Juvenile Offender Rehabilitation: Evidence-Based Programs

Introduction

For over a decade, researchers have recognized program models as well as intervention strategies that reduce law-breaking while encouraging pro-social development. Preventing delinquency and rehabilitating juvenile offenders not only safeguards the public, but also keeps youth from spending time in detention facilities or jails that do not help them — and instead typically create scenarios that lead to youth committing more crimes as they age into adults. Prevention and rehabilitative efforts are key to inhibiting chances for future crime and diminishing the strain of crime on its victims and the public at large.

Not only do rehabilitative and preventative efforts help reduce crime overall, they also help reduce the money taxpayers ordinarily spend on the arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, and subsequent treatment of criminal offenders. If the end goal is to reduce or prevent criminal offense and reoffense, programs aimed at addressing the reasons behind committing a crime may be more beneficial than those that pursue traditional methods. If programs become available that enable prevention of juvenile offenders from reoffending — and thus from becoming adult criminals — they could potentially save taxpayers seven to ten dollars for each dollar invested, chiefly in the form of reduced expenditure on prisons and the justice system overall (Baglivio, Wolff, Piquero, & Epps, 2015, p. 229).

Such programs should take into consideration antisocial potential theory for any preventative or rehabilitative approaches (Steinberg & Scott, 2010). Farrington's Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory helps summarize decades of research showing the development of at-risk working-class London boys and how their documented behaviors provide context for understanding juvenile delinquent behavior and motivations (Borduin, Dopp, & Taylor, 2013, p. 194). Delinquent development is complex and requires an understanding of various scenarios and contexts in order to grasp why a juvenile offends and what could be prompting such destructive behavior. This paper highlights antisocial potential theory, evidence-based practices that are effective in preventing juvenile delinquency, and programs that are — and are not — helping juvenile offenders during the critical rehabilitation process.

Review of the Research

Offender programs often follow the traditional route and do not fully consider the psychosocial factors that influence individual engagement in intervention settings. While factors related to offending behavior are known throughout the research community, their influence on what causes the behavior or on motivational engagement remains unclear. Studies like Brooks and Khan (2015) attempted to examine such impact by interviewing and monitoring 109 juvenile offenders within a non-custodial community intervention. They explored antisocial behavior, the influence of aggression, and disruptive and problematic behavior during school hours. They also monitored self-esteem and parental bonding as possible influences and examined reported motivation to engage in intervention situations.

Their results revealed relationships among these variables and identified four subtypes of motivation: amotivation, identified regulation, extrinsic motivation, and intrinsic motivation. Results concerning self-esteem were decidedly mixed and did not reveal significant new information. The results suggest that the nature of motivation is complex and that, for intervention strategies to work, they must provide participants with a sense of competence and self-autonomy. As the authors concluded, "The findings highlight the multidimensional and complex nature of motivation, and support the need to internalize extrinsic motivations through the promotion of self-autonomy and competence within intervention programs in order to maximize engagement" (Brooks & Khan, 2015, p. 351).

This was also seen in another study that highlighted the need for intervention strategies to consider what will motivate adolescents to engage in positive behaviors that will prevent further conflicts with the justice system. What was found was that juveniles tend to find intervention methods that encourage participation and self-autonomy more interesting and influential than those that merely address the "base needs" of an adolescent (Cooper, 2015, p. 285). For example, if a rehabilitation program sought to enable positive coping mechanisms for juvenile offenders by engaging in thoughtful discussion with them about their lives and how they wish to see themselves in the future, this may be more helpful than treating all juvenile offenders as identical. They need some level of individual attention in order to feel motivated enough to follow through with the program protocol and learn.

Feelings and motivation are closely tied together, and if someone does not feel positively toward a program or intervention strategy, it will most likely not be effective. A 2014 article by DeLisi and Vaughn demonstrated that temperament has been connected to behavior for hundreds of years, yet it has not been clearly discussed or applied within crime theory. That study incorporated research and theory from over three hundred studies across fields such as genetics, psychiatry, neuroscience, and criminology in order to introduce a temperament-based theory of antisocial behavior within a criminal justice framework, identifying temperamental constructs that could reveal previously unrecognized connections.

