Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to pressing local issues. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author alone.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. The legislation was a step forward at the time and intended to support local and state efforts to prevent delinquency and reduce juvenile incarcerations. Those gains, however, have waned in recent years.
What’s often referred to as the foster care-to-prison pipeline shows children growing up in foster care are more likely to enter juvenile detention or adult incarceration. According to research from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, over 50% of foster children will face arrest, conviction or detention by the juvenile legal system by the age of 17. And if a child has experienced five or more placements in foster homes, their risk of being involved with the criminal legal system increases to 90%.
The number of foster children entering the criminal legal system continues to rise even as the number of children entering foster care has decreased.
We’ve learned a lot in recent years about how to prevent entry into foster care through an upstream, prevention approach to family support aimed at stopping crises before they occur. An emphasis on protective factors and concrete economic support for families during turbulent times can help them meet basic needs and has a direct and measurable impact on reducing involvement in child welfare.
Child welfare systems are building on these successes through multi-disciplinary approaches that reflect the importance of working across systems to support families and promote child and family well-being.
It is time for juvenile justice systems to take a similar approach.
Incarceration is an ineffective strategy for deterring youth from criminal and delinquent behavior. The U.S. incarcerates youth at rates 11 times higher than European or Asian nations, and yet our juvenile violence rates are still substantially higher. In San Antonio, the number of adolescents with felony charges increased by 55% last year alone.
Beyond its failure to deter criminal behavior, incarceration can also lead to physical and emotional damage that lasts a lifetime. Our brains do not fully mature until our mid-to-late 20s, thus making risky behaviors a hallmark of youth. The majority of young people will eventually achieve “psychosocial maturity” enabling them to better control impulses, weigh the consequences of their actions and refrain from risky behaviors. Incarceration can have the opposite effect, introducing trauma and impeding young people from achieving psychosocial maturity.
Just as the child welfare field is realizing surveillance and punishment of parents may not be the solution to child and family safety, it’s time we recognize these punitive approaches to juvenile delinquency are failing our kids. We must pivot and look to early childhood supports and programs for troubled teens that can lessen delinquent behavior and improve overall well-being.
Youth Advocate Programs offer one such approach. As community-based alternatives to youth incarceration, Youth Advocate Programs redirect justice, child welfare, behavioral health and other social service dollars from youth prisons and other residential facilities to community-based programs offering youth the help they need. The University of Texas at San Antonio, in partnership with Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. (YAP), received one of five Mentoring Research Best Practice grant awards from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The two-year study will identify core features of YAP’s intervention model and compare the impact of YAP services with youth being served in other community programs.
Fostering Healthy Futures is another program that works with youth in foster care to engage in prosocial activities to strengthen social-emotional skills and set them on a positive path. The program, based in San Antonio, intervenes with youth in foster care prior to their entering the juvenile justice system. Studies have shown a direct reduction in delinquency among foster youth as a result of the program.
Both programs are an important part of preventing youth who are involved with the child welfare system from entering the juvenile justice system. Federal policies, including the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 are increasingly looking at ways to provide federal reimbursement mechanisms for evidence-based prevention programs.
We should be implementing policy and practice reforms that can enhance prevention efforts, including seeking alternatives to addressing youth lawbreaking through juvenile courts, increased juvenile probation rates, alternative therapies for lesser offenses and limiting court-ordered youth incarceration.
It’s past time for those in the juvenile justice space to take a page from the shift in child welfare — from a child welfare system to a child and family well-being system. It’s time to identify and engage effective prevention programming that can help our nation’s youth chart a healthier course through adolescence and into adulthood.
