Juvenile Risk and Needs Assessment

Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice

Christopher J. Sullivan, Kristina K. Childs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book takes a comprehensive, analytic approach to understanding Juvenile Risk and Needs Assessment (JRNA), covering elements relevant to how the practice affects youths' cases and the juvenile justice system. The work draws on both analysis of the extensive research on risk and needs assessment in the juvenile justice system as well as data from the authors' recent work in the area.

Authors Sullivan and Childs have extensive experience in teaching about and doing research on the juvenile justice system, including multiple studies on juvenile risk and needs assessment tools and their implementation. This expansive, integrative book leaves readers with a realistic sense of "where things stand" on the theory, research, policy, and practice of JRNA. By bringing together existing ideas and assessing them in depth, it identifies possible future paths and sparks ideas for improving the juvenile justice response to delinquent and at-risk youths.

Juvenile Risk and Needs Assessment is essential reading for scholars of juvenile justice system impact and reform as well as practitioners engaged in youth and juvenile justice work ranging from the preventive to the rehabilitative stages.

Chapter 1

Risk and Needs Assessment and Effective Juvenile Justice Practice

10.4324/9780367823122-1

The operations of the juvenile justice system build on a series of discretionary decisions made about a diverse group of youths who have become involved in the system because of varying degrees of misbehavior. Like the adult criminal justice system, in the last few decades juvenile courts and corrections have largely moved from unstructured, professional judgment to relying more on structured assessment processes as a precursor to making placement and treatment decisions, theoretically limiting discretion and affecting the decisions made by juvenile justice actors. Referring to juvenile probation systems, Wachter (2015) reports that more than two-thirds of U.S. states have now adopted standardized statewide assessments and many others have regional or local assessment tools. He goes on to mention that risk assessments are often “the foundation of evidence-based practices, enhancing efforts to treat offenders, reduce recidivism, and ultimately increase public safety” (p. 1). More broadly, proponents of the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) model of intervention suggest that effective treatment requires systematic assessment as a first step (Bonta, 2002). Such usages heighten the importance of this aspect of the juvenile justice process as it can have cascading effects on a range of decisions by court and correctional personnel, which are expected to affect youth outcomes for the better.

Juvenile Risk and Needs Assessment (JRNA) tools frequently contribute to more systematic decision-making, but several dimensions of related policy and procedure require further examination and analysis to ensure that these processes are effective, efficient, and fair when implemented in the juvenile justice system. The recent wide-scale adoption of these tools in systems with a dual mission of ensuring child wellbeing and administration of justice necessitates a close look at their impact to consider what the process and outcomes mean for justice-involved youths, public safety, and agencies themselves. This is particularly important given the inherent variation in the cases and contexts in which the JRNA process is applied (Sullivan, 2019).

The Scope of JRNA

Risk factors are events or influences in the individual, family, peer group, or community that increase the likelihood that a youth will engage in delinquency or continue that behavior if it has already started (Loeber, 1990). Needs are related to risk factors, but more generally define aspects of the youths’ disposition and environment that are important targets for intervention (Vieira, et al., 2009). Frequently, these are dynamic in that they could, theoretically, change because of intervention.

The assessment process involves three steps: (1) gathering information on youths’ risks and needs, (2) synthesizing the information collected and deriving risk and need scores (e.g., risk level), and (3) using the assessment results to inform conclusions about juvenile justice cases and facilitate the most effective interventions. This is true whether a probation officer is trying to get a read on a youth by implicitly comparing them to other cases they have seen (i.e., unstructured assessment) or by asking a series of predetermined questions that lead to a score or categorization of their risk and needs (i.e., structured assessment). Likewise, it is true if an intake official or magistrate is attempting to decide about detention based on the seriousness of the offense and questions the youth about his or her family situation or working from a standardized set of scores and the police report of the incident. Either way, the result of that process is some conclusion about “risk” for future delinquent behavior and intervention needs.

Assessment permeates the juvenile justice process. Cicourel (1967) and Emerson (1969) both carried out intensive observational and interview-focused studies of the juvenile justice system. In a study that included intensive observation of juvenile justice processes like court hearings and intake or investigation interviews with youths and families, Cicourel (1967, p. 310) asserts that probation officers “seek[s] to develop general theories about the family and the juvenile in order to reconstruct how the participants could have produced actions leading to ‘trouble’.” He also reports that the process informs the views of other court actors about the case and helps develop conclusions about potential future pathways for the youth. Emerson (1969, p. 101) described the process leading up to juvenile court decisions as one of making “categorizations” of the youth and their offense. This process involved the juvenile court actor’s judgment about where the current offense fits into the youth’s overall moral character. With that they constructed a makeshift narrative about the youth that led to differing points of emphasis when presenting the case before the court. In other words, was the offense a fleeting response to a social situation or, rather, part of a more enduring pattern of behavior?

