2024 Issues

The field of special education has developed evidence-based practices (EBPs) to promote positive postsecondary outcomes for youth with disabilities. Postsecondary transition planning is comparable to the planning processes needed for reentry of previously incarcerated youth to educational and community settings. Common practices for transitioning students with disabilities and for those returning to the community setting include career/technical/vocational education, interagency collaboration, career assessment and exploration, student-centered planning, high expectations, real-life problem solving, and assessment-driven goals. Transition planning has the potential to reduce recidivism, the key measurement of successful programs and interventions in the carceral setting. There is little empirical evidence of best practices in correctional education; however, there are some programs and resources within special education transition literature that may be useful in the development of prerelease planning for adjudicated youth. Programs focused on improving self-determination skills such as being aware of abilities, needs and preferences, problem-solving, self-control, cognitive reasoning to address problems, self-efficacy, and selfadvocacy can increase the level of preparation youth have for returning to the community. Other efforts geared at systemic change can be beneficial, as well, including improvement of interagency collaboration, enrollment/re-enrollment requirements, training for educators and administrators to prevent stigma, and hiring one person in charge of the prerelease planning and records. Resources and suggested applications are included in summary.

Youth justice in Australia is at a crossroads. A series of recent reviews and inquiries have called for major reform of the sector and identified the need to develop and deliver new and different ways of working. And yet implementing change in youth justice has proven difficult, with an absence of strong and effective leadership identified as a particular issue that constrains progress. In this paper we describe two different models of public service leadership – a ‘transformational leadership’ approach that is widely used in

healthcare, and a ‘coherence leadership’ approach developed specifically for use in education. We use these to illustrate how youth justice leaders and leadership teams might approach the task of conceptualizing and delivering an agenda for reform and continuous improvement. We conclude by arguing that it is only by adopting a strategic approach to organizational and cultural change that leaders will be able to successfully engage and equip the workforce to deliver effective justice services for children and young people across Australia and elsewhere.

A state juvenile justice system underwent a system-wide organizational change process as a result of implementing a new empirically-based residential treatment model for adolescent sex offenders. Because of the significant differences between the new treatment model and the former, the change process required modifications in treatment philosophy and ideology, clinical practice, staff responsibilities and teamwork, and an understanding of applied research and the role of residential juvenile justice providers.  A detailed description of the transformative change process is provided and is further examined through the lens of organizational change theory.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been used in many K-12 schools across the United States to improve academic and nonacademic outcomes. Extensive research affirms SEL’s benefits for students in educational settings. However, there is a research gap in adaptations of SEL for alternate settings. This article conceptualizes a SEL framework for justice-involved youth on community supervision to support rehabilitation efforts in the juvenile justice system (JJS). Integrating SEL into JJS may reduce recidivism and help justice-involved youth develop the skills to reintegrate into society successfully.