Reducing Recidivism Among Justice-Involved Youth in the Deep South: The Role of Court-Ordered Programs

Background and Purpose: Within the US, roughly 800,000 youth encounter the juvenile court system annually. While rates of juvenile court involvement have decreased considerably, continued attention toward identification of practices associated with improved outcomes is needed to support this declining trajectory. Furthermore, extant juvenile justice research focuses largely on urban areas, presenting a need for continued research with court-involved youth in non-urban areas. Recognizing this need, this study examines whether various court ordered programs are associated with reduced recidivism among court-involved youth within a non-urban county in the deep south.

Methods: Using a community-based participatory research approach, this study analyzed retrospective case information from youth referred to a county-level juvenile court between 2014 and 2016. Data collected on this sample (N=278) included age, race, gender, charges entered (count and type), programming ordered (count and type), and re-offense at 18 months (yes/no). Charges were categorized as charges against people, against property, involving drugs/alcohol, disturbing public order, and technical charges. Court orders were categorized as outpatient mental health and substance abuse counseling, residential and inpatient substance abuse counseling, sex offender rehabilitation (in and outpatient), non-traditional school/redirection classes, detention and community service. In addition to bivariate statistics, binary logistic regressions examined types of programing associated with reduced risk of re-offense while controlling for effects of individual-level characteristics and charges.

Findings: Youth within the sample were predominantly male (87%) and identified as black or indigenous people of color (BIPOC; 78%), with ages ranging between 12 to 18 (M=15.5-years-old). Most prevalent within this sample were crimes against property (41%), followed by crimes against people (29%), technical violations (13%), disturbing public order (11%) and crimes involving drugs/alcohol (7%). The majority of youth were charged with only one offense (75%), and few were charged with more than 3 offenses (4%). Programing included non-traditional school/redirection classes (53%), outpatient mental health and substance abuse counseling (34%), community service (19%), residential and inpatient substance abuse counseling (6%), sex offender rehabilitation (5%) and detention (4%). Among these youth, 64% had re-offended within 18 months. Bivariate tests demonstrated increased rates of re-offense among BIPOC youth (x²[1, N=278]=4.86, p<.05), youth receiving more charges (x²[6, N=278]=27.13, p<.001) and youth ordered to more programs (x²[4, N=278]=10.12, p<.05). However, multivariate regression analyses revealed a different picture, where BIPOC youth were no longer more likely to re-offend. Community service was the only ordered programing associated with reduced re-offense. Odds of re-offense were 70% lower among youth ordered to community service (OR=0.30, 95% CI [.12–.82], p<.05) when compared to those ordered to outpatient mental health and substance abuse programs, even after controlling for charge type and count.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest a need for closer examination of community service programing and other restorative approaches within juvenile diversion efforts. Further, analyses reveal the importance of utilizing analytic techniques that examine risk in a multivariate context to avoid misattribution of risk to individual factors. These findings have implications for social workers providing services within criminal justice settings or community agencies serving adjudicated youth.