© 2004 American Public Health Association
E. Michael Foster and Amir Qaseem are with the Department of Health Policy and Administration, Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Tim Connor is with Opinion Research Corporation (ORC), Atlanta, Ga. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to E. Michael Foster, PhD, Department of Health Policy and Administration, Pennsylvania State University, 114 Henderson Bldg, University Park, PA 16801 (e-mail: emfoster{at}psu.edu).
Objectives. We evaluated how improved mental health services affect justice involvement among juveniles treated in the public mental health system. Methods. Our analyses were based on administrative and interview data collected in 2 communities participating in the evaluation of a national initiative designed to improve mental health services for children and youths. Results. Results derived from Cox proportional hazard models suggested that better mental health services reduced the risks of initial and subsequent juvenile justice involvement by 31% and 28%, respectively. Effects were somewhat more pronounced for serious offenses. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that improved mental health services reduce the risk of juvenile justice involvement.
Current research on youths treated in US public mental health systems reveals that many have been or will be involved in the juvenile justice system (E. M. Foster and T. Connor, unpublished data, 2002).1,2 Other research suggests that the obverse is also true: many youths in the juvenile justice system suffer from mental health problems.36 While these conditions may have been preexisting, entry into the juvenile justice system probably exacerbates them. Many observers fear that time spent in juvenile justice residential facilities further traumatizes these young people and only worsens their mental health problems.7 Such findings suggest that keeping youths with emotional and behavioral problems out of the juvenile justice system should be a public heath priority. The overlap between the juvenile justice and mental health systems raises difficult questions surrounding service delivery to the children and youths straddling the 2 systems. One strategy for addressing these issues involves integration of and coordination between the mental health and juvenile justice systems. Such system-level coordination and collaboration is the focus of the so-called "system of care" approach to the delivery of mental health services, an approach that reflects a public health perspective on mental health problems. Under a system of care, responsibility for meeting the mental health needs of children and youths resides at the community level rather than with a single agency. Various child-serving agencies, such as mental health and juvenile justice, coordinate and integrate service delivery. Such collaboration can involve strategic planning, interagency budgeting and cost sharing, implementation of comprehensive screening and assessment, case management, and cross-training of staff.8 When implemented, systems of care also involve changes in the types of mental health services delivered. These changes generally increase the use of community-based alternatives (e.g., day treatment or partial hospitalization) to restrictive inpatient hospitalization, and they can involve services, such as multisystemic therapy,917 targeted specifically to young people with a history of serious delinquency. Taken together, these elements of the system of care work to reduce juvenile justice involvement. As a result of system integration, youths with emotional and behavioral problems who break the law or engage in other offenses may have their problems identified more quickly and may be diverted into the mental health system. By targeting underlying mental health problems (such as aggression), mental health services may reduce the likelihood of a subsequent offense and contact with the juvenile justice system. At present, little research exists on how systems of care affect juvenile justice involvement. One possible basis for such research is the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program (the "Childrens Program") funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. This program is fostering public sector systems of care throughout the country. In several of the communities involved in the Childrens Program, juvenile justice is well integrated within the system of care. In Stark County (Canton), Ohio, for example, juvenile justice is integrated with the system of care at several levels: program administration, financing, service delivery, and training for juvenile justice personnel. Administratively, the system of care operates under the aegis of the Stark County Family Council,18 whose board of trustees includes a juvenile justice official. The council administers pooled funds contributed by multiple child-serving agencies, including juvenile justice. At the level of service delivery, the target population for the system of care comprises youths who are at risk of out-of-home placement and who are involved in multiple child-serving sectors, including juvenile justice. Furthermore, there is a cross-system service planning process in which juvenile justice personnel can participate, and mental health staff are stationed at juvenile justice facilities. Finally, the mental health agency provides juvenile justice personnel with training in mental health issues (e.g., principles of multisystemic therapy). Stark County and 66 other communities are participating in an evaluation of the Childrens Program. This evaluation comprises both quantitative and qualitative elements; the former includes a longitudinal study of the children and youths served at each site. As a means of providing a group of comparison children and youths, 3 system-of-care sites were matched with comparison communities. One pair involves the Stark County system and a comparison site in Mahoning County (Youngstown), Ohio. Using data from these sites, we examined whether the system of care can eliminate or delay involvement in juvenile justice among youths receiving mental health services. Our analyses employed hazard models to examine the timing of first involvement with the juvenile justice system and the likelihood of recidivism. Analyses incorporated prestudy differences in demographic characteristics and risk of juvenile justice involvement.
