An MST therapist weighs in on treating trauma

As practitioners of Multisystemic Therapy, we are often asked if MST can be helpful for youth who have experienced trauma. While MST is not a treatment model designed to provide trauma-focused care, the short answer is—yes. 

MST's analytic process gives hope to families with troubled adolescents.

Families with adolescents who have committed crimes are often at the end of their tether and have lost all hope. The first question to their MST therapist often is “what could you possibly do that we haven’t tried?” Then they say, “And believe me, we’ve tried everything, and nothing works.” What they quickly come to learn is that MST's approach to working with families is different from anything they've tried in the past.

That's because MST is rooted in understanding the family's unique circumstances and their strengths. The therapist uses the MST Analytic Process, what we call the Do Loop to create change by slowing down to first seek understanding and then speeding up by acting and doing.

A comprehensive report on juvenile crime, victimization, and the juvenile justice system

To say the National Center for Juvenile Justice’s (NCJJ) 2014 Juvenile Offenders and Victims report is comprehensive is not doing it justice.

The center used a vast array of sources from Census Bureau to the FBI to state agencies with the objective of giving the public, media, elected officials, and juvenile-justice professionals accurate statistics on the types of crime juveniles are committing, who’s committing the crimes, and trends in criminal behaviors.

The Cost of Jailing Juveniles—Enough to Give You Sticker Shock 

The Justice Policy Institute recently issued a report spelling out the staggering costs of incarcerating juveniles. The institute, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to finding ways to improve the justice system and reduce the number of people imprisoned, gathered information from 46 states on what they spend on their juvenile correctional facilities. These states accounted for 93 percent of the U.S. population in 2013.

Texas Juvenile Crime Justice Reform Reduces Crime & Saves Money

In 2007, after abuses were reported in Texas juvenile facilities, the legislature put together a reform package. Part of its aim was to keep youthful offenders close to home in the hopes of reducing the size of the correctional system, the second largest in the United States. Money that would have been spent putting kids behind bars, building new jails and prisons, and all the ancillary costs of incarceration were to be funneled into community supervision.

Over the course of the years since the reforms began, juvenile incarcerations plunged from 4,305 to 1,481, a 66-percent drop. At the same time, arrests fell by 33 percent from 136,206 in 2007 to 91,873 in 2012. So, it would not appear that locking up fewer adolescents was a threat to public safety.

By closing eight juvenile correctional facilities, the state shaved its appropriations from $486 million to $290 million from 2006-2007 to 2014-2015. The savings went to local probation departments that find community supervision, services, and treatment for the offenders.

Imagine yourself 17. You’ve been convicted of armed robbery. In jail, you were caught with a shiv. In the eyes of the institution, no excuse for that. However, any viewer of the TV series “Law and Order” would know having protection might be the only way to stave off predators.

Now take this further. Imagine you are confined to an 8-by-10 foot cell, 23 hours a day without human contact. That’s what happened to Michael Kemp. “You just like, ‘Man, I feel like an animal in here. I don’t even feel real...where I’m not even a human being."

Pew Poll Finds Voters  Support Juvenile Sentencing Reform For Those Who Commit Lesser Crimes

In the 1990s, the country and its lawmakers took a “get tough on juvenile offenders” stance. Keeping the community safe by getting delinquents off the street and locking them up was the attitude. 

Judging by a 2014 Pew Charitable Trusts poll, the times, have changed.

Study Finds Hispanic Juvenile Offenders in LA County Show Marked Improvements with MST

With Hispanics and Latinos making up more than 48 percent of Los Angeles’ population, it is no surprise that those concerned with the local juvenile-justice system would turn to the Rand Corporation to evaluate how effective Multisystemic Therapy is with minority youth offenders. 

Rand’s study followed 757 juveniles who received Multisystemic Therapy and 380 offenders who did not participate in the program from 2003 to 2010 to compare the outcomes of both groups. Of the MST group, 77 percent were Hispanic as compared to 69 percent in the non-MST group.

The results show MST-treated youth having a lower recidivism rate and doing better in their dealings with the county's probation system. (See below.) MST youth had significantly lower incarceration rates than the other group (11.2 percent, compared with 20.3 percent) and significantly higher rates of completion of community service (8.5 percent versus 2.6 percent).

Legal Highs Changing The Face Of Substance Misuse In The U.K.

It used to be when you talked about illegal drug use in the United Kingdom, you were talking about weed, cannabis, hashish, coke, snow, whiz, amphetamines, speed, and heroin. The risk, dangers, and effects of these substances were widely known.

However, in recent years, we are seeing the increased use of what is called “legal highs.” It is not against the law to buy these substances in head shops or at festivals. They are often sold as “not for human consumption,” which means they are not yet controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Research is ongoing, and decisions are being made on whether they should be made illegal with some already classified A, B, based on their potential harm.

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.