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NewsStudy aims to straighten path for arrested teensAugust 27, 2007Palm Beach Post By Kathleen Chapman Local teens who are arrested in the next two years could become part of an experiment meant to help Florida leaders decide how best to prevent crime. The study, which researchers believe is the first of its kind in Florida, will randomly assign teens who are arrested or violate probation as juveniles into two groups. Some will be sent home and enrolled in an intervention program called Redirections. The others will be sent to a residential commitment program. University of Florida criminology Professor Charles Frazier will lead the study, which will be paid for with a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. Frazier hopes to select about 750 teens across Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties - along with Broward, Indian River and Okeechobee counties - then follow the, to see which do better. The study should give legislators answers about whether intervention programs work in the real world, Frazier said: "And that, we think, will be good not just for these three circuits but for the rest of the state and the rest of the country." Though judges in Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties have signed onto the project and are waiting for the first teen to be assigned to an intervention program, some juvenile court judges in Palm Beach County initially balked at the idea. Palm Beach County Juvenile Court Judges Ronald Alvarez and Peter Blanc said they were concerned when they heard that a computer program would decide the fate of each teen randomly. The youths in juvenile court are not laboratory rats, Blanc said when first presented with the idea last month. "I don't want to say, 'OK, you're kid number four today, so you get (the intervention program) Redirections instead of commitment.' " A sentence handed down in his courtroom, he said, "is not an experiment, and it is not a research study. It is real life for these kids." Frazier said the random assignment of teens is like any clinical trial and a key element of his proposal for federal grant money. Only teens who the Department of Juvenile Justice determines are eligible for either intervention or commitment will be chosen, and judges will be notified that a teen has been randomly assigned to one group or the other. In the study judges keep the right to override those decisions. Judges had a good meeting with Frazier last week but have a few more questions before agreeing to participate, Alvarez said. Frazier has done great work in other studies, Alvarez said, and the research he gathers would be valuable to judges and policymakers. The concern for Blanc is whether the experiment may affect judges' decisions about where teens will go. Blanc said he would need to look at all the evidence when deciding what sentence would give a teen the best chance of success, and could not sign off on a purely random assignment in the interest of a study. The experiment will follow a segment of juvenile offenders: those who have gotten in enough trouble that they could qualify for a residential program but have not committed a crime more serious than a nonviolent, third-degree felony. Teens who have committed violent crimes are typically charged as adults or sent to locked juvenile programs and are not eligible for the study. Many of the children sent to residential programs have not committed a serious felony but have exasperated parents, teachers and judges. Some are charged repeatedly with minor crimes or violate probation by skipping school, running away or getting caught with kids who are using drugs. In the past, judges typically had few options except to send those teens who repeatedly broke the rules to a locked program. But the problem, some judges say, is that those programs often are 50 to 100 miles from the teen's home - too far for parents to visit often. And when teens are released, they often go back to the same friends and dysfunctional families that caused their problems to begin with, said Paul Kanarek, who is administrative judge of the family division in the four-county judicial circuit of Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties. "If, in fact, we learn that keeping them at home and providing intervention or therapy is just as effective, or maybe more effective, than placing them in a commitment program, we could be saving a substantial amount of money and helping everyone," Kanarek said. The Department of Juvenile Justice started the intervention initiative Redirections in 2004, and contracts with a company called Evidence-Based Associates to provide programs across the state. The program in the Treasure Coast, called multisystemic therapy, assigns families to a therapist who is available on-call. Each therapist usually is assigned to five families and spends about 60 hours with a family over four months, teaching parents how to regain control and working with the teen to resolve problems with parents, school and friends. The program in Palm Beach County, called functional family therapy, is centered on helping family members relate to each other better. In that program, therapists typically visit families once a week for an hour at a time. Both models are used in hundreds of locations around the world. In Florida, the intervention programs have waiting lists, and there is not enough money to serve all the teens who qualify. A U.S. surgeon general review in 2001 after the Columbine, Colo., high school shootings found those programs were among the few proven to prevent youth violence. A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health followed with its own review of the literature in 2004. The panel found that detention centers, boot camps and other get-tough programs often exacerbate problems by grouping teens with delinquent tendencies, "where the more sophisticated instruct the more naive," according to a news release on the study. The new study will be the first of its kind in Florida, Frazier said. "What is unique for us, and why the federal government is interested in funding it," he said, "is that it is a field experiment." Many studies are demonstration projects, he said, where the teens assigned to an intervention program may have different characteristics than those sent to a commitment program. But this study will find out how teens do in the real world, Frazier said. |
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© 2008 Evidence-Based Associates