How MST Came to Ohio

In the mid-1990s, the Ohio Department of Youth Services (ODYS) underwent research that revealed significant barriers to meeting the mental health needs of the incarcerated youth in their care. Motivated to address this, the department began looking for alternative treatments for delinquent youth – a search that quickly led to Multisystemic Therapy (MST).

Police and professionals get called out to the home. Family members are about to give up...

Her family life was marked by violence. Family members felt so hopeless and unsafe, they constantly rang the police and other professionals for help. Professionals felt so hopeless as she and her family continued to pull on the limited resources of the community. More calls-outs came to the police from her home than any other. Everyone reached the conclusion the only solution was to place the girl in care. 

But not so fast

This young person was lucky. Her community has Multisystemic Therapy (MST), a proven evidence-based treatment program that helps keep young people like her safely at home, in school, while it restores the balance of how community resources are used.  

This young boy was headed to placement, but MST helped him remain in the home

Kyle* made it clear to his parents that they had taken “everything away” from him and didn’t understand him. He took out his anger by getting into trouble. Stealing, joy-riding, using drugs, hanging out with friends who were bad influences. And the police constantly knocking on the door.

Kyle’s parents sought help from four different services that achieved different levels of success. But at the end of the day, Kyle showed little improvement, the police kept arriving with the boy moving closer and closer to placement. The mother remembers “the worst was the feeling you had failed as a parent that you hadn’t done enough, and this was our fault.”

Members of the Action for Children Wigan MST team, above

 

Putting youth behind bars for status offenses doesn't make communities safer

I am 38 years old. I am a wife and mother of three kids. We live in the suburbs with our dog, a hamster and two fish. I take my kids to gymnastics class, and I wait in the car-pool line. My life is not unusual. It’s just that I have an extraordinary job. 

For 14 years now, I have worked with kids who are on probation and parole. When I say the words “probation” or “parole,” I get lots of interesting reactions. Many people don’t seem to know that kids go to prison in America. Their kids haven’t been incarcerated, and so, it’s the furthest thing from their minds. The facts of youth incarceration in America are heart wrenching. While most people imagine young people to be behind bars for violent offenses, this is not the reality. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, the real truth is that 95 percent of kids held in detention centers are not there as a result of violent behavior. Perhaps more shocking is the fact that a large percentage are detained and sometimes even placed long term for status offenses.

After years of collaborating, two local leaders helped bring MST to Toledo, Ohio and saw reductions in youth incarceration

When you meet matriarchs, you just know it. You feel their power, and you recognize their force. That’s how I felt when I made the acquaintance of Deborah Hodges, administrator of the Lucas County (Ohio) Juvenile Court and her colleague, Karen Olnhausen of their Mental Health and Recovery Services Board. In 2010, I met them at the launch of Toledo’s Multisystemic Therapy (MST) program. These are the ladies whom I affectionately call the godmothers of MST in Toledo because they had worked for years to bring it to their community. Finally, their goal was achieved through funding from the Ohio Department of Youth Services Behavioral Health Juvenile Justice Initiative.

This report documents legislative victories as well as what is left to be done in keeping youth out of adult court

Twelve years ago, the Campaign for Youth Justice (CFYJ) set out to get young people removed from the adult justice system. In an effort to achieve that goal, since 2011, it has issued periodically a State Trends Report documenting legislative victories and what’s left to be done.

In that time, a lot has changed. Although, too much has stayed the same. The CFYJ laid out its findings in the recently released “Raising the Bar: State Trends in Keeping Youth Out of Adult Courts (2015-2017).”

Inspired from an unlikely place, one MST expert reflects on the value of kindness 

“You’re mean to each other.” That's what he said, and it shocked me. Maybe because it's true, and I didn't want to believe it. Or maybe I've been too ignorant to see it and just didn't want to believe it. Or maybe I was just embarrassed by the simple truth of it. Whatever it was, it caused me to think about those words for a long time. That’s definitely not the perception I want others to have.

Those were the words of a taxi driver as he drove me from the airport to my hotel upon my arrival in a foreign country.

How Multisystemic Therapy gave this young man from Compton a chance to be more than a statistic

In the summer of 2017, The New Yorker ran an article titled “American Inferno: The Life of a South Central Statistic.” This was a woman’s story of how her cousin became involved in the juvenile  justice system and his eventual murder—making him one more tragic statistic.

As a Multisystemic Therapy (MST) therapist in the Compton and South Central areas of Los Angeles County, I see these “statistics” play out in real life.

Virginia replaces correctional centers with evidence-based practices, MST is one of them

In June 2017, the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) closed its Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center, which had been housing more than 160 young men. The center had first started receiving youth offenders in 1890, and its yearly budget had grown to $26,039,540 by 2016.

The closing was good news for some youth advocates. Even better news came this month when the DJJ announced it would be using savings from the closing to fund Multisystemic Therapy (MST). In a statement, the department referred to MST as “a highly-regarded evidence-based model,” which would be made available “to court-involved youth in traditionally underserved areas of the Commonwealth.”

Members of the new MST teams

New Jersey calls for a bigger investment in community-based programs to lower disparities in the juvenile justice system

New Jersey has made progress in lowering the number of incarcerated juveniles. From 1997 to 2010, the confined youth population was cut by 53 percent. These efforts should be applauded. 

Unfortunately, there are other statistics that are far less commendable—those showing distressing racial disparities.