Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1731
AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: MAY 2009 63 Most adolescents referred to long-term group homes in Los Angeles County after being charged with a serious offense reported they were still involved with crime or drugs seven years later, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The bleak fi ndings suggest there is a need to improve juvenile justice rehabilita- tion programs, according to the report, published online by the American Journal of Public Health. Studies rarely track ju- venile offenders for long, so little is known about the prognosis for juvenile offenders nationally. How- ever, the youths in this study were similar to the national profi le of youths in juvenile correctional facilities, and a similar study conducted in Chicago found similar mortality rates. Researchers studied 449 adolescents aged 13 to 17 who were referred to group homes by judges in Los Angeles County between February 1999 and May 2000. The participants were interviewed periodically over the next seven years to assess how their lives had progressed. When attempts were made to re-contact these young people in 2007, researchers learned that 12 of the young people had died, including seven from gunshot wounds. Among the 383 participants who completed the fi nal in- terview, 36 percent had used hard drugs in the past year and 27 percent reported substance dependence. Among the group that completed the final inter- view, 66 percent reported they had done something illegal, other than using alcohol or drugs, in the pre- vious year. Thirty-seven per- cent reported being arrested within the previous year and 25 percent had been in jail or prison every day for the previous 90 days. "We cannot say that these group homes failed to im- prove anyone's life, but the large number of poor out- comes we observed raises questions about whether the juvenile justice system is as effective in rehabilitating de- linquent youths as it should be," said Rajeev Ramchand, the study's lead author and an associate social scientist at RAND, a nonprofi t re- search organization. The group homes may have contributed to a few bright spots in the study's fi ndings. About one-fi fth of the participants reported they were living productive lives -- neither criminally active nor in jail. Among the group that completed the fi nal interview, 58 per- cent of the participants had graduated high school or obtained a G E D and 63 percent reported working at a job in the previous year. The RAND study is one of the largest and longest efforts to follow juvenile offenders who had been referred to group homes for rehabilitation. The RAN D study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Participants were recruited from all three juvenile de- tention facilities in Los An- geles County. Group homes fail to break the cycles, says RAND Part of getting smarter about offender re-entry and juvenile justice is fi guring out what's not working Circle number 142 on the Reader Service Card.