Table of Contents

Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Youth’s Needs and Services

Conditions of Confinement

Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds

Nature and Risk of Victimization

Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Andrea J. Sedlak

March 2010

A Message From OJJDP

For decades OJJDP has collected data on juvenile offenders in custody and on the facilities in which they are confined to better understand the nature of these facilities and to enhance the effectiveness of the services that they provide to youth.

Two surveys designed and implemented by OJJDP in the 1990s, the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP) and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census (JRFC), solicit information from facility administrators.

This bulletin introduces the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP), which complements CJRP and JRFC by gathering information directly from youth in custody. It is the only current national survey to do so.

The bulletin describes the survey’s design and methodology. It also provides an overview of the remaining bulletins in the series, which draw on the findings of the first national SYRP to report on the characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations of youth in residential placement; the conditions of their confinement; their needs and the services they receive in custody to address them; and their risk of victimization during confinement.

It is OJJDP’s hope that SYRP’s findings, like those of its companions, CJRP and JRFC, will increase awareness of the challenges that we face in addressing the needs of juveniles in custody and inform policy and practice to meet them more effectively.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the third component in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s constellation of surveys providing updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census, which are biennial mail surveys of residential facility administrators conducted in alternating years. SYRP is a unique addition, gathering information directly from youth through anonymous interviews. This bulletin series reports on the first national SYRP, covering its development and design and providing detailed information on the youth’s characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations; the conditions of their confinement; their needs and the services they received; and their experiences of victimization in placement.

This bulletin, the first in the series, introduces the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement, reviews its background, describes its design and methodology, discusses its strengths and limitations, and summarizes the questions it answers about the population of youth in custody. Subsequent bulletins, described below, report the survey findings; further details also will be available in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report (Sedlak et al., forthcoming).

Surveying the Youth

SYRP is unique in being the only current national survey to obtain information about youth in custody by asking the youth themselves. By directly questioning youth, SYRP can address issues that no other information source covers. Moreover, it conveys the special perspectives of the youth about their offenses and offense histories and their experiences in placement.

SYRP is the latest addition to the two data collections that OJJDP designed and implemented in the 1990s to provide enhanced juvenile custody statistics. As outlined in table 1, SYRP joins two ongoing surveys that OJJDP conducts—the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP) and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census (JRFC), both of which collect information from administrators of facilities that hold offenders younger than 21.

CJRP and JRFC target all such facilities nationwide, excluding only federal facilities and those that solely provide mental health or substance abuse treatment. CJRP, first conducted in 1997, is administered in odd-numbered years to all juvenile facilities. It gathers information about some basic characteristics of the facility and obtains individual-level administrative data on each youth assigned a facility bed on the reference day (Sickmund, 2002a). JRFC, first conducted in 2000, obtains detailed information about facility operations and programs in even-numbered years (Sickmund, 2002b).1

SYRP is a unique addition to these surveys in that it gathers data directly from youth in residence through anonymous interviews. SYRP asks the youth about their backgrounds, offense histories, and problems; the facility environment; their experiences in the facility; and their expectations for the future. Although SYRP covers the same universe of facilities as the two census surveys, it does so through a sample methodology. Thus, based on interviews with a large, nationally representative sample of offender youth in residential placement, SYRP can generate reliable estimates about the characteristics of the full population of youth in custody.

Background

OJJDP began designing the new array of juvenile justice surveys following the 1993 Juvenile Custody Statistics Symposium, dedicating a great deal of attention to the surveys’ substantive focus and workability and to ensuring their sound methodology and defensible measurement properties. Like the earlier census surveys, OJJDP developed SYRP through a 2-year planning process.2 Guided by recommendations from an advisory board of nationally recognized juvenile justice experts, the planning team articulated the core research questions for the national SYRP, drafted the instrument, developed the national sample plan, and designed implementation procedures adaptable to the full range of facility environments the national SYRP would include. The team assessed and refined the draft instrument through cognitive interviews with youth in custody and then programmed it into an audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI) format to support SYRP’s anonymous self-interview procedures (detailed below). Finally, the team assessed the feasibility of the overall plan through a large field test in which 811 youth in 34 facilities in several eastern states completed interviews (Westat, 2000). The field test results guided several modifications of the national plan, the most important being strategies for improving youth participation rates and revisions of specific interview items to simplify wording, improve clarity, and enhance the quality of the resulting information (Westat, 2001).

Methodology

Sample

The targeted universe for SYRP is the population of offender youth ages 10–20 in all facilities surveyed for The CJRP and the JRFC from the listing that the U.S. Census Bureau maintains for OJJDP, excluding only extremely small facilities (those with fewer than three offender youth in residence). SYRP draws a nationally representative sample from this population through a two-stage, probability-proportional-to-size sample design, with facilities sampled at the first stage and youth within the selected facilities sampled at the second stage. Both pre- and postadjudication youth and facilities are part of SYRP.

SYRP statisticians stratify the targeted universe by a number of characteristics to reduce sampling error^3 and undersample small facilities to improve cost efficiency. To improve the precision of estimates for females and Hispanic males, the statisticians also oversampled these subgroups at both the facility level and youth level. The resulting sample included 290 facilities, selected from a total of 3,893 facilities on the census listings in August 2001 and/or September 2002.

Within participating facilities, the sample frame comprises all offender youth with assigned beds at the time of data collection. Facilities provide a roster of these youth, indicating whether each is female or Hispanic to permit the oversampling of these subgroups. More complex facilities subdivide their rosters into units that differ in primary program or function to distinguish them during analyses. Facilities further subdivide their program rosters into their separate living units (e.g., wings and cottages). Drawing the youth sample from each living unit separately allows survey staff to complete most interviews soon after youth are sampled and to process the facility residents according to a preplanned sequence. This minimizes disruption to normal facility operations, permits administrators to plan and provide the support needed to escort and monitor youth in different units, and maintains separation of important subgroups (e.g., males/females, different gangs) when convening youth for interviews.

Facility Recruitment and Participation

Although the SYRP sample is drawn from all eligible facilities throughout the United States, the facilities randomly sampled happened to be located in just 36 states. Recruitment began with contacts to state authorities more than a year in advance of the data-collection period, identifying the sampled facilities under state jurisdiction, and initiating the clearances needed to conduct the study in those institutions. Seven states required a full application to their Institutional Review Board (IRB) or review by their state attorneys general or administrative legal counsel. Following 15 months of recruitment, 35 of the 36 states granted clearance to conduct the study in facilities under their authority.4 The survey team began recruiting facilities under state authority immediately after the state granted approval and approached other facilities as soon as it was clear they were independent of state authority. Some facilities required a local authority (e.g., juvenile court) or a parent agency (e.g., private corporate administrative office) to grant clearance.

