Determinants of Substance Abuse among Incarcerated Adolescents

Background and Significance

One of the most common characteristics of young offenders is substance abuse, a fact fairly well established for over three decades (Hirschi, 1969). Approximately 50 percent of incarcerated youth acknowledge using drugs or alcohol at the time of their crime (DeMatteo & Marczyk, 2005). As DeMatteo and Marczyk discuss, the nexus of substance abuse and crime is clearly there, but it may not be a simple cause-and-effect or even correlational relationship. In other words, if substance abuse is a risk factor in serious offending, then knowing the risk factors for substance abuse would aid not only treatment of offenders but perhaps prevention of substance abuse and delinquency as well. Teplin, Abram, McClelland, Duclan, and Mericle (2003) conducted an epidemiological study to examine psychiatric disorders in juvenile delinquents, and found that the most common disorders were substance-use disorders and disruptive behavior disorders, such as oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to determine the seminal symptoms of conduct disorder that seem to be the risk factors for substance abuse among incarcerated youth.

Methods

Data were collected on a sample of 83 youth – 74 males and 9 females - confined to a secured facility in Southern Oregon. The independent variables were the following six critical symptoms of conduct disorder: setting fires, threatening others, torturing animals, destroying property, having carried a handgun, and running away. Five of these variables were derived from the Oregon Mental Health Referral Checklist (Corcoran, 2005) with the participants' endorsement of the presence or absence of the symptoms within six months prior to incarceration. An item from the survey of Arthur, Hawkins, Catalano, and Pollard (n.d) defined the carrying of a handgun variable. The dependent variable – the presence or absence of substance abuse six months prior to incarceration – was also derived from the Oregon Mental Health Referral Checklist.

Results

Logistic regression was used to determine the impact of the six criteria of conduct disorder and substance abuse. Using the criteria of studentized residuals greater than +/-2.0, there were no outliers in the sample. When analyzing the independent variables, running away from home was the only individual characteristic of conduct disorder that was significantly related to substance abuse (Wald = 11.0, p < .01). The values of exp (B) for running away was 9.03 (p < .001). This indicates that those incarcerated youth who reported running away were nine times more likely to be substance abusers than youth who had not run away prior to their incarceration. A 75%/25% validation confirmed these results.

Discussion

Because incarcerated youth in this sample who ran away from home were more than nine times more likely to abuse substances than their counterparts, the researchers came up with a three-pronged preventative approach. First, youth presenting with multiple risk factors for incarceration should be assessed for their risk of running away from home. Second, an ecologically grounded and integrated treatment plan should be used. Finally, the researchers recommend the adoption of a harm-reduction approach.