A Systematic Review of Teen Court Evaluation Studies

Background/Significance: Every year over 1 million youth under the age of 18 are arrested and risk entry into the juvenile justice system. Justice system involvement is associated with a host of negative outcomes including an increased likelihood of engaging in further crime, violence, and delinquent behavior, dropping out of school, and being involved in the justice system as an adult. Given these risk factors, diversion programs such as Teen Court (TC) are often used for non-chronic youthful offenders as an alternative to the traditional juvenile justice system. In the TC process, a peer jury determines appropriate prosocial sanctions. Despite the prevalence of TC programs across the United States (over 1,000), research on TC’s effectiveness remains scarce and existing studies have conflicting results. The purpose of the current systematic review is to synthesize TC research and examine the program’s impact on recidivism.

 

Methods: Following acceptance by PROSPERO, the methodology followed AMSTAR’s (A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews) guidelines for conducting systematic reviews (e.g., established research question, list of inclusion criteria, comprehensive literature search). The authors independently searched 12 databases using identical keywords. The search yielded 443 articles which resulted in 46 eligible articles reporting on 35 studies. The authors examined recidivism (i.e., source, definition, rate), study design, sanctions, referral sources, participation criteria, and additional program outcomes (e.g., substance use, social skills).

 

Results: Findings indicated substantial differences in participation criteria, sanctions, and methods for measuring recidivism. Whereas some programs accepted referrals from the juvenile justice system and therefore served youth who would otherwise be served by the juvenile justice system, other programs accepted referrals from schools and served youth with less severe offenses (e.g., school misbehavior). Recidivism rates ranged from 2% to 49%; however, inconsistencies in the way in which recidivism was defined and measured impeded our ability to make comparisons across studies. Finally, 20 of the 35 studies included a comparison group, and only two used random assignment.

 

Implications: Differences in participation criteria across TC programs have significant implications for practice and research. The results of this review suggest that although TC programs are commonly referred to as a juvenile justice diversion programs, some TC programs serve youth who would otherwise face school disciplinary action, but would not be processed through the juvenile justice system. The youth who are served by these different types of programs likely differ substantially, suggesting differing participant needs from a practice perspective and differing likelihood of recidivism from an evaluation perspective. The authors offer terminology that distinguishes among different types of TC programs (i.e., Diversion Teen Court, Disciplinary Teen Court, and Hybrid Teen Court). In terms of effectiveness, rigorous research on TC programs is minimal; additional studies using stringent methodology (i.e., experimental designs or quasi-experimental designs that control for selection bias) are needed in order to draw confident conclusions on program impact. Standards for assessing recidivism are offered to increase comparability across programs in future research.