The 290 sampled facilities included 240 that were eligible for data collection.5 Of these eligible facilities, 204 participated, yielding a facility-level response rate of 85 percent. The nonparticipating 15 percent included those where state or local authorities refused clearance for the study (13 facilities, or 5 percent of those eligible) and those where the individual facility administrator refused (23 facilities, or 10 percent of those eligible). When facilities provided reasons for refusing, they predominantly cited budget, staffing, or scheduling constraints. Of the 240 eligible facilities, 175 were public and 65 were private. Public facilities participated at a significantly higher rate (89 percent versus 74 percent private facility participation).

Facility Characteristics and Logistics

Once a facility agreed to participate, study staff obtained or updated information about its program(s) and learned about its different living units—their size, composition, and security. All but the smallest facilities had multiple living units. Because important features that vary across living units often shape implementation strategies, SYRP treats different living units as discrete operational units. In collaboration with the facility administrators, the study team developed plans for the following activities:

● Obtaining the required permissions (facility/parental) to allow individual youth to participate.

● Obtaining rosters of residents for youth-level sampling.

● Reserving the room space to administer the survey to small groups.

● Scheduling the survey team’s visit during days when the necessary facility staff could be available to support the survey activities.

● Scheduling the interview sessions during times when the youth could be available.

The plans also identified a facility liaison to coordinate the visit and clarified any special procedural constraints or precautions.

Parental Permission

SYRP targeted youth ages 10–20, with minors comprising most of this population. Because of differences in youth’s custody status (detained, adjudicated) and variations in state and local requirements regarding parental permission (i.e., age of self-consent or in loco parentis authority [which means the facility can provide consent in the place of a parent]), study staff developed specific consent arrangements in consultation with state and local authorities and facility administrators. Nearly one-half (48 percent) of the 204 participating facilities provided in loco parentis consent for all juveniles in their custody; the remainder required a form of parental consent for some or all of their juvenile residents: 38 percent required written parental consent, 1 percent verbal consent, 9 percent passive consent (i.e., parental notification only, with a response only needed to deny permission), and 4 percent required a mixture of consent procedures with different approaches for different subgroups of residents. To ensure the anonymity of youth, SYRP staff did not directly obtain parental consent. Instead, the facility sought whatever parental consent was required and SYRP staff supported these efforts with any needed materials or resources (e.g., letters, brochures, and/or postage). Facilities began efforts to obtain any required parental consents in advance of the data collection visit.

Youth Sampling and Participation

Facilities provided rosters of their offender residents. Larger facilities provided an earlier roster in advance of the data collection visit. This allowed survey staff to key the roster into the sample management system and draw a preliminary sample of youth,6 thus minimizing the number of parental consents the facility had to pursue in 39 large facilities that required parental consent. Youth sampling activities at the time of the data visit varied, depending on the details of earlier preparations. In small facilities that did not provide a preliminary roster, the survey team simply entered all offender residents assigned a bed at the time of their data collection visit (using facility code numbers to identify the residents) and drew the youth sample. In large facilities without a preliminary sample, the survey team updated the earlier roster to accurately reflect all offender residents who were assigned a bed at the time and drew the final youth sample. Finally, in facilities with a preliminary sample already drawn from the preliminary roster, the survey team listed all the offender youth currently assigned a bed who had entered since the preliminary roster was prepared and drew a supplementary youth sample from these new entrants.

Taken together, youth rosters in all participating facilities listed 25,429 offend-er youth; 9,850 of these were sampled. Among sampled youth, 9,495 were eligible because they had an assigned bed when the sample was drawn. (The remainder were selected in preliminary samples but left their facilities before the data visit.) A total of 7,073 youth completed SYRP interviews, comprising 74.5 percent of the eligible youth sample. The remaining sampled youth did not participate because their parents did not consent (15.1 percent of eligible youth),7 the youth refused (3.3 percent), the youth were unavailable during the interview visit (3.0 percent), the facility refused to allow certain youth to participate (2.7 percent),8 or the youth answered only part of the interview and could not continue (1.4 percent). The lowest rate of youth participation occurred when written parental consent was required (53 percent), and the highest rate was obtained when facility administrators were able to grant in loco parentis consent for their committed youth (88 percent).

Interviews

The survey team conducted interviews between the beginning of March and mid-June 2003, with 96 percent completed in the first 10 weeks (i.e., by mid-May). In preparation, field staff underwent a 6-day training at the end of February 2003. Twenty-four three-person teams traveled to the facilities to conduct the interviews. Each team brought 12 laptops and a portable printer. Two laptops were servers that held the sample management system and all survey response data. The remaining 10 were “client” laptops that held the interview program and the teams used them to administer the interviews to youth.

On arrival at a facility, the field team arranged the client laptops so youth seated before them could not see others’ computer screens. (A critical point of discussion during the logistical planning for the visit was the need to identify a location in the facility where youth could be situated at sufficient distances and physically oriented to ensure the privacy of their laptop screens.)

Facility staff provided the final youth roster in a coded format (i.e., without names). The field team entered this final roster into the sample management system (or updated an earlier roster so that it correctly listed all current offender residents) and then drew a random sample of these youth. The field team printed the list of sampled youth (using the facility codes) and gave this to the facility staff. Facility staff identified and located the sampled youth and escorted them to the survey room in groups of up to 10. The field team seated each youth at a client laptop and started the interview program.

The interview uses an ACASI methodology. Youth put on headphones and listen as a prerecorded interviewer’s voice “reads” the words displayed on the screen. The ACASI system first presents the assent statement; youth touch a “button” on the laptop touch-screen to indicate whether they agree to participate.

Youth who agree to participate then enter a brief tutorial about how to use the ACASI system. The interview program highlights each question and answer alternative on the screen as it is read. Youth indicate their response choice by touching it on the screen, at which point it is again highlighted and the prerecorded voice again reads it aloud. If satisfied with the answer, the youth touches the “Next” arrow when ready and proceeds to the next question. Figure 1 shows an ACASI screen from the SYRP interview.

In this example, the phrase “this facility” is given in yellow font. Throughout the interview, certain words and phrases are printed in yellow to indicate that they are “hot words.” When the youth touches a hot word, the program displays its definition on the bottom of the screen and plays an audio file that reads this definition. Any youth who has a question can raise a hand to summon a member of the SYRP field team monitoring the session. Also, any youth who takes longer than 30 seconds to respond to the question on four different screens in a given interview section receives a screen that stops the interview and instructs the youth to raise a hand and summon the survey monitor for assistance. The ACASI program also presents a similar screen when a youth cannot find the offense(s) that led to his or her custody in the lists provided. The monitor answers questions, ensures the youth is comfortable continuing with the interview, and assists in locating an appropriate answer from the offenses listed. Intervention by the survey monitor lengthens the time it takes the youth to complete the interview.

