In 2010, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention released results from the first-ever nationally representative survey of youth confined in juvenile justice facilities. This Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) offered a treasure trove of information about the mental health and substance abuse problems faced by confined youth and the treatment provided to them. 

However, because interviews were conducted back in 2003, the SYRP findings beg the question: What changes have occurred since 2003 in mental health care for confined youth?

Unfortunately, few national data on the breadth or quality of mental health treatment in juvenile facilities have become available since 2003.  Yet there is no doubt that awareness of mental health needs among delinquent youth has grown substantially, and there are many signs that services have improved.

Carefully constructed mental health screening and assessment tools, once rare, are now used routinely in juvenile detention and correctional facilities nationwide. And either voluntarily or in response to conditions of confinement lawsuits, many states have hired additional mental health professionals and substantially expanded counseling and treatment inside their juvenile facilities. 

“I think that [state facilities] are better equipped to work with the mental health population today,” says Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, a membership organization for state youth corrections agency heads. “States are using the results of the screening and assessments to build treatment plans,” Loughran says. “Is it perfect? No, it’s not perfect. But it’s far better than it was 10 or 15 years ago.”

Early in 2000, after a groundbreaking study revealed epidemic levels of mental illness among detained youth in Cook County — plus a severe lack of counseling and treatment — the Illinois Department of Human Services launched an ambitious new Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Initiative.

Ever since, the program has been diverting hundreds of emotionally disturbed and behaviorally troubled youth out of the justice system each year and into community-based treatment. Outcomes have been favorable for participating young people and for public safety.

However, for the much larger number of behaviorally troubled youth remaining in the Illinois juvenile justice system — and especially for those committed to state correctional custody — progress has been far slower.

Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in September 2012 alleging that youth housed in state youth corrections facilities still do not receive “minimally adequate” care.

The state settled the lawsuit quickly, agreeing in a December 2012 consent decree to undertake a comprehensive study of its mental health services and institute meaningful reforms. That consent decree, along with other recent changes to minimize confinement of troubled teens and expand the use of research-tested treatment methods, offer renewed hope for mentally ill youth caught up in the juvenile justice system. Yet both advocates and system officials agree that, while the situation is improving, serious challenges remain.

Inside state facilities, “The care is uneven,” says John Maki, executive director of the John Howard Association — a century-old, independent watchdog organization devoted to juvenile and adult prison reform. “They’re juggling a lot of balls: facility consolidation, right-sizing the system, creating a new aftercare system.”

Put on a sex registry for the offense of public nudity as a minor. Harassed by neighbors out of a home and banned from a homeless shelter because of an offense committed at age 15.

The New York-based research group Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report today on the life-shattering consequences of putting minors on sex registries for offenses — sometimes shockingly mild offenses — for the rest of their lives.

Filled with devastating stories of teens and young adults unable to put offenses behind them, the rights group's report is called “Raised on the Register: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S.”

The report is the product of a 16-month investigation into 581 cases and interviews with 281 sex offenders — median age 15 — in 20 states.  Prosecutors, defense attorneys, child sexuality experts and victims of “child on child” sexual assault were also interviewed.  The investigation explores how a burgeoning national web of laws in various states requiring constant registration and public disclosure of offenders’ identities has affected the lives of young offenders long after time served or rehabilitation. Some on registries have killed themselves, even before reaching adulthood.

The report begins with Jacob C., who was 11 years old when convicted of one count of sexual misconduct in Michigan for touching, not penetrating, his sister’s genitals. He was not allowed to live in a home with other children, was eventually put into foster care and was placed on a sex registry that was made public when he turned 18.  He struggled to graduate from high school, and was shunned because of his registration status. And when he enrolled in college, he said, campus police followed him everywhere. He dropped out.

Now 26, the report says, Jacob’s life continues to be defined and limited by a conviction at age 11.

As the national debate grows louder over deploying police in schools, the largest state in the union — California — is considering a bill that would require schools to set “clear guidelines” defining the role of school police and limit their involvement in disciplinary matters.

The Golden State joins Texas and Connecticut — home of the December Newtown school shootings — in considering legislation that would set limits on how schools involve police officers in discipline. Colorado adopted limits last year.

The proposals come amid burgeoning concern nationally over harsh school punishment policies, and police involvement in seemingly routine discipline. Police presence on campuses nationwide has grown steadily since two teens went on a killing spree at Columbine High School outside Denver in 1999. But a growing group of juvenile-justice researchers and judges argue that putting students into conflict with officers over minor infractions — and needlessly placing kids in the justice system — increases risks students will drop out and get into more serious trouble.

Since last December, lawmakers in various states and school administrators have rushed to fortify security in reaction to a young adult’s shooting rampage, which killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn. President Obama and California’s own senator, Democrat Barbara Boxer, have urged appropriating money to schools that want to increase security.

CHICAGO — In the late 1990s, Northwestern University scholar Linda Teplin launched a groundbreaking study to examine the mental health status of young people in Cook County’s juvenile lock up.

The study began a century after the county became the first jurisdiction in the world to create a separate court system for juveniles accused of delinquency.

The results, however, were not those expected of a mature juvenile justice system, they were not full of positive outcomes and they did not suggest the Cook County system as a model for others.