Since 1994, the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) within the US Department of Health and Human Services has funded the development of systems of care through the Childrens Program. The CMHS program provides communities with seed money to establish a system of care administrative structure. Communities draw on Medicaid, block grants, and other sources to actually fund services.
Design of Comparison Pairs Study In the case of most of the study children and adolescents, entry into the study coincided with entry into the mental health service system. According to the core service data described subsequently, fewer than 1 in 4 participants had received mental health services more than 90 days before study entry. Among youths who had received services in the past, therefore, entry into the study coincided with a new episode of care.
Data Source and Study Samples
The caregiver interviews incorporated well-accepted measures of child mental health, such as the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The CAFAS assesses child functioning in 8 domains, while the CBCL assesses behavioral symptoms. As with the demographic data, these measures revealed both similarities and differences among the children in the 2 communities (Table 1 Management information system data. The participating mental health centers in the 2 communities are behavioral health treatment organizations. Core mental health service data were derived from each agencys management information system, which is used for billing purposes. Services included in the data obtained from both communities were as follows: intake and assessment, case management, medication monitoring, and individual and group counseling. The system of care also offered day treatment, and the alternative system operated a short-term crisis residential center. Data regarding juvenile justice involvement. To assess study participants contact with juvenile justice systems, we extracted data from management information systems maintained by juvenile courts in the 2 communities for the years 1997 through 2000. The juvenile courts maintain current and historical information on all juvenile offenses, including offense type, date of court referral, adjudication, and disposition. A wide range of offenses are recorded in each management information system, examples being violent crimes, property crimes, criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct, alcohol- and drug-related offenses, weapons-related offenses, truancy and curfew violations, and probation violations. Both official and unofficial cases are included in the management information system data. Official cases funnel juveniles through the entire court process, including a court hearing, adjudication, and a final disposition. Unofficial cases involve actual offenses, but the cases are handled informally through agreements involving the youths parents, a judge, and a probation officer. These data allowed us to examine the timing of first and subsequent offenses and to differentiate offenses as "serious" or other. Serious offenses involve violent crimes, property crimes, alcohol and drug offenses, weapons offenses, criminal damaging and trespassing, and sexual offenses. Because some offenses may have occurred before the period for which juvenile justice data were available, the first and subsequent offenses may have represented the first and subsequent offenses that occurred during the 1997 to 2000 period only. However, this situation probably applied to a relatively small portion of the sample. Seventy-five percent of the participants were 12 years or younger at the beginning of the data collection period (more than half [55%] were 10 years or younger).
Hazard Model Hazard models can be implemented in several forms. We used the Cox proportional hazards model. A major advantage of this semiparametric model is that it does not impose a specific functional form for the baseline hazard profile (or the risk profile across age). The model does allow for the hazard to be shifted up or down by covariates. The resulting parameter estimates are best exponentiated and interpreted as hazard ratios (in the present case, the proportional effects of covariates on the risk of juvenile justice involvement). A hazard ratio greater or less than 1 corresponds to a characteristic that raises or lowers the risk of involvement. The analyses described subsequently included a range of covariates. Our focus here is on 3 of these covariates: a site indicator, a "prepost" indicator pertaining to study entry, and an interaction between these 2 factors. The first covariate captured between-site differences among participants before study entry. We interpreted preexisting between-site differences in juvenile justice involvement as reflecting differences between sites in regard to (1) underlying risk factors and (2) mental health referral patterns. (Even though the system of care was in place throughout the period, we did not interpret preentry differences as reflective of the system of care per se because the individuals involved were generally not receiving mental health services.) The second key covariate captured the difference in risk before and after study entry (and often into mental health services) for the comparison site. The interaction term captured the effect of interest: the between-site difference in the effect of study entry.