The SYRP interview is designed to take an average of 35–40 minutes, although youth with particularly complex offense histories or who report extensive problems can take as long as an hour. Excluding those interviews that were interrupted in midsession and had to continue at a later time,9 the SYRP interview took youth an average of 39 minutes (median 38 minutes) to complete. The majority of interviews took between 25 minutes and an hour (5th percentile: 24 minutes, 95th percentile: 59 minutes).

Sensitive Questions, Privacy, Anonymity, and Human Subjects Protections

SYRP’s designers faced a challenging dilemma. Because of the importance of learning about youth’s experiences in placement, the interview contains a number of sensitive questions, including several about experiences of violent victimization (e.g., forced sex, robbery, and physical assault) within the facility. Obtaining candid answers to such questions is difficult in any circumstance but is especially problematic in the context of state mandates to report child abuse to appropriate authorities. When youth answer that they have been victimized, researchers must report the abuse to the authorities who receive child abuse reports.10 Yet in that situation, informed consent requirements also dictate that the researchers must forewarn youth (and their parents or other consenting authorities) prior to beginning the survey that they will formally report any disclosed abuse to the appropriate authority (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). Obviously, such forewarning could substantially decrease participation and candor, thereby compromising the original purpose of the survey. At the same time, the confidentiality statutes and regulations that apply to the U.S. Department of Justice generally prohibit the release of individually identifiable private information without the consent of the person providing the information (U.S. Department of Justice, 2005).

To resolve this dilemma, SYRP uses ACASI and follows “strict anonymity” procedures. These procedures encompass more than the privacy that ACASI itself affords and go further than the anonymity of youth within a facility through the use of code numbers (i.e., survey staff never know youth’s names—all rosters and sample lists refer to the residents solely by codes that their facility assigns). Specifically, SYRP’s strict anonymity procedures ensure that the youth’s answers cannot be linked to their facilities. Answers are stored separately from sample management information in an electronic file that is indecipherable without a data model. All data are delinked from any facility identifiers before the interview answers are deciphered for analysis by the data model. This strong shielding means that when the answers are finally analyzed, survey staff cannot provide actionable reports to child protection authorities because they do not know which individual youth or even which facilities are involved in any incidents disclosed during the interviews.

Although the ACASI method and strict anonymity procedures encourage candor and resolve the conflict between states’ mandatory reporting laws and federal privacy regulations, they do not address the needs of vulnerable youth who require support and access to intervention. To address this ethical responsibility, SYRP provides toll-free access to a licensed independent counselor. As a condition of participation,11 facilities agree to allow sampled youth to contact the counselor for an unmonitored phone conversation at their request.

SYRP’s assent statement informs youth participating in the survey that they can call a toll-free number if they have questions about the survey after the field team leaves their facility or if they are upset or need help. All youth who start the survey receive a paper copy of the assent statement, which provides the counselor’s toll-free phone number. The counselor’s role is to provide screening and referral services to youth who are distressed about the interview topics or concerned about abusive experiences and need to talk about these matters. The counselor assists these youth in identifying and accessing facility counselors or other resources. If youth disclose abuse in this conversation, the counselor encourages them to report it themselves or provide information so the counselor can report for them.

The counselor received four calls during this first implementation of SYRP. Only one of these calls pertained to maltreatment—from a youth who reported that the survey had triggered memories of earlier abuse. He was receptive to following up with the counseling staff at his own facility.

Administrative CJRP and JRFC Data

SYRP forges explicit links between the youth’s interview answers and the information gathered in the normal cycles of the two census surveys by adapting and updating the latest CJRP and JRFC information for the SYRP sample. At the time of the 2003 SYRP, the latest facility surveys were the 2001 CJRP and 2002 JRFC. In planning facilities’ participation, SYRP recruiters asked the facility-level CJRP questions (i.e., the first section of CJRP) for separate living units, clarifying the primary program and size of each. After drawing the youth sample, the field team asked facility staff to complete the youth-level CJRP items, providing key administrative data items for sampled youth. The field team also brought a copy of the facility’s completed 2002 JRFC survey and asked staff to verify that the information was accurate as of the date of the SYRP interviews and to update it as necessary. SYRP programmers linked the adapted CJRP data and updated JRFC information to the sample management system record for participating youth before they removed the links to facility identifiers.

Data Processing, Analysis, and Dissemination

SYRP field staff electronically transmitted interview response data from the field to the home office. Throughout these activities, ACASI data remained encoded (i.e., undeciphered). The survey statisticians assigned weights to the sample management system records for participating youth. These weights reflect the sampling probabilities of both the facility and youth and adjust for nonresponse at both levels. Programmers joined the encoded ACASI files, which were linked to the sample management records, with the appropriate JRFC and CJRP data to compile a unified record for each youth. After this, they randomly assigned identification numbers, delinking the data records from facility identifiers. Analysts then applied the data model to open and decipher the interview answers for analysis. After modifications to reduce disclosure risk, the survey team will provide a public use data file through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan (www.icpsr.umich.edu). Because of the complex sample design, analysts used WesVar to develop all findings reported in the SYRP bulletin series. WesVar is a software package that computes accurate variances and significance tests for complex survey data using the replicate weight approach (Westat, 2002).12 Westat has also created an online system for accessing SYRP, called WesDax. (See sidebar below.)

WesDax: Providing Survey of Youth in Residential Placement Data Online

WesDax is an online query and analysis system that allows users to construct their own results from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. The system is designed for audiences without technical or statistical expertise, including policymakers, service providers, and the general public.

The WesDax system:

● Operates in a standard Web browser and requires no special software.

● Offers a tutorial for new users, including a glossary of terms.

● Computes accurate totals and percentages.

● Can provide statistical measures of precision (in the form of standard errors or confidence intervals).

To use WesDax, see the “Online Analysis” link at  www.syrp.org.

Strengths and Limitations

Before SYRP, the only study to directly survey a national sample of youth residing in juvenile facilities was the 1987 Survey of Youth in Custody (Beck, Kline, and Greenfield, 1988). That earlier survey, a one-time effort, used a sample limited to youth in long-term, state-operated facilities. In contrast, SYRP is to be a periodic survey that represents offender youth placed in the full range of juvenile justice residential facilities, matching the coverage of OJJDP’s census surveys. The majority of these are private facilities that hold about one-third of the juveniles in custody (Sickmund, 2002b). To cover this broad facility universe, the SYRP methodology adapts to widely varying logistical constraints, including the following:

● Facilities with very short lengths of stay.

