Treatment of Juvenile Offenders: Toward Multisystemic Risk and Resource Management

Abstract

The conclusion of social scientists in the 1970s that psychological interventions were not effective in treating juvenile offenders contributed to the abandonment of the rehabilitative focus of the juvenile justice system. However, over the last few decades, new schools of thought have emerged that focus on behavioral science and social-ecological factors associated with risk for criminal behavior. Programs grounded in the social-ecological framework work to identify the multisystemic factors that contribute to an individual’s behavior and utilize evidence-based interventions to elicit change and reduce recidivism. Programs such as Functional Family Therapy, Multisystemic Therapy, and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care have emerged as promising secondary prevention programs for treating juvenile offenders through their focus on the social context of adolescent criminal behavior. These programs and others that focus on the social context of behavior change have demonstrated promising outcomes in treating juvenile offenders across a variety of areas, including substance use disorders and mental illness, recidivism, and family functioning. This chapter explores the efficacy of these programs in detail, offers critiques, and provides recommendations that have implications for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners. A brief review of the history of the juvenile justice system is provided, followed by an overview of social ecology, which serves as an analytic framework for critically evaluating current interventions at the individual, family, and community levels. Finally, directions for future research and criminal justice reform are presented, including recommendations that the justice system needs to evolve from its current backward-looking retributive model, toward a forward-looking, evidence-based system, whose primary focus is rehabilitation and recidivism reduction, rather than culpability and punishment.