Building Resilience in Juvenile Offenders

This chapter is focused on how to avoid delinquency, detention, and incarceration for young people by using early prevention and effective programs to help divert from the juvenile courts and build individual and family strengths and resiliency. First reviewed are the risk and protective factors that impact delinquency and incarceration pathways, it is often a combination of events over time that lead to youthful offending and delinquency. A developmental framework approach helps to understand that adolescents are uniquely different from young adults and how this makes rehabilitation and resiliency building much more possible. Looking at what works, specific assessments of how traumatic events and mental health problems increase the risk for offending behaviors and delinquency are reviewed along with ways to intervene and build resiliency through effective prevention and programming efforts. In addition, the impact and efforts schools can take in helping young people have positive academic outcomes is examined because school approaches can have a uniquely protective impact on vulnerable students. There are also ways that police, the juvenile courts, and incarceration facilities can use rehabilitative alternatives, as opposed to control and punishment, to divert young people from the system and provide a second chance for youthful offenders to minimize recidivism.