● Narrow time windows when youth are accessible for interviews (taking into account school schedules, programmed hours, and other time away in low-security, open facilities).

● Diverse interviewing settings, from large cafeterias in training schools to living-room settings in small shelters and group homes.

SYRP attained a facility-level response rate of 85 percent, obtaining all the necessary authorizations and clearances for participating facilities. This entailed negotiating complex, multilayered organizational structures, applying for various states’ IRB approvals, and working through legal concerns that various states’ attorneys general and/or agency lawyers raised. Within sampled facilities, the study attained a 75-percent youth response rate, obtaining all consents for the youth required under state and local laws and practices. This achievement is particularly noteworthy in view of the fact that more than one-half of facility administrators required parental consent, primarily written.

Another strength of the study is its use of ACASI methodology. The privacy of self-administered questionnaires has been found to enhance reporting of sensitive behavior (Tourangeau and Smith, 1998). With ACASI, youth may be more willing to report behaviors or experiences they would not report to an interviewer (e.g., drug use, victimization). Also, because a prerecorded interviewer’s voice “reads” the questions and the answer alternatives to the participant, ACASI avoids a key disadvantage typically associated with self-administration: comprehension problems in populations with poor literacy skills.

SYRP promises participants strict anonymity. Interview answers do not link either to identified youth (whose names were never revealed to the research staff) or to their specific facilities (ACASI answers remain encrypted until all links to specific facilities are eradicated). These protections were critical in achieving the high facility and youth participation rates, since the interviews ask youth about a number of sensitive topics, including their offenses and offense histories, their previous experiences of physical and sexual abuse, their experiences of violence in the facility, substance and alcohol abuse, and suicidality. The ACASI format also allows SYRP to ask questions about youth’s experiences of abusive treatment that an interviewer could not ask directly without triggering legal reporting mandates.

SYRP interview data explicitly link to administrative data in three ways:

● Having participating facilities update their JRFC answers to reflect the facility circumstances near the time of the SYRP data collection.

● Asking detailed questions about the structure and characteristics of the facility’s living units.

● Having facilities complete the youth-level CJRP questions concerning the specific youth sampled for SYRP.

To minimize sample loss due to turnover (i.e., to keep the sample “fresh”), the survey staff sample youth in different living units independently, ensuring that they can interview the number selected on a given day in light of the time and space available. This approach also makes it possible to associate youth’s interview answers with administrative data concerning the facility environment at the level of their living units and to characterize the organizational complexity of the facility on the basis of the number of separate living units and their functional differences. As will be evident throughout the SYRP bulletin series, this additional information provides rich context that further informs the study findings and extends their implications for policy and practice.

As a self-report study, SYRP is vulnerable to the criticism that mischievous respondents, or other factors affecting youth’s self-presentation strategies, may distort the findings. At the same time, one might expect the ACASI format and the strict and complete anonymity of the SYRP interviews to remove any obvious direct incentives for youth to attempt to “fool” the study: no interviewer will react to youth’s self-descriptions, and their answers about the facility environment cannot be linked to their specific facility.

Even so, in light of the policy importance of many of the findings, the SYRP analysts undertook special efforts to identify suspicious answer patterns. Preliminary tabulations identified five youth who endorsed every offense listed as the reason for their current placement. Because this extreme distortion seriously undermined the credibility of all their answers, analysts classified them as refusing to participate and excluded all their data from analyses. Work concerning the credibility and quality of data from the remaining 7,073 participants^13 proceeded throughout the analyses and followed several different strategies: assessing extreme response patterns, comparing youth’s answers about their offenses to administrative information provided about them on the youth-level CJRP questions, and examining within-unit and within-facility consistency of youth’s answers about their environment. The first and second of these efforts are summarized here and will be detailed in OJJDP’s Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report (Sedlak et al., forthcoming).

To gauge the potential influence of exaggerated extreme responses, SYRP analysts identified 18 different markers of suspicious answer patterns. These cover a range of topics throughout the interview and focus on areas where youth can potentially endorse a high number of available answer alternatives or give large numerical estimates in response to questions about frequency or quantity. These markers flag outliers on questions such as the following:

● The number of times youth say their property was taken by force or threat in the facility.

● The number of recent emotional and/or mental problems youth report.

● The number of people youth say they injured during the offenses that led to their current placement.

● The variety of weapons youth claim they used during their current offenses.

● The number of substances (alcohol, different drugs) youth say they used.

● The number of problems youth claim they experienced as a result of their alcohol and/or drug use.

OJJDP’s Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report (Sedlak et al., forthcoming) will define these markers and give their incidence in the respondent data records. Summing the number of markers in each interview constructed an “outlier index,” where scores identify youth whose responses are exaggerated or extreme on multiple topics.

Although theoretical scores on this index range from 0 to 18, actual scores range from 0 to 13. Despite the presence of some high-scoring youth, the results confirm that suspicious answer patterns are infrequent in SYRP. Answer patterns of a large majority of the 7,073 participants have no suspicious markers (6,640 youth, or 93.9 percent), and most of the rest fit just a single marker (321 youth, or 4.5 percent of participants). SYRP analysts recommend against discounting an interview on the basis of a single outlier response because it could reflect a valid report about an extreme experience. Following this standard, which considers scores of either zero or one on the outlier index to be nonproblematic, the answers of 98.4 percent of the youth give no evidence of distortion or bias. The remaining 112 youth (1.6 percent of participants) have 2 or more markers, with only 56 of these (0.8 percent of participants) evidencing 3 or more markers. These youth are too few to measurably affect the study findings in most areas. On issues where small percentages have important policy implications (e.g., the percentage of youth sexually assaulted in placement and their characteristics and risk factors), SYRP analysts verified the findings by running the analyses with the outlier youth excluded. Subsequent SYRP bulletins note wherever staff took this precaution.

For some findings, particularly those on the incidence of victimization experiences in placement and the factors that predict risk of those events, SYRP analysts imposed a very conservative verification test. They compared the offenses the youth identify as the reason for their current stay against what the facility administrators report as their most serious offense. The most conservative standard excludes youth whose interview responses place them in a more serious offender category than administrative information indicated.

This is an exceptionally strict standard because, absent any intent to exaggerate, youth could indicate more serious offenses than administrators for several valid reasons, including the following:

● The interview questions are more comprehensive, affording youth more opportunities to consider and include a more serious offense.

● Most youth have convictions for past offenses and may have difficulty disentangling the offenses leading to their current placement from their prior offenses (especially if the court considered their prior convictions in deciding on their current placement).

● Systematic differences between the events that occurred and the charges that were pled could exacerbate discrepancies, with youth selecting the response that describes their actions, while administrative records indicate the lesser charge actually pled. For example, whereas a youth might describe an assault, the administrative record might show only a disorderly conduct charge.

