Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration

CMHS Consumer Affairs E-News
May 1, 2003, Vol. 03-32a

* The following is a press release from the National Council On Disability issued earlier today.

NATIONAL COUNCIL ON DISABILITY CALLS FOR CHANGES IN JUVENILE JUSTICE AND EDUCATION FOR YOUTH WITH DISABILITIES

The National Council on Disability (NCD) today released a research study entitled Addressing the Needs of Youth with Disabilities in the Juvenile Justice System: The Status of Evidence-Based Research (http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/juvenile.html). The report evaluates the emerging status of key policies and programs that affect children and youth with disabilities who have often been overlooked by service and research programs.

The issues of delinquency prevention and juvenile justice as they relate to children and youth with disabilities are relatively new for policymakers, yet they present some of the most complex and challenging problems that policymakers must grapple with and resolve.

Over the past several years, NCD has recognized that children and youth with disabilities have increasingly become over represented in the juvenile justice system. A significant proportion of youth in the juvenile justice system have education related disabilities and are eligible for special education and related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Factors associated with the disproportionate representation of youth with disabilities in juvenile corrections are complex-but the available information suggests that school failure, poorly developed social skills, and inadequate school and community supports greatly increase the risks for arrest and incarceration. NCD believes, therefore, that delinquency prevention is a critical feature of any service or support system that is used to address the needs of all youth, especially youth with disabilities and special education needs.

The major recommendations NCD makes are to:

• Identify a range of strategies to enforce and promote compliance with federal disability law as it relates to children and youth with disabilities who are at risk of delinquency. The strategies should include those that increase effective programming for youth with disabilities in schools and in juvenile justice settings.
  
  
• Increase funding and/or resources to schools and the juvenile justice system to ensure that youth with disabilities receive appropriate services.
  
  
• Designate a single federal agency whose sole focus is to ensure that the rights and needs of youth with disabilities entering or in the juvenile justice system are addressed. The Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the President's Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth may be well-suited to provide the direction and leadership to address this gap by helping to create a national commission focused explicitly on youth with disabilities at risk of entering or already in the juvenile justice system.
  
  
• Conduct research that focuses on establishing the true prevalence of youth with disabilities of different types among at-risk populations in schools and across all stages of the juvenile justice system; the needs/services gap, including compliance with disability law; the causes of overrepresentation, where it exists, of youth with disabilities in the juvenile justice system, especially correctional facilities; and effective systems level and program level approaches, including federal laws, for addressing the needs of these youth, including particular attention to the types of programming most effective for youth from diverse racial/ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
  
  
• Undertake a comprehensive assessment to determine what programs and policies are most effective in schools, communities, and the juvenile justice system. At the same time, ensure that there is a balanced approach to funding diverse programs and policies, coupled with evaluation research studies of their effectiveness. Such an approach will ensure that a more definitive body of knowledge can develop to determine "what works" and for whom.

Without a clear understanding of what works, communities can become awash in a maze of programs and services that claim effectiveness in deterring delinquency yet have no factual information or evidence supporting their effectiveness. NCD believes that policy makers can use the findings and recommendations from this research study to help shape the scope and direction of future federal initiatives designed to tackle delinquency prevention and juvenile justice. Such initiatives fall under the purview of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice.

NCD's study findings on the status of, and need for, improved, evidence-based research in the area of juvenile justice are consistent with those of two other federal level agency research endeavors, namely, the President's Mental Health Commission and the General Accounting Office (GAO).

In an April 3, 2003 draft outline of a final report from the President's Mental Health Commission Goal #4 states: "Adults with serious mental illness and children with serious emotional disturbance will have ready access to the best treatments, services, and supports leading to recovery and cure. Accelerate research to enhance prevention of, recovery from and ultimate discovery of cures for mental illnesses." Recommendation #4 states: "Evidence-based practice interventions should be tested in demonstration projects with oversight by a public-private consortium of all stakeholders. The results of those demonstrations should form the basis for directing support of financing, dissemination and workforce development."

In an April 15, 2003, report Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice, officials in the states GAO visited identified practices that they believe may reduce the need for some child welfare or juvenile justice placements. These practices included finding new ways to reduce the cost of or to fund mental health services, improving access to mental health services, and expanding the array of available services. GAO reported, however, that few of these practices have been rigorously evaluated.