The top 6 Reasons MST eschews out-of-home placement
Juvenile crime is, unfortunately, a common topic in today’s news and leaves parents, police and communities struggling in their search for answers. Also unfortunate is the call by some people for “more of the same”—incarceration, residential facilities, or other cocktails of the commonly used approaches that have failed to curb the problem.
Our juvenile justice system is like a bicycle stuck in one gear, and that gear is incarceration. But it just doesn't make good sense to keep building prisons and sticking youth in them for non-violent offenses. The body of evidence on successfully rehabilitating juvenile offenders emphasizes keeping adolescents with their families and in their schools. Worse still, locking kids up doesn’t make our communities safer.
Not highlighted in the political speeches and talk shows are the group of programs proven to be effective in reducing juvenile crime—evidence-based practices. These are shown to be effective and have been cited as such by Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, an independent organization that “identifies prevention and intervention programs that meet a strict scientific standard of program effectiveness.” The Washington State Institute for Public Policy, a research organization that assesses crime-reduction programs, has identified many of these same programs as cost-effective.
Though these approaches vary, they are unified by some core principles. The first is they are community-based, meaning the interventions take place where the youth lives, where the behavior occurs. Second, they intervene through changing the influences in the child’s ecology that research shows commonly support or maintain delinquent behavior.
This focus on the contributors and the effort to target those influences in a way that will generate lasting change necessitates that the juvenile not be removed from those influences to be “treated” elsewhere. Consequently, proponents of evidence-based practices do not support out-of-home placement that is commonly discussed in the search for solutions. What follows is a brief description of the top six reasons we are against placement.
1. Out-of-home placement may increase offendingThe factors that contribute to or sustain delinquent behavior exist in the child’s environment. The most direct predictor of such behavior is an association with delinquent peers. With this in mind, it should be no surprise that Dishion, McCord, and Poulin (1999) found that interventions grouping delinquent youths together actually increase offending. Surrounding a child with influences that support and encourage delinquency by forcing them to live together has been shown to increase juvenile crime. Since the goal of evidence-based practices is to reduce crime, they do not support placement.
2. Youths in placements will eventually return to their home communities
Research studies have clearly demonstrated that the causes and correlates of juvenile delinquency rise from multiple factors in a child’s world—family, friends, school, and community. While under these influences, we can predict that a youth will continue offending. When removed from them through placement, the youth is forced into a completely different environment, one that may not be supportive of offending, though some placement settings foster further delinquency. Offending behavior may fall off while in placement, leading to the conclusion that the child is ready to return home. Back home and under the conditions that originally fostered and maintained the offending, not surprisingly, most youths return to committing criminal acts.
3. Removal from school is counterproductive
Poor school performance is linked to law-breaking and poor outcomes. Though a child may not be doing well at the moment, it would be preferable to address the contributing factors—a common one is being surrounded by disruptive peers—than to remove her and place her in a setting full of nothing but disruptive peers.
As Joe Doyle, an economics professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who studied this issue wrote, "You're supposed to be going to school while you're there," Doyle says of the juvenile facility, "but kids aren't there very long, so it's not like teachers are investing in new education plans for them." The net result: If you get locked up, your odds of dropping out of school increase.
4. The affective bond with parents can be a powerful tool for change
The foundation of any effective therapeutic effort to change a child’s behavior is built on an effective relationship. We rightly do not expect a complete stranger, let alone a prison guard, to have the same level of influence over a child as we would a parent. Admittedly, there are many situations where the parent-child relationship is strained. Those challenges can be addressed, but a true bond with a prison guard is rare under the best of circumstances.
Long-term behavior is addressed most successfully when it’s tackled in the child’s environment. Fortunately, that is also where the people who love the child the most can be found.
5. Youths may be harmed in placement
Recent reports from Rikers Island and other facilities around the nation have highlighted the risks of confining young offenders, including the use of solitary confinement. A large body of scientific research indicates that solitary confinement is particularly damaging to adolescents and young adults because their brains are still developing. Prolonged isolation in solitary cells can worsen mental illness and in some cases, cause it, studies have shown.
Not only does putting a child in a locked facility increase the likelihood of future offending, but it can also unwittingly expose juveniles to abuse by other prisoners. The results can dramatically alter the lives of youths who may be there for lesser offenses and whose needs would be better met in a less-secure setting.
6. Out-of-home placement is not cost-effective
The Washington State Institute for Public Policy researched many approaches to juvenile delinquency and has consistently found evidence-based practices to be the most cost-effective. Its research is supported by real-world results.
The state of Florida introduced evidence-based practices on a large scale as a part of the Florida Redirection Project. That effort resulted in a significant reduction in juvenile crime. In addition, the state saved $231 million in five years or $27,059 per completed case.
Other states, such as Connecticut, North Carolina, and Louisiana, have found similar reductions in offending, coupled with cost savings. Learning from these results, there is a push elsewhere for changes, including an effort in Kentucky led by Sen. Whitney Westerfield (R) and Rep. John Tilley (D) and another in South Dakota, led by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.
So, if out-of-home placement is not the answer, what is an alternative to youth incarceration?
One alternative is evidence-based practices that work to reduce criminal behavior and improve family functioning.
These programs achieve results by working with the families as they learn to function more effectively. Programs such as Functional Family Therapy, Multisystemic Therapy, and Multidimensional Family Therapy have been shown to be cost-effective in reducing offending, and the results have consistently included better family relationships, along with improved skills and social networks. States are learning of these findings, and many are on the road to juvenile-justice reform, among them Kentucky, South Dakota, Michigan, and West Virginia.
The goal of MST is to reduce youth criminal activity and antisocial behaviors and to achieve these outcomes at a cost savings by decreasing rates of incarceration and out-of-home placement. Download this white paper to learn how MST can be used as an alternative to youth incarceration.