Overall, neither measure is necessarily more valid—both the youth’s and the administrators’ reports provide important information about the types of offenders in placement. It seemed prudent, however, to probe the validity of the most important policy-relevant findings by considering the only available independent information on the youth. This imposed an extremely ruthless test, since excluding youth who were more serious offenders in their self-report than in administrative data omitted 39 percent of the 7,073 participants (44 percent of the weighted population in residential placement). Thus far, wherever SYRP analysts have applied this extreme test, the study conclusions have prevailed, despite the substantial amount of excluded data.

Thus, all validity tests to date confirm that the SYRP findings are not discernibly distorted by invalid self-reports. Only a small percentage of participants’ answers in multiple interview sections raise suspicion, and critical findings prove robust even when the dataset is severely censored by excluding all youth who report more serious offenses than their facility administrators indicate.

Research Questions Addressed

OJJDP, the SYRP advisory board, and the study team identified a set of research questions important to policymakers and practitioners, and these guided the interview design. Following the general strategy of that design, each bulletin in the forthcoming SYRP series focuses on a particular topical domain, answering questions about the youth in custody related to that subject.

Table 2 lists the questions addressed in the first topical bulletin in the series, Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (Sedlak and Bruce, forthcoming). Although some SYRP information overlaps with the basic population parameters that CJRP obtains (i.e., number and age, sex, race/ethnicity demographics, most serious current offense), SYRP findings go well beyond those rudimentary characteristics. SYRP youth give considerable details about their current offenses and also report about their prior involvement in the juvenile justice system, providing a more comprehensive picture of the kinds of offenders they are and the direction of any recent changes in the severity of their offense categories.

Youth also answer a number of questions about their family backgrounds, indicating their principal caregiver(s) when they were growing up and who they lived with before their most recent entry into custody. They also answer questions about their childbearing patterns—whether they have children of their own and/or are expecting any. Because SYRP is nationally representative of all youth in juvenile justice custody, comparing their childbearing patterns with those of youth in the general population is meaningful.

The survey includes questions about the youth’s educational status and experiences. Their responses reveal their achievements, whether they are on track (i.e., at an age-appropriate grade level), have special needs, or have received sanctions.

The survey also asks the youth a number of questions about their expectations for the future, including their time of release and plans for their immediate future, their thoughts and expectations concerning future offending and justice system sanctions, and their longer range hopes and expectations. The youth also identify the barriers they see standing in the way of their goals.

Table 3 presents the research questions addressed in the second topical bulletin, Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (Sedlak and McPherson, forthcoming). As noted earlier, SYRP links the survey responses to characteristics about the facility indicated in JRFC and to CJRP-type questions about the particular living unit and principal program. Consequently, SYRP can describe the distribution of youth in custody by various characteristics of their placement contexts, including the size, organizational complexity, and physical layout of their facility; the size of their program and living unit; and the security of their living unit. Considering youth characteristics in these contexts, SYRP indicates the categories of offenders who are placed in different types of programs.

Although no specific facility identifiers remain in the survey response data at the time of analysis (as described above), the data can indicate which youth were grouped together in a living unit, program, and facility. Consequently, SYRP shows the percentage of youth in coeducational facilities or programs and the extent to which youth are placed with others who differ in the severity of their offenses, age, and background experiences.

Youth describe physical features of their placement environments (number of others sleeping in the same room, good qualities, and problematic conditions); rate the quality of available programs; and report on their access to various social, emotional, and legal supports. They also detail features of the facility climate, conveying their perceptions of staff and of the quality of staff-resident relations and reporting on the presence of gangs and contraband in their facility. An additional series of survey questions asks about facility rules, methods of control, and discipline, providing rich information about facility practices.

Table 4 shows the research questions addressed in Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (Sedlak and McPherson, forthcoming). The SYRP interview includes a number of questions taken from the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument (MAYSI) (Grisso et al., 2001) concerning recent mental and emotional symptoms. Other questions pertain to youth’s experiences indicative of, or associated with, emotional problems (e.g., suicide attempts, exposure to traumatic events). Youth also indicate whether they saw a counselor at their current facility and, if so, how frequently, when they last saw the counselor, the format of the counseling sessions (e.g., group, individual), and how helpful these were. Because SYRP imports updated information from the facilities’ latest JRFC and associates these facility characteristics with the ACASI data records, it is possible to determine how youth’s emotional problems and reports about their counseling experiences relate to facilities’ practices on screening or evaluating residents for suicide risk and mental health needs.

One section of the interview pertains to youth’s experience with alcohol and drugs and their recent problems with substances prior to their last entry into custody. SYRP includes several MAYSI questions on this subject and asks youth whether they received counseling in the facility specifically to help them stop using drugs or alcohol. Youth who received substance abuse counseling answer followup questions about its frequency, format, and helpfulness. JRFC also provides information about whether youth with recent substance use problems are in facilities that evaluate entering youth, the type of screening provided, and the facility’s substance abuse services.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Further information about the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement can be found in the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report and other bulletins in this series, which include:

● Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Nature and Risk of Victimization: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

For more complete results of the survey findings, see the “Reports” link at  www.syrp.org.

The SYRP interview incorporates a brief series of questions on youth’s medical needs and the services they received in their current facility. Because of the availability of JRFC information about the facility’s services, SYRP findings can show whether youth who are taking psychotropic medication are in facilities where outside medical professionals prescribe and/or monitor these medications.

The survey also reveals the percentages of youth attending school in their current placements, the nature of these educational program(s), and the amount of time youth spend in school. Analyses explore how these factors relate to whether youth think their facility has a good school program. The survey data also reveal whether youth who were told they have a learning disability are receiving special education and whether any of the older youth who were in placement for some time have earned a high school diploma or general equivalency diploma.

The last bulletin in the SYRP series is Nature and Risk of Victimization: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (Sedlak and McPherson, forthcoming). Table 5 lists the specific research questions this bulletin will address. The initial sections will present the percentages of youth who report different victimization experiences while in custody (theft, robbery, physical assault or threat, or sexual assault); describe these experiences (the perpetrators, any weapons, injuries); and identify whether youth reported any sexual assault and what was done to address the problem. The next eight sections of the bulletin will examine the relationship between the following factors and the youth’s risk of experiencing violence (robbery, physical assault with injury, or sexual assault) while in placement:

● The youth’s characteristics.

● Their relative standing among residents in their living unit or program.

● The social context, as reflected by the prevalence of various characteristics among coresidents.

● Structural features of the facility or unit.

● The facility climate.

● Access to support and due process.

● The quality of their facility’s physical conditions and available activities.

● Their facility’s practices relating to communicating and enforcing rules, physical control, and administering punishment or sanctions.

