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An Evidence‐Based Approach to Reducing Recidivism in Court‐Referred Youth

The focus on court-referred youth within this study necessitates a brief description of the modern juvenile justice system. Children and adolescents under the age of 18 are described as juvenile delinquents if they engage in activities prohibited by local, state, or federal legal codes (Granville, 2007). When juveniles violate the law, their cases are typically processed through the juvenile justice system, a loose network of agencies that deal with juveniles including police, prosecutor, detention, court, probation, and the Department of Juvenile Corrections (Nissen, 2006). Historically, the juvenile justice system has been oriented toward offender rehabilitation over incarceration and other punitive measures (Granville, 2007). Embedded within the juvenile justice system is the notion that minors lack the cognitive and developmental capabilities of their adult counterparts, and thus they cannot be considered fully culpable for their actions (Binder, 1988). Despite the juvenile justice system's inherent leniency, juvenile crime is indisputably a serious social problem (Binder, 1988; Latzman, 2008; Steinberg, 2009). Juvenile crime accounted for 16% of all violent crime arrests and 26% of property crime arrests in 2007 (Puzzanchera, 2009). Although cost estimates are not readily available, researchers in the 1990s estimated that reported juvenile crimes cost victims $17.6 billion annually (Freeman, 1996). Furthermore, trajectory analysis of juvenile delinquency has found that juvenile crime is often a doorway to more serious offending and adult criminality (Kadish, Glaser, Calhoun, & Risler, 1999; Van der Geest, Blokland, & Bijleveld, 2009). The total cost to society of a single career criminal, who commenced criminal behaviors during adolescence, is estimated to be $1.5 to $1.8 million (M. Cohen, 1998). During the 1980s, society witnessed a spike in juvenile crime rates, resulting in harsher sentences, the absorption of many adolescents into the adult justice system, and a shift toward sanction-based programs (Latzman, 2008). Underlying new policy was the philosophy that exposing adolescents to an aversive experience would deter them, and others, from engaging in future criminal behavior (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007). As the juvenile crime rate stabilized since its peak in the early 1990s, the rationale for harsher methods for dealing with juvenile crime has been called into question. According to research, tough love approaches, including intensive supervision, arrest, boot camp, detention, fines, restitution, and drug testing, have limited to negative effects on reoffense rates (Ads, Phipps, Barnoski, & Lieb, 2001). Furthermore, those programs based on incarceration may have a criminogenic effect on adolescents by exposing them to a wider population of delinquents and weakening prosocial relationships (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007). Few outcome studies have been published in the counseling literature reporting on the work of community agencies with court-referred youth. To date, the majority of studies focused on juvenile corrections have been generated within the disciplines of criminal justice and psychology. Such studies have broadly conceptualized juvenile justice corrections in terms of two theoretically antithetical approaches: sanction based versus rehabilitative (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007). Sanction-based programs aim to reduce recidivism by subjecting youth to aversive programs and policies and by instilling a fear of future consequences. By contrast, rehabilitation programs are designed to bring about lasting changes in behavior by facilitating personal growth, helping youth with social skill development, and subverting negative behaviors (Steinberg, 2009). The relative value of deterrence-oriented programs over rehabilitation programs is most simply measured by comparing the recidivism rate of youth who were exposed to a particular treatment (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007). …