Juvenile and Family Court Journal最新文献

This article features a set of court performance measures, the “Judicial, Court and Attorney Measures of Performance” or “JCAMP,” with a focus on JCAMP's permanency measures. The JCAMP permanency metrics are discussed in relation to court and judicial practices and the judge's role in achieving permanency for children and families. How data from the permanency measures can inform understandings of what judges are doing to promote safe and timely permanency for children and families in child welfare cases is addressed. Connections between the JCAMP permanency measures and recommendations for judicial best practices are also highlighted.

Upholding the fundamental rights of families during child welfare court cases is critical to ensuring equal access to justice. This article review research related to the due process measures in the Judicial, Court, and Attorney Measures of Performance (JCAMP). Studies of due process practices early in the case to avoid unnecessary involvement of families are presented. These represent divergent opinions on the role of the judge and arguments for the early appointment of parent attorneys. Future research is critical to understand practices which promote fairness and address the over-representation of families of color in the child welfare system.

Child safety is an ambiguous and transient construct within the child welfare court system. It being not statutorily defined yet is at the crux of the child welfare system. In this article, the measurement of child safety in the child welfare system is explored with a focus on how it has been measured within the context of the courts. Gaps in the current measurement structure are identified, focusing on how measurement might support a better understanding of a safety decision-making framework and its application into practice. The article also introduces the Capacity Building Center for Courts' Judicial, Court, and Attorney Measures of Performance as a new approach to a standardized performance metric of safety practices within the child welfare court system. Limitation of these measures is discussed along with recommendations for moving the field forward toward measuring safety decision-making.

The 2020 Juvenile Residential Facility Census reports that roughly 25,000 youth in the United States (U.S.) are incarcerated—placing the United States as the leading nation in number of juveniles in correctional facilities worldwide. This paper aims to highlight an overlooked population impacted by this issue: not the incarcerated youth themselves, but their siblings. This paper first grounds historical trends, the effects of racialized sociopolitical systems on disparate rates of incarceration, and the current state of youth incarceration, with a specific focus on impacts on families. This paper reviews the literature on how families are affected by the juvenile justice system in terms of their well-being, education, and other outcomes—drawing from the small body of research directly on siblings and hypothesizing impacts in need of further study based on families' experiences in the criminal justice system. We present historical and current issues/limitations to understanding and addressing the impacts of youth incarceration on siblings, concluding with areas of future research needed to address the impacts that a youth's incarceration has on their siblings and family.

The juvenile justice system has long struggled with practices for understanding, preventing, and intervening in delinquency. Debates concerning youth delinquency, diversion efforts, and effective rehabilitation have consistently been examined. However, the answers to most of these fundamental approaches remain unresolved. Mental health is a major concern for juveniles under a correctional treatment program, but the juvenile justice system lacks individualized mental health services, having devastating and unfair results on youth in need. Through research, professional development, and advocacy, youth who are especially vulnerable to experiencing the undesired outcomes that result from receiving inadequate and inappropriate services will gain better outcomes.

Families play a significant role both in youth's development of criminal behavior and in their desistance of criminal behavior. Nonetheless, programming for families of justice-involved youth is limited. This article describes two family-based programs found in the National Institute of Justice CrimeSolutions database. Among 19 programs for families, only the Functional Family Therapy and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care for Adolescents are documented as effective in helping justice-involved youths and their families. The discussion proposes how these programs could be used to harness services under special education law for students with emotional and behavioral disabilities who are overrepresented in juvenile correctional facilities.

The family law system requires change to improve family outcomes, and the operationalization of therapeutic jurisprudence may be part of the solution. In this paper, the authors propose The Confluent Family Law Model, which realigns mental health professionals with the court to utilize their expertise better, mitigate problems with child custody evaluations, reduce system noise, and improve decision hygiene in family law. The model aims to work collaboratively with family court professionals to assist families and argues that “best interest” determinations may be better achieved through mental health input on a case-by-case basis at the level of the bench.

Parenting styles studies which used US data have shown positive effects of authoritative parenting styles and negative effects of permissive and authoritarian parenting styles on the adolescents' behavioral development. The effects of parenting styles were predictive within the juvenile population of the United States. The current study introduces questions about the influence of culture and gender on the association between parenting styles and children's delinquent behaviors. It focuses on South Korean culture, which is influenced by Confucian philosophy emphasizing obeying parents and importance of the role of the son in the family. This study uses ordinary least squares regression to examine data from the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey 2010 collected by the National Youth Policy Institute from 2010 to 2016. Results indicated that male South Korean children respond positively to the authoritarian parenting style, but parenting style does not influence female South Korean children, at least when it comes to delinquency. These results indicate that culture and gender influence the association between parenting style and delinquency among children and broaden the applicability of parenting style research.

The rate of children entering foster care due to parental substance use continues to climb, particularly in rural areas. States and localities grappling with how to best serve these cases may be interested in implementing family treatment courts (FTC) but unsure of the return on investment for this enhanced approach. The few existing cost analyses of FTC focus primarily on large programs in urban settings. We present findings from a 4-year quasi-experimental study of a Midwestern rural FTC and conduct a cost analysis of observed effects on time in foster care. Using survival analyses to capture daily differences in permanency rates between groups and calculating the integral of the difference between survival curves, we observed that treatment group children spent, on average, 361 fewer days in care compared to children in the traditional system. The difference between FTC implementation costs and daily foster care costs avoided for the 91 treatment group children was estimated at over $26,000 per child served.