For juvenile offenders, it pays to think long-term
Communities invest in a portfolio of services. Each service has a cost and is used to meet a certain need. Think of it as any financial investment. Communities must make sure that the current service portfolio continues to meet the ever-changing requirements in their fluctuating financial environment. In recent years, with tax revenues declining, many places have had to make hard choices about where to invest money. When looking at the need to help juvenile offenders and their families, the short-term costs of prevention must be weighed against the long-term expenditure for foster care, juvenile, and adult incarceration.
Although decisions are often made hastily, their long-term impact of them should be carefully analyzed. Some strategies will begin to emerge. For example, any service that takes children from their families will be very costly. How costly you might ask? Thirty-three U.S. states and jurisdictions spend $100,000 or more annually to incarcerate a young person. Is that costly? At the lowest end of the scale, Louisiana still spends $46,662 a year, according to the Justice Policy Institute.
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) identified patterns of youth offending and recommended community-based alternatives that actually save money in the long run. The greatest savings comes from evidence-based practices like Multisystemic Therapy (MST) that focus on the most serious and persistent offenders—those most likely to become adult offenders. MST was developed in the late 1970s and implemented on a large scale in the 1990s to target juveniles considered most likely to go on to commit criminal acts as adults and end up in prison.
Given the proven record of evidence-based treatments and the long-term cost savings, why aren’t more of the limited community service dollars being spent on them? The answer, in part, has to do with the slightly higher costs in the short term as compared to “services as usual.” These often target only the youth who go to outpatient counseling in a clinic. These services either ignore or underemphasize the role of the adolescent’s environment—family, peer pressure, school—in the problem behavior.
Community stakeholders frequently ask why they have to pay more for evidence-based practices at the outset than some existing services. The short answer is simple. These practices have proven quality assurance (QA) oversight in addition to the requirements needed to achieve long-term cost-effectiveness. You’re paying for highly trained and supported staff carrying smaller caseloads with limited, but more intensive lengths of service. When numbers are being crunched, the cost of QA is most often challenged because the majority of existing offerings do not provide this at a level that would significantly change outcomes. Take the QA away in favor of short-term savings, and the long-term costs go up as good outcomes inevitably decline.
What's the real cost of abandoning quality-assurance oversight?
It happens that a community in Kansas, facing budget cuts, tried to see if they could continue getting MST predictable results while eliminating all quality assurance and ongoing staff training. They ignored the fact that these are important and necessary components that contribute to MST’s success. And the result? Outcomes suffered. A published research report showed this experiment at pinching dollars failed. Overall the study found “court charges decreased for youth in the oversight group, but not for youth in the non-oversight group. The two groups also differed in age, pretreatment charges, therapist contacts, and progress on goals.” In other words, it cost more later to “save” now.
Ultimately, does it make sense to create a service portfolio without any research-supported QA? Probably not. Paying a short-term premium for treatments that have proven effectiveness saves significantly over the long haul and is well worth the investment.
And it’s not only financial savings. We’re talking about keeping youths in school, families together and making communities safer by stopping juvenile crime. Do the math. The long-term gains of evidence-based practices far outstrip the today's expenditures.
Are you a community administrator tasked with selecting services to treat juvenile offenders or identifying adolescent substance-abuse treatment? Tell us what information helps you decide how to allocate public funds. Also, download this white paper for more information about how to help your community save money while serving the needs of youth.