We also included a range of child and family characteristics as covariates (enumerated in Table 1
Tables 1
As one would expect, the youths involved in the study were struggling. At baseline, 42% reported having repeated a grade (Table 1
Figure 1 The between-site difference was significant at a marginal level (P = .09). However, in the case of serious crimes the between-site difference was substantially greater and statistically significant (P = .03). While the likelihood of youths committing a serious crime after study entry remained largely unchanged in Mahoning, this likelihood dropped by 57% in Stark. The second 2 pairs of bars represent recidivism, or the likelihood of the occurrence of a second offense. These analyses were limited to youths who had committed a first offense. A similar pattern emerged for offenses of all types. Hazard ratios fell after study entry at both sites, with a greater reduction occurring in Stark. The between-site difference in regard to serious crimes was especially large. The risk of a second, serious offense actually increased after study entry in Mahoning.
The full set of results is presented in Table 3
Table 3
This study examined the impact of coordinated and integrated mental health services on juvenile justice involvement among youths served in the public mental health system. Using data from a quasi-experiment, we assessed between-site differences using hazard models. As mentioned, these models were well suited to addressing the research question of interest here because they can accommodate key data features, principally, in the present case, the fact that youths entered the study (and mental health services) during the midst of the period in which they were at risk for involvement in the juvenile justice system. While previous research has examined the mental health needs of youths involved in the juvenile justice system, relatively little attention has been focused on whether system integration can reduce such involvement. Our results were derived from only 2 communities and are subject to other limitations, but they suggest that community-based care coordinated across child-serving agencies can reduce or delay entry into the juvenile justice system as well as recidivism among those who have been involved in the system. These relationships were stronger for more serious offenses. Our study also links juvenile justice involvement to a range of other youth and family characteristics. The relationships we found were generally consistent with those revealed in other research. We found, for example, that juvenile justice involvement is more likely for boys and for non-White youths. Also, youths who are struggling in school tend to have a higher risk of involvement. However, there were some surprising relationships as well. For example, youths living with a grandparent were more likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system. In this case, causality could have been reversed: the youths behavior may have led to the grandparent moving into the household. Although provocative, our results are subject to several limitations. Principal among these limitations are possible between-site differences in children and youths receiving mental health services. Youths in Stark County may have been less likely to become involved in the juvenile justice system for reasons not captured here. This possibility is counterintuitive, however: the system of care there attempted to draw youths involved in the juvenile justice system into the mental health system. If anything, one would expect youths in Stark to have been otherwise more likely to become involved in the juvenile justice system; thus, our results may be conservative. In any case, we did adjust between-site comparisons with a variety of baseline characteristics, including mental health symptomatology and functioning. Furthermore, our analyses incorporated information on juvenile justice involvement before study entry. Nevertheless, the results presented here should be interpreted as preliminary, and they require replication in other communities and with other study designs (perhaps including randomization). An important question for future research is whether a public healthoriented strategy of avoiding juvenile justice placements among youths with emotional and behavioral problems is cost-effective. A full economic analysis would depend on how the costs of identifying and treating the mental health problems of a large group of at-risk youths compare with those related to detaining a subset of such individuals in the future. The answer to this question awaits future research.
Data were collected through the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program (Grant 280940012) funded by the Center for Mental Health Services. We would like to thank personnel in the participating Stark County and Mahoning County agencies, as well as Paula Clarke and the studys Ohio field staff, for their work in providing us with the necessary data and budget information.
Human Participant Protection
Contributors E. M. Foster conceived the study and was responsible for all analyses and for writing the article. A. Qaseem assisted in the analyses and in preparation of the article. T. Connor assisted in preparation of the article. Accepted for publication July 17, 2003.
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