These sections will discuss each potential risk factor separately, indicating whether each is associated with a youth’s risk of experiencing violence when all other features are ignored.

The last section will take a different approach, reporting multivariate analyses that consider the simultaneous effects of multiple characteristics on youth’s risk of experiencing violence. These analyses recognize that many features are correlated and assess the effects of each feature by considering the effects of the others (i.e., not ignoring them). The results identify a set of factors, each of which predicts a youth’s risk of violence in the context of the other factors, detailing a broad set of characteristics, circumstances, and conditions that operate independently to elevate the risk of violence. These findings offer valuable guidance to the field because policy and/or practices can modify many of the strong risk factors.

Conclusion

As previewed here, the SYRP findings offer a unique and richly detailed view of the population of youth in residential placement. More information about all aspects of the SYRP methodology is available in the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report (Sedlak et al., forthcoming), and a public-use file of SYRP data will be available to researchers for further analysis.

Endnotes

1. Besides these three surveys that gather data about youth in custody, OJJDP’s redesign of the juvenile statistics systems also includes two new surveys about youth on probation, which George Mason University of Fairfax, VA, and the U.S. Census Bureau are conducting jointly: the Census of Juvenile Probation Supervision Offices and the Census of Juveniles on Probation.

2. Westat, Inc., conducted the SYRP planning project under cooperative agreement number 98–JB–VX–K002 from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

3. Stratification factors in this implementation of SYRP included security level, administration (public versus private), facility size, proportion of females, proportion of adjudicated youth, average length of stay, facility type (detention center or not), proportion of Hispanics, proportion of African Americans, and the four census regions.

4. In the refusing state, only facilities that were not under state jurisdiction participated. A few other states excluded approval for specific facilities or imposed special conditions for all facilities under their jurisdiction (e.g., disallowing the most sensitive survey questions, revising parent and youth consent statements and/or procedures, or requiring criminal background checks for survey data collectors).

5. Fifty facilities in the original sample were out of scope: 17 were too small, having fewer than 3 offender youth; 13 had closed; 12 had nonoffender residents only; 4 were adult-only facilities; 3 had merged with another facility; and 1 had no residents as it provided a day program only. (Note that the SYRP sample derives from the listing of all juvenile residential facilities that the census maintains for OJJDP. Facilities on this list are all able to hold juvenile offenders, but whether they actually do hold any can vary from one point in time to another. The facilities with only nonoffender residents and those with only adults just happened not to have any juvenile offenders in residence at the time of SYRP data collection.)

6. In addition to pursuing parental consent for youth in the preliminary sample, these facilities sought consent for all youth entering after they prepared the preliminary roster. That way, parental consent would be in place for any recent entrants selected for the final sample.

7. As noted, facility staff sought parental consent. They reported that nearly all failures of parental consent were nonresponse—very few parents actively refused to permit their child to participate.

8. These were youth in lockdown and those the facility deemed to be unsuitable for the interview because of their serious emotional or behavioral problems.

9. This circumstance occurred in approximately 200 interviews for various reasons. Sometimes the client laptop malfunctioned and the youth had to be moved to another client laptop to continue the interview. In other cases, the youth had to leave temporarily but later returned to complete the survey.

10. State laws on mandated reporting differ in their requirements. Mandatory reporters typically include healthcare workers, school personnel, childcare providers, social workers, law enforcement officers, and mental health professionals. However, as of June 2003, 18 states required all citizens to report suspected abuse or neglect regardless of their profession (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2003). A national study that follows uniform procedures would treat the survey personnel as mandatory reporters.

11. OJJDP and Westat’s Institutional Review Board granted an exception to one state that had equivalent procedures in place for its facilities.

12. In computing variances and assessing the significance of different tests, standard statistical packages assume that the data derive from a simple random sample (SRS), which is rarely used in survey research. When a study departs from the SRS design, as the SYRP design does, variance computations become complicated by the “design effect” (Kish, 1965), standard statistical packages lead to biased variance estimates (Brogan, 1998; Korn and Graubard, 1995), and users must take special measures to compute unbiased results (Lee, Forthofer, and Lorimor, 1989). The SYRP statisticians developed replicate weights (Brick and Morganstein, 1996; Rust and Rao, 1996), which enable analysts to compute accurate variances and significance tests using the software package WesVar (Westat, 2002). The SYRP analysis file includes the replicate weights required for this approach. The two advantages of the replicate weight method are that (1) the replicate weights also incorporate the variance associated with any adjustments, such as nonresponse and poststratification adjustments (Valliant, 1993), and (2) once replicate weights have been developed for a survey database, the repeated replication approach employs the same method for all statistics estimated from the database.

13. Thus, 7,078 youth actually completed the SYRP interview, but only 7,073 are classified as complete participants in the final computation of the youth response rate. As noted earlier, nonresponse adjustments in the weighting of the survey data compensate for the lost eligible sample, which included these five outlier youth.

References

Beck, A., Kline, S., and Greenfeld, L. 1988. Survey of Youth in Custody, 1987. Special Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Brick, J.M., and Morganstein, D. 1996. WesVarPC: Software for Computing Variance Estimates from Complex Designs. Proceedings of the 1996 Annual Research Conference. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, pp. 861–866.

Brogan, D.J. 1998. Pitfalls of using standard statistical software packages for sample survey data. In Encyclopedia of Biostatistics, edited by P. Armitage and T. Colton. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2003. Mandatory Reporters of Child Abuse and Neglect Summary of State Laws. State Statute Series.

Grisso, T., Barnum, R., Fletcher, K.E., Cauffman, E., and Peuschold, D. 2001. Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument for mental health needs of juvenile justice youths. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 40(5):541–548.

Kish, L. 1965. Survey Sampling. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Korn, E.L., and Graubard, B.I. 1995. Examples of differing weighted and unweighted estimates from a sample survey. The American Statistician 49:291–295.

Lee, E.S., Forthofer, R.N., and Lorimor, R.J. 1989. Analyzing Complex Survey Data. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Rust, K., and Rao, J.N.K. 1996. Variance estimation for complex estimators in sample surveys. Statistics in Medical Research 5:381–397.

Sedlak, A.J., and Bruce, C. Forthcoming. Youth’s Characteristics, and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., Bruce, C., Cantor, D., Ditton, P., Hartge, J., Krawchuk, S., McPherson, K., and Shapiro, G. Forthcoming. Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report. Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and McPherson, K. Forthcoming. Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and McPherson, K. Forthcoming. Nature and Risk of Victimization: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and McPherson, K. Forthcoming. Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sickmund, M. 2002a. Juvenile Offenders in Residential Placement: 1997–1999. Fact Sheet. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sickmund, M. 2002b. Juvenile Residential Facility Census, 2000: Selected Findings. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Tourangeau, R., and Smith, T.W. 1998. Collecting sensitive information with different modes of data collection. In Computer Assisted Survey Information Collection, edited by M. Couper, R.P. Baker, J. Bethlehem, C. Clark, J. Martin, W.L. Nicholls II, and J.M. O’Reilly. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., pp. 431–454.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 2005. Protection of human subjects. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 45, Public Welfare, Part 46. Available online: www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/45cfr46.htm.

