three was to address the food desert that existed within these communities.” The university partnered with the community to address all these issues, and people in the community responded very favorably to that approach.

These interactions should work both ways, so that researchers have pathways not only into the community but community members have pathways into the university, Morales said. People who do the hard work in communities should get academic research credit for that work. “Plenty of people in the community who are doing things because of the love of their community . . . are not interested in a bachelor ’s degree. But we’ve got to start thinking about how we develop true partnerships and have representation on campus of those populations that are being affected.” Academia

also needs to be careful in such partnerships, Morales warned, because these are vulnerable populations.

Shreya Kangovi, executive director of the Penn Center for Community Health Workers at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the roundtable, observed that people of color have a different lens when they are given opportunities to participate in events like the workshop. She also noted that researchers tend to study community members who are disadvantaged but not the people and institutions that create disadvantage. “We don’t have evidence-based interventions or empathy training for changing the minds of the policymakers who are doing this and have been doing this for hundreds of years.”

Studying Successes and Protective Factors

Mario De La Rosa, professor of public health and social work at Florida International University and a member of the roundtable, called attention to the need to study people from disadvantaged communities who do not get involved in juvenile justice systems. If one of three Black males is imprisoned at some point, what are the driving forces for the two of three Black males who do not end up in prison, he asked. “What are the reasons? What are the protective factors?” De La Rosa had a mother who was always telling him that he had to go to school and stay in school and get an education. In addition, an Upward Bound program helped him go to college. “We need to go back and look not only at the systems . . . but also at the children who did not go into the systems and the reasons why that occurred.” This information then needs to inform policies to change the pathological forces that have resulted in dysfunction, he said. “There are programs and there are policies that have worked and will work. We just need to put them in place.”

Morales agreed, pointing out that studying people who have been successful could help change the environment so that more people are successful. For example, the Burns Institute brings people who have not been involved in the juvenile justice system to the table so that people who are a part of that system can better use the community to create success.

Gallagher added to this point by noting that the juvenile justice system can seem like a “bad news factory,” but in fact there are many pathways to success. For example, a mother ’s education is a major protective factor for youth, as are social inclusion, having access to family resources, and having family members who care about and can watch and help a young person. “There are ways communities can make these stronger. They don’t need people to come in and study them under a microscope. They just may need the space and a little microfinancing to strengthen

those bonds within the community,” she said. Communities know what their problems are better than outsiders do and know how to solve their problems. “They get tired of us coming and saying, ‘Well, tell me about your problems.’”

Teplin highlighted the particular role of education in success. In other countries, schools are funded by the state, so every child receives a similar education. As a result, social mobility is greater in those countries than in the United States, where schools, in contrast, are funded by the local jurisdiction. “If you live in Chicago, you will attend one of the ten worst school systems in the country. If you live one half block over, in Evanston, you will attend one of the ten best systems in the country,” she explained. Poor people tend to live in poor neighborhoods where there are insufficient funds for schools and proper education,” she said. “This is a critical system to address when we think about the trajectories of youth in the juvenile justice system.”

Sue McWilliams, assistant professor at the Northern Arizona University School of Nursing, also pointed out that school systems are poorly funded. “We still live in a segregated country, and we still have policies in place where youth of color are primarily attending segregated schools in poor neighborhoods. That’s an issue of access and opportunity on the front end.”

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