The researchers discovered two temperamental constructs — negative emotionality and effortful control — that are major indicators of behavioral problems and self-regulation deficits from infancy through adolescence and across adulthood. As the authors stated, "Two temperamental constructs — effortful control and negative emotionality — are significantly predictive of self-regulation deficits and behavioral problems in infancy, in toddlerhood, in childhood, in adolescence, and across adulthood" (DeLisi & Vaughn, 2014, p. 10). If these constructs are identified in prevention programs and incorporated into assessments of juveniles and juvenile offenders, they may contribute to a more effective intervention strategy.

Farrington's Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

A theory that may contribute significantly to identifying motivations behind criminal behavior, especially for adolescents, is Farrington's Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory. Unlike antisocial propensity, antisocial potential suggests that criminal inclination has less to do with biological factors and more to do with environment and upbringing. The theory also distinguishes between long-term antisocial potential (AP) and short-term AP components, each influenced by different factors. Long-term AP, from Farrington's perspective, is influenced by individual characteristics and childhood socialization, while short-term AP is influenced by short-term energizers such as intoxication or anger (Farrington, 2014, p. 2560).

By examining long-term AP characteristics that are not affected by outside events such as unemployment and loss, Farrington found that long-term AP was not as strong an indicator of delinquency as short-term AP, which is more directly affected by social interaction and environment. By combining innate characteristics with interaction and environment, Farrington developed a theory that could explain some of the reasons why certain youths are more prone to juvenile delinquency than others. He also connected long-term AP with short-term AP — noting that high short-term AP suggests a higher incidence of delinquency — by arguing that long-term AP could contribute to the pervasiveness of short-term energizing factors like chronic anger and repeated drinking, causing offenders to seek out social settings where the chances for crime and delinquency are far more common (Junger-Tas & Decker, 2008, p. 305).

For example, Black male youth are more likely to be arrested than other population groups. This disparity has less to do with race itself than with location, environment, and the availability of potentially harmful influences. By engaging in street or gang-related activities and participating in a youth culture that promotes drug use and violence, at-risk youth may be more likely to engage in criminal activities than those who do not seek out such settings (Haegerich, Salerno, & Bottoms, 2013, p. 86). As Sykes, Gioviano, and Piquero (2015) observed, "Research shows that the most disadvantaged members of society have the highest risk of spending time in prison. One in nine African-American men is imprisoned, and over a third of young, Black, male high-school dropouts are in prison or jail on any given day" (p. 123). While characteristics related to oppression and inequality may be present since early development, it is the available avenues of expression that perpetuate potential criminal offenses.

In a 2014 qualitative study, frontline viewpoints were explored in order to address the challenge of meeting the criminogenic needs of youth within a Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR)-based case management framework. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-nine probation officers in Toronto, Canada. Emergent themes included the significance of targeting "high impact" criminogenic needs, the lack of evidence-based programming, the salience of particular responsivity factors within case management, and respondents' doubt regarding their role in meeting the criminogenic needs of youth. Results demonstrated the need for research probing the connection between explicit responsivity factors, criminogenic needs, and the educational needs of youth on probation. "Findings also support recent initiatives that provide concrete training to probation officers around implementation of the need and responsivity principles in effective case management of justice-involved youth" (Haqanee, Peterson-Badali, & Skilling, 2014, p. 37).

This study also helped reveal the need to explore additional research avenues regarding juvenile offenders. A 2006 study explored targeting the self-esteem of youth offenders in order to effectively treat them (Hubbard, 2006, p. 40). This line of thinking was also adopted by a 2011 study that sought to understand youth offenders' expectations for success in rehabilitation-type programs and interventions (Iselin, Mulvey, Loughran, Chung, & Schubert, 2011, p. 239). While neither study produced definitive results, both brought to the foreground the need to address the expectations for success that youth offenders hold for these kinds of interventions, as well as their self-esteem as a result of participation. By addressing the real concerns and needs of juvenile offenders during intervention phases, programs may help alleviate some of the risk that juvenile offenders will reoffend in the future.

Conclusion

To summarize, juvenile offenders require evidence-based practices that take into consideration their motivations and behaviors. Theories like Farrington's Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory not only provide direction in an otherwise complex situation, but also help to link environmental and social factors with the behavioral problems and negative attitudes experienced by juvenile offenders. While race and income level may play a part in the frequency of incarceration due to racial prejudice and associated systemic factors, the main determinants of criminal engagement are short-term influences and indicators such as aggression, lack of stimulation, and negative community influence. Programs that take these complexities into consideration will have better outcomes than those that pursue the traditional route.

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