Elements of these processes bear close resemblance to contemporary assessment practices as part of the “pitch” or “presentation” made by a court actor, like a probation officer, who is attempting to identify where a youth might be “placed within the sequence of stages of a typical delinquent career” (Emerson, 1969, p. 120). Scott and Steinberg (2009) frame the consideration of youths involved in juvenile justice as a practice of balancing attributions about delinquent choice and character where the conclusions reached about the two ultimately affect how cases are handled individually and as sets.

Such links between the specific and general, or the individual case and the average of a group, are a fundamental premise of assessment practices. In formal assessment, statistical averages are developed based on samples of cases and then used to develop scoring systems and cutoffs. Those scores and categorizations are in turn applied to decisions made in similar cases—presumably after the assessment tool is validated. This applies knowledge from prior samples to make decisions about future cases and groups and reflects a desire to situate cases in some broader frame of reference in identifying appropriate case dispositions and treatments for youths. The process is seemingly more systematic with contemporary assessment tools, but its main objective and many of its characteristics remain the same. Even objective assessments require translation of information from the youth, his or her family, and prior record material to a formal scoring process. This frequently involves judgments—based on underlying processes—like those described by Emerson or Cicourel, which in some ways stretch back to the early work of William Healy and colleagues in Chicago’s Juvenile Court Clinic (Healy, 1912; 1913). In this way, identifying the nature of cases and generating ideas about how to best respond is and has always been a central focus of the juvenile justice process.

In contemporary practice, JRNA is used in jurisdictions across the country and touches multiple stages of the juvenile justice process within states and local settings. Ohio, for example, uses a risk assessment tool comprising common risk factor items, like history of school suspension, in domains such as education and employment, across diversion, detention, disposition, residential facility, and reentry stages (Latessa et al., 2009). Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice (FDJJ) uses a set of three assessments that cover prevention and diversion cases, a community supervision tool, and a residential assessment) (Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, 2014).¹ The first of the three targets cases that have not penetrated the system and therefore require early intervention. The Community Assessment Tool (CAT) is meant to determine the necessary depth of system intervention because of the youths’ needs and likelihood of reoffending. The residential assessment (i.e., Residential Assessment for Youth [RAY]) guides services in secure facilities and helps to assess change and readiness for release from custody. Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice relies on the Structure Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) to inform disposition, treatment, and release readiness decisions. Other stages of the system (i.e., diversion, detention, drug court, prevention) rely on a variety of structured and non-structured screening or assessment tools.

The use of the three-step assessment process dictates that multiple facets of a youth’s experience in the juvenile court, corrections agencies, and services draw on their categorizations and scores. Of the approximately 750,000 youths who reach the juvenile justice system each year (Sickmund et al., 2020), nearly all are categorized based on some type of systematic assessment tool. If these assessments and broader systems work as intended, the results, at least in part, affect a variety of decisions made in resolving delinquency cases. The range of those possible decisions include whether to: (1) formally process the case, handle it informally, or not pursue it at all (diversion or prevention screening and assessment); (2) hold a youth in custody as the case progresses through the court process (detention assessments); (3) utilize community-based sanctions or residential placement (disposition assessments); (4) determine community supervision levels and treatment referrals (disposition or community assessments); (5) assign security levels, make housing placements and match youths to treatment and services (residential assessments); (6) identify necessary supervision levels and treatment needs as youths transition from residential facilities back to their community (reentry assessments); and (7) determine release readiness (e.g., release, reentry, or community assessments).

Considering this coverage across the juvenile justice system, the scoring and categorization of the assessment process can have a significant impact on the outcomes of juvenile justice cases ranging from the least to the most restrictive sanction, as well as the juvenile justice system’s allocation of time and resources. These impacts are both immediate, as well as longer term in the sense that youths may be affected by decisions about whether they remain in the community (Gatti et al., 2009; Petrosino et al., 2013) or are placed in a detention facility during the court hearing process or in a residential commitment program (Steinhart, 2006; Wordes & Jones, 1998). The assessments are also meant to guide intervention allocation and intensity such that the results of the assessment process also impact the juvenile justice system’s treatment objectives (Vieira et al., 2009; Vincent et al., 2012). Although specific protocols may vary by tools and across juvenile justice agencies, the step of conducting systematic risk and needs assessment is also insightful in understanding the processes utilized, the decisions that result, and the related case, youth, and system outcomes.

The introduction and development of systematic assessment processes are also meant to facilitate both general juvenile justice system-wide changes and specific usage of evidence-based interventions with youths. The Ohio Youth Assessment System (OYAS) described previously, for instance, is meant in part to facilitate shifts in placement trends at the local and state levels (Ohio Department of Youth Services, 2012). This is also the case in Louisiana where several local jurisdictions experienced a significant reduction in the use of out of home placements and an increase in the utilization of evidence-based treatment services after the introduction of the SAVRY (e.g., Childs et al., 2011). The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), which is now operational in hundreds of counties and more than half of the states in the U.S. (The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2014), is largely predicated on the use of risk assessment as a factor in case-level decision-making to promote community-based alternatives to secure detention. Writing about the role of risk assessment in JDAI, Steinhart (2006, p. 5) describes the objectives and process as follows:

Detention risk screeni...