U.S. Department of Justice. 2005. Confidentiality of identifiable research and statistical information. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 28, Judicial Administration, Part 22. Available online: www.ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/funding/confidentiality.pdf.

Valliant, R. 1993. Poststratification and conditional variance estimation. Journal of the American Statistical Association 88:89–96.

Westat. 2000. Planning the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP): Report on the Field Test. (Submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.) Rockville, MD: Westat, Inc.

Westat. 2001. Planning the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP): Final Report. (Submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.) Rockville, MD: Westat, Inc.

Westat. 2002. WesVar™ 4.2 User’s Guide. Rockville, MD: Westat, Inc.

Acknowledgments

This bulletin was written by Andrea J. Sedlak, Ph.D., Vice President and Associate Director of Human Services Research at Westat and Project Director of SYRP.

The author thanks other Westat staff who made key contributions to SYRP, including those principally responsible for instrument design and development (David Cantor, Ph.D., Associate Director of Survey Methods at Westat), recruitment and data collection (John Hartge, Senior Study Director), management information and data systems (John Brown, Senior Systems Analyst; and Alfred Bishop, Senior Systems Analyst), sample design and weighting (Gary Shapiro, M.A., Senior Statistician; and Sheila Krawchuk, M.Sc., Senior Statistician), and analyses (Carol Bruce, Ph.D., Research Analyst; and Karla McPherson, Ph.D., Senior Analyst and Study Director). Monica Basena, M.A., Research Analyst; Kristen Madden, Systems Analyst; and Ying Long, M.S., Programmer, offered invaluable support in developing the final SYRP analysis file, the foundation of the findings reported in this bulletin series. Many other dedicated Westat staff, too numerous to name here, also provided crucial assistance and expertise.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) assisted Westat during the SYRP design, recruitment, and early analyses. NCCD staff who provided substantial input on those efforts included Madeline Wordes, Ph.D., Senior Researcher; Eileen Poe-Yamagata, M.S., Senior Research Associate; and Christopher J. Hartney, Senior Research Associate.

The author is grateful for the support and guidance of OJJDP program managers Joseph Moone, Barbara Allen-Hagen, and Janet Chiancone, as well as the constructive and generous contributions of the many members of the SYRP Advisory Board. The author also thanks the many state directors and hundreds of local facility administrators for providing the information, space, and staff time to make the survey possible and the thousands of youth participants for their cooperation and candor.

This bulletin updates the version originally released in 2008.

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This bulletin was prepared under grant number 2001–JR–BX–K001 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice.

Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance; the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the National Institute of Justice; the Office for Victims of Crime; and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking.

Access OJJDP publications online at ojjdp.gov/publications/index.html.

NCJ 218390

Youth’s Needs and Services

Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Andrea J. Sedlak and Karla S. McPherson

April 2010

A Message From OJJDP

In undertaking a thorough assessment of juvenile offenders in custody, it is not sufficient to examine their conditions of confinement or even the histories and characteristics of the offenders. It is also necessary to consider their needs and the services that address them.

OJJDP’s Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the first comprehensive national survey to gather information about youth in custody by surveying the detained offenders.

This bulletin draws on SYRP’s findings to take a closer look at the needs of youth in residential placement and the services they receive. In the process, it reports on the psychological and substance abuse problems experienced by youth in custody and the mental health and substance abuse counseling they receive to address them, as well as other medical needs and services. The bulletin also describes the educational background of youth in residential placement and the schooling they receive while in confinement.

The findings reported in this bulletin describe how youth’s needs have been addressed and indicate areas in which services could be improved. SYRP found substantive needs in each of the areas it examined—mental health, substance abuse, health care, and education.

It is OJJDP’s hope that the information provided in these pages will contribute to strengthening policies and enhancing practices to better serve the needs of youth in residential placement.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the third component in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s constellation of surveys providing updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census, which are biennial mail surveys of residential facility administrators conducted in alternating years. SYRP is a unique addition, gathering information directly from youth through anonymous interviews. This bulletin series reports on the first national SYRP, covering its development and design and providing detailed information on the youth’s characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations; the conditions of their confinement; their needs and the services they receive; and their experiences of victimization in placement.

This bulletin describes key findings from the first Survey of Youth in Residential Placement about the needs and service experiences of youth in custody. SYRP surveyed youth about their psychological state, substance abuse problems, their needs, and the services their facilities provided to them. Specifically, this bulletin details youth reports regarding:

● Their overall emotional and psychological problems and the counseling they receive in custody.

● Their substance abuse problems prior to entering custody and the substance abuse counseling they receive in their facility.

● Their medical needs and services.

● Their educational background and the educational services the facility provides to them.

SYRP’s findings are based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 7,073 youth in custody during spring 2003, using audio computer-assisted self-interview methodology.1 Researchers analyzed youth’s answers and assessed differences among subgroups of youth offenders in custody based on their age, gender, and placement program (i.e., detention, corrections, community-based, camp, or residential treatment facilities). When other studies offered corresponding data about youth in the general population, analysts compared these data to the SYRP results for youth in custody. For more information, see the sidebar “Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology.”

SYRP provides the first nationally representative findings on the needs of the population of youth who are in custody because they are charged with or adjudicated for offenses.2 These findings are also unique because they come from youth self-reports. The results in this bulletin reveal substantial needs in all four domains that SYRP examined—mental health, substance abuse, health care, and education. (See the list of research questions.)

Mental Health

In recent years, the juvenile justice and mental health fields have increasingly recognized the scope of the mental health needs of youth involved in the juvenile justice system and the inadequacy of services to meet these needs (Mears, 2001). As a result, standardized screening instruments have gained wide acceptance, more service providers have turned toward evidence-based treatment approaches, and more juvenile justice and mental health agencies have collaborated to devise solutions (Skowyra and Cocozza, 2006, 2007).