They were, instead, alarming. Among a random sample of 1,829 young people taken into custody in Cook County from 1995 to 1998, 66 percent of boys and 74 percent of girls were diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder, and most of these youth had two or more disorders. Half had a clinically significant substance abuse problem. Depression, anxiety, and attention deficit disorder were all widespread.

Yet Cook County’s mental health services for detained youth were paltry. Just 15 percent of youth tracked in the study received any mental health services inside the detention center, and just 8 percent received any mental health services in the community within six months of release from detention.

Teplin’s study, the largest of its kind ever undertaken, provided a wake-up call to leaders not just in Cook County but nationwide — part of a sea change in the juvenile justice field over the past decade toward growing awareness and action to address the mental health needs of court-involved youth.

“We’ve come into this, since her studies, with a much more sophisticated understanding of the needs of the kids,” says Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union in Chicago. “You are dealing with large numbers of kids with fairly substantial mental health needs.”

How big a difference can new evidence-based treatment methods make in the cases of juvenile offenders with mental health problems?

In Cook County, Illinois, juvenile court leaders decided to find out.  Specifically, they agreed to participate in a randomized controlled experiment to test the impact of Multisystemic Therapy (MST) – a prominent new treatment methodology – against the court’s usual services for youth accused or adjudicated for juvenile sex offenses.

The study, published in 2009, involved 127 youth accused of sex offenses and ordered by the court to attend sex offender treatment. Sixty-seven were assigned to MST, and 60 were assigned to Cook County probation department’s existing juvenile sex offender unit and required to take part in weekly sex offender treatment groups.

The offenders’ mean age was 14.6 years (range 11 to 18 years). Most youth (98 percent) were male, 54 percent Black, 44 percent White, with 31 percent reporting Hispanic ethnicity. Their offenses included aggravated criminal sexual assault (31 percent), criminal sexual abuse (24 percent), criminal sexual assault (18 percent), and aggravated criminal sexual abuse (15 percent). Evaluators found no differences between youth in the MST and comparison groups in terms of their sexual offense records or demographics.

The new immigration proposal now before the Senate could help thousands of American citizens whose families have been shattered or forced into exile because of deportation and tough immigration penalties Congress adopted in 1996.

Grueling debate on the sweeping bipartisan proposal is ahead, with opponents, such as Numbers USA, an immigration restriction group, already mustering a campaign to denounce portions of the bill as “amnesty.”  But Americans who have been forced to move out of the country to remain united with ousted spouses – or who face years of separation from spouses and sometimes children — say they are thrilled by language in the proposal that could provide them relief.  

“We still have a long way to go, but this is one giant step forward for my family,” New Jersey native Margot Bruemmer, 40, told the Center for Public Integrity in a phone call from Veracruz, Mexico. She has lived there, in a remote area, since 2005, after she tried to legalize her husband and he was given a mandatory lifetime “bar” from living in the United States that can’t be appealed for 10 years.

The reason: He had crossed the border more than once unlawfully, which is not uncommon among  undocumented workers. The couple has two small children.

Bruemmer belongs to American Families United, a network of Americans who have all been separated from spouses or moved abroad with them – or who fear that they’ll suffer the same fate if they dare to try to legalize spouses under the current immigration system. 

Researchers analyzing a trove of national school discipline data have found that as black, disabled and English-as-a-second language students enter middle and high schools, their school suspension rates start soaring — a serious predicator for dropping out.  

Even one or two out-of-school suspensions are now linked by multiple studies to a greater risk of a student dropping out, suffering “failure” and being incarcerated, researchers for the University of California at Los Angeles Civil Rights Project said Monday at a Capitol Hill briefing.

“Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that nationally, on average, 36 percent of black male students with disabilities enrolled in middle and high schools were suspended at least once in (the) 2009-2010 (academic year),” researchers wrote in their report, “Out of School & Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools.”

The study also found that across the nation, one in every four African-American students in secondary schools was suspended at least once in the 2009-2010 academic year. One in every five students with disabilities and one in every five English-language learners was also suspended, out of school, at least once. That’s compared to only one in 16 white students without disabilities receiving at least one suspension over the same time period.  

For their report, researchers analyzed data on suspensions for the 2009-2010 school year gathered from schools for the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Database.

Just as a National Rifle Association task force unveiled its “National School Shield” report this week, a detailed critique from three criminologists termed the gun lobby’s push for enhanced school security “superficially simple.”

Two professors at Marshall University in West Virginia who are studying incarcerated school shooters and one professor at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military school, published their jointly written critique this month in the American Journal of Criminal Justice.

The criminologists began their review last December after the NRA announced its “National School Shield” project in response to a gunman’s massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators in a Newtown, Conn. school.  The NRA’s initial thrust was to urge schools to hire more police, but also persuade states to allow teachers or other willing staff or volunteers to carry arms. The NRA said it would provide training. In addition, the firearms association formed a task force to study schools’ vulnerabilities and make suggestions.

That  task force unveiled a 225-page report at a press conference Tuesday with “best practices” recommendations, including advice on installing bullet-proof glass and surveillance equipment, redesigning doors and outdoor areas, seeking advice from consultants and putting an armed guard or armed employee in every school.