Risk and Protective Factors of Juvenile System Involvement Among Post-Adjudicated Young Women

Background: Despite a disproportionate rise in juvenile system involvement among young women compared with young men over the last few decades, there remains a dearth of gender-responsive services. Young women of color are overrepresented in juvenile arrests and sentencing, with over half of young Black women (55%) and over a third (35%) of Hispanic young women representing 90% of justice involved young women (JIYW) (OJJDP, 2019). These trends highlight the need to address systemic bias, while also understanding gender-specific needs that have potential for reducing health disparities. JIYW experience multiple complex and overlapping risk factors, as well as varied pathways into the system. Most enter the juvenile system for nonviolent and minor offenses that may be related to mental health, substance use, health, trauma experiences, or family needs. Recent efforts to move toward diversion programs that provide community-based prevention and early intervention offer hope for minimizing the harms of system involvement on these young women. The purpose of this exploratory, cross-sectional study was to elucidate risk and protective factors associated with varied levels of prior juvenile justice involvement among post-adjudicated young women in a large urban county to better inform gender-responsive community diversion prevention and intervention efforts.

Methods: This secondary analysis of cross-sectional administrative data (N=365) included background demographics and items and subscales from the Positive Achievement Change Tool (PACT) collected for all post-adjudicated young women from April 2017-July 2019. SAS 9.4 programming was used an exploratory mode-building procedures to identify the risk and protective correlates of criminal history (medium and high) using multinomial logistic regression with the low level of justice involvement as the reference group (Hosmer & Lemeshow, 2000).

Results: The most parsimonious model revealed three predictors of increased criminal history involvement: mental health problems, running away from home, and age at time of probation. For each unit increase in age at time of probation, there were decreased odds of moderate level of criminal justice history by .46 (p<.001), and a higher level of justice involvement history by 0.394 (p<.001). Young women with prior mental health problems had an increased odds of being classified as having a high level of justice involvement/history than a low level (OR = 2.801, p = 0.014). Those with a history of running away had increased odds of being classified with a high level of justice involvement than a low level (OR = 3.124, p = 0.006).

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that gender-responsive programming should re-centered to target early intervention towards younger girls entering the system, with a particular focus on mental health needs and family/placement considerations that may lead to running away from home. The overrepresentation of young women of color nationally, and within our post-adjudicated sample (44% Black), is a finding that also has important implications for reducing racial bias in referrals, arrests, court services and post-adjudication outcomes. Future research and policy should focus on reducing the impact of justice- involvement for young women, while increasing opportunities to access needed community-based services starting from a younger age.