Case Study: Juvenile Offenders And Substance Abuse

Edward P. Mulvey, Carol A. Schubert, and Laurie Chassin (2010), examined 1300 juveniles (14-17years old), seven years post-conviction to expose the pathway to desistance. This sample was made up of the most serious offenders and substance abuse was strongly linked. The use of interviews with the participant, as well as a family member, was conducted for the purpose of gathering participant responses and verifying whether it’s true or false with someone that knows the offender best. Researchers often reviewed school performance, work performance, involvement in programs, and official arrest records as their variables in the study. The components are imperative to include in studies because it provides more background information on the kind …show more content…
Carter and Barker (2011) took a sample of 79 former juvenile drug court participants from the Davidson County Juvenile Drug Court (2002-2007), were compared with their adulthood convictions. The data was collected from It was found that by youth completing the drug program, the commitment of felony crimes was greatly reduced. The program was more successful for Whites rather than Non-Whites. However, without having access to certain factors such as demographics, family aspects, and socioeconomic status, it made it difficult to seek how these aspects affect treatment. Brook et al. (1992), encountered the same problem in their study where there was limited information on the background of these offenders, which is absolutely important to know because the overall lifestyle of the offender (i.e. who they interact with, family foundation, job/income) all plays a part in the right kind of treatment to be rendered. This issue was very common throughout the majority of the literature and studies. These personal factors should be included in studies in order to provide a list of motivations behind juvenile drug use, because it may be the underlying cause that researches are looking …show more content…
Henggeler et al. (2006), sought to perform a study in which six juvenile drug courts were randomly exposed to therapists coming in and using their professional skills to administer contingency management with a blend of family engagement tactics. This was done in effort to see whether the new strategy would be greater than the usual services offered. The sample consisted of 104 juvenile offenders, with an average age of 15-16. With this sample, it was found that 86% of the sample was deemed to have at least one substance disorder and at the same time psychiatric diagnoses were present. The disorders were accessed for nine months and as a result it was found that the new strategy involving contingency management with a blend of family engagement tactics was significantly way more effective than the usual services rendered. This strategy generally reduced drug use based upon urine drug test results and it also reduced both violent and nonviolent crimes. Thus, the juvenile drug courts need improvement and most importantly needs to create a family based component into their treatment methods because youth need to be socially accessed on a level where the treatment is beyond just drug use