We conducted a comprehensive policy scan across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico to document how juvenile justice systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented disruption to institutional operations affecting confined youth. Our policy scan included coding across six overarching topics: emergency preparedness, visitation, intakes, transfers and waivers, releases, education and probation. We coded 32 variables related to juvenile justice system responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We placed special emphasis on (1) policies related to statewide efforts to reduce the juvenile justice population during the pandemic, and (2) policies related to mitigating spread of infection (by implementing screening and social distancing measures). This study documents efforts to reduce the juvenile justice population (through intakes and releases), to protect the health and wellbeing of young people and staff, and to balance the needs for youth development with physical safety in domains such as visitation and education within juvenile detention and confinement facilities. Our findings offer important insights into the structure and resilience of juvenile justice systems during emergencies. Across jurisdictions, we identify three key themes: (1) widespread, but uneven, efforts to reduce detention populations through changes in intake and release practices; (2) rapid, and often improvised, adoption of technology to maintain services such as education, court access, and family contact; and (3) significant variation in the documentation and public availability of policy changes. Notably, we observed gaps in documentation across politically diverse states, suggesting that transparency during crisis response is shaped less by ideology and more by administrative capacity and infrastructure. By highlighting disparities not only in policy responses but also in their visibility, this study contributes a critical evidence base for understanding how juvenile justice systems function under stress. These findings underscore the need for stronger documentation practices, greater institutional preparedness, and more equitable transparency to ensure accountability and informed decision-making in future public health or system-wide crises.
Parental monitoring remains a central protective factor against a range of adolescent risk behaviors, including substance use, mental health issues, and negative peer influence. It involves parental awareness and oversight of adolescents’ friendships, activities, and digital behavior Recent scholarship has further advanced this understanding by exploring moderating influences such as neighborhood context, peer relationships, and cognitive factors. Building on this foundation, the present study examines the impact of parental monitoring on adolescent well-being, with a specific focus on the moderating role of school connectedness. This study used the 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to examine the effect of parental monitoring on adolescent well-being mediating for school connectedness. To achieve this, researchers conducted binary logistic regression analyses explored four outcomes: poor mental health, suicidal ideation, hopelessness, and drug use. Across all models, higher parental monitoring was associated with significantly lower odds of negative outcomes. These findings underscore the dual importance of engaged parenting and supportive school environments in promoting adolescent resilience, while also pointing to the need for tailored supports for vulnerable subgroups. Implications, future research, police, and practice are discussed.
Youth reintegrating into society following incarceration, commonly referred to as reentry youth or youth who reenter, face major challenges to achieving successful, healthy developmental trajectories when transitioning back to their families and communities. Family-based interventions focusing on family strengths and psychoeducational skills help reduce risky behaviors and assist youth who reenter transition back into their families and healthy trajectories into adulthood. Research on family-based interventions for youth who reenter and barriers to treatment engagement however, is limited. The qualitative findings reported in this paper draw from a larger randomized control trial of a family-based intervention for youth who reenter and their families. Youth who reenter and their guardians were queried about their motivation to participate in family-based interventions and their desired content for these interventions. Analyses revealed themes reflecting these families’ needs and suggested strategies for researchers and practitioners to consider that may increase families’ participation when developing and implementing family-based interventions. These findings are essential for fostering engagement in these interventions, promoting treatment adherence, and ultimately improving outcomes of youth who reenter when transitioning back to their families and communities. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.
The research-to-practice gap in juvenile services is substantial, as it is in most other fields. This gap contributes to adverse psychosocial outcomes for youth that are juvenile-legal service and system-involved, such as mental health concerns. Implementation science emerged to reduce discrepancies between research and practice. This article introduces implementation science and explains how it may be harnessed to enhance youth outcomes and bring about systemic change in the juvenile-legal services sector. An overview of implementation science is provided, with a particular emphasis on accelerating the adoption of evidence-based practices, like restorative justice as a diversionary tactic and graduated response as an alternative approach towards probationary youth, within the juvenile-legal system. Given the field’s focus on implementation, we emphasize opportunities for researchers and practitioners to incorporate implementation science into practice and research, and we offer helpful examples and suggestions for juvenile services practitioners looking to integrate evidence-based methods in their contexts.
The criminalization of racially minoritized youth is often examined in the literature on racial and ethnic disparities (RED) and the school-to-prison pipeline. Most of the research in this area focuses on the impact of formalized criminalization on the offending trajectories of racially minoritized youth, often overlooking informal experiences with criminalization and their influence on how these youth construct their self-perceptions. The current study assesses human and juvenile justice service providers’ perceptions of the impact of repeated criminalization on racially minoritized youths’ self-concept and other outcomes. The results of thematic coding showed that practitioners perceived that the ubiquitous experience of regular criminalization altered racially minoritized youths’ self-concept and contributed to other problems, including compounded criminalization, and the development of internalizing and at-risk behaviors. The results suggest that the criminalization process extends beyond juvenile justice processing and access to conventional opportunities.