SYRP shows that youth in residential placement report problems in many mental and/or emotional areas. Although the SYRP questions about mental and emotional symptoms are not diagnostic of specific mental health disorders, they indicate the general scope of self-reported problems in a number of domains. Most SYRP questions on recent symptoms derive from the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument (MAYSI) (Grisso et al., 2001; Grisso and Barnum, 2006).3

SYRP answers show that problems with anger are especially prevalent within this population, with more than 60 percent of youth reporting that they were easily upset, quick to lose their temper, and often angry (table 1). This is consistent with the fact, reported in Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (Sedlak and Bruce, forthcoming), that 43 percent of youth are currently in placement for a violent offense (i.e., murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, or assault). Symptoms of depression and anxiety are also common, with 51 percent of the custody population reporting that nervous or worried feelings have kept them from doing what they want to do over the past few months, and 52 percent indicating that they feel lonely “too much of the time.” Additionally, 48 percent of the population scored in the “caution” or “warning” range on SYRP’s version of the MAYSI Depressed-Anxious Scale.4

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among adolescents, and a prior suicide attempt is the single most important risk factor for death by suicide (Wintersteen, Diamond, and Fein, 2007). One-fifth of youth in placement admit having two or more recent suicidal feelings, which MAYSI classifies as “caution” and “warning” range scores. The prevalence of past suicide attempts (22 percent) is more than twice the highest rate for their peers in local surveys of the general youth population and nearly quadruple the rate in national samples.5

The majority of youth responding to this survey (70 percent) report some type of past traumatic experience (table 1), which may include physical or sexual abuse. Nearly one-third (30 percent) indicate some history of prior abuse, whether frequent or injurious physical abuse, sexual abuse, or both (figure 1). SYRP data also indicate significant correlations between youth’s histories of past abuse and the suicide-related indicators, both their recent suicidal feelings and their past suicide attempts.

Mental Health Services

Mental health services in the form of evaluation, ongoing therapy, or counseling are nearly universally available in the facilities, with 97 percent of youth living in places that provide one or more of these services either inside or outside the facility.6 However, despite the relatively high suicide risk in the placement population, individual screening for suicide risk is not common. More than one-fourth (26 percent) of youth are in facilities that do not screen all youth for suicide risk. Despite the importance of early identification, 45 percent of youth are in facilities that fail to screen all youth within 24 hours and 26 percent are in facilities that do not screen any youth at intake (first 24 hours).

Screening for general mental health needs is also limited. Less than half (47 percent) of youth are in facilities that provide mental health evaluations or appraisals for all residents. Youth are equally likely to receive counseling in their current facility regardless of their answers about their recent mental and emotional problems or previous traumatic experiences. Slightly more than half (53 percent) of youth in custody say they have personally met with a counselor at their current facility to help them contend with their feelings or emotional problems. Those who received counseling report relatively frequent sessions, and 80 percent consider their counseling to be “very” or at least “somewhat” helpful. Of those youth who have not met with a counselor, one-fifth (20 percent) say it is because they do not know how to arrange to talk to a counselor.

Many youth do not receive counseling from qualified mental health providers. Seventy-seven percent of youth are in facilities where trained mental health professionals provide ongoing therapy to some youth, but 88 percent of youth reside in facilities where some or all counselors are not mental health professionals. Additionally, the qualifications of staff conducting suicide screenings are generally even lower. More than one-fourth (27 percent) of youth are in places where the staff conducting suicide screening are untrained, while a little less than one-third (31 percent) are in facilities that assign only mental health professionals to this important screening function.

Overall, current mental health services for youth in custody still fall short of key recommendations for practice, which suggest that all youth offenders receive suicide risk and other mental health screens and that all mental health screens and assessments be administered by properly trained staff (National Commission on Correctional Healthcare, 2004; Skowyra and Cocozza, 2006, 2007). Any movement toward this goal would constitute a major improvement in the juvenile custody system (Desai et al., 2006).

Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the only national survey that gathers data directly from youth in custody, using anonymous interviews. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention designed the survey in 2000 and 2001. SYRP surveys offender youth between ages 10 and 20. It draws a nationally representative sample from state and local facilities that are identified by the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and Juvenile Residential Facility Census surveys.

SYRP interviewed youth from a selection of 205 eligible, responsive facilities listed on the census as of September 2002. The survey team interviewed 7,073 youth between the beginning of March and mid-June 2003. Surveys were electronic and used an audio computer-assisted self-interview system to ask questions and record answers.

When using this system, youth wear headphones and hear a prerecorded interviewer’s voice read the words on the screen. Youth indicate their response choice by touching it on the screen. The computer program automatically navigates to the next appropriate question based on the youth’s earlier answers, storing all the data anonymously and securely.

Statisticians assigned weights to reflect the sampling probabilities of the facility and the youth respondents and to adjust for nonresponse. In this way, the survey of 7,073 provided accurate estimates of the size and characteristics of the national youth offender population in custody (estimated as more than 100,000 youth).

Substance Abuse

Researchers have documented a significant relationship between drug use and serious delinquent behavior (Huizinga et al., 2000). SYRP results indicate that youth offenders in custody use drugs and alcohol at higher rates than the general population (table 2). Nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of youth in custody have tried alcohol, compared to 56 percent of youth in the general population.7 Additionally, 84 percent of youth in custody admit using marijuana, compared to 30 percent of youth in the general population. Rates of other drug use are also significantly higher for youth in custody; 50 percent admit trying illegal drugs other than marijuana—nearly double the rate of experimentation of their general population peers (27 percent).

More than half of youth (59 percent) say they were drunk or high on drugs several times a week or more during the months before they were taken into custody. Two-thirds of youth in custody (68 percent) report problems related to this substance use, such as getting into trouble while they were high, not meeting their responsibilities, or having a blackout experience.8

Substance Abuse Counseling

Despite the high rate of substance-related problems, nearly one-fifth (19 percent) of youth in custody are in facilities that do not screen any youth for substance use problems and more than one-third (36 percent) are in facilities that screen some, but not all, youth (table 3).

Although screening tools have proliferated (McBride et al., 1999), only 50 percent of youth in custody are in places that use standardized assessment tools to identify youth with substance use problems. While most youth are in facilities that conduct urine tests to identify drug problems in certain circumstances, only about one-third of youth are in facilities that test all youth—29 percent of youth are in facilities that test youth upon arrival, 37 percent of youth are in facilities that test residents at random during their stay, and 22 percent of youth are in facilities where they are tested each time they reenter.

Additionally, SYRP data show that facilities more commonly provide substance abuse counseling to youth who report substance abuse problems and that youth who report substance-related problems are more likely to receive frequent substance counseling sessions when their problems are more severe. However, only 62 percent of youth who report four or more recent substance-related problems say that they have received substance abuse counseling in their current facility. Figure 2 illustrates the relationship between the severity of youth’s substance abuse problems and whether they received counseling.

The standards of substance abuse treatment or counseling range widely. A comprehensive, reliable assessment is just a first step (McBride et al., 1999). Effective intervention requires that the case manager use the assessment to guide the development of a comprehensive treatment plan. A plan works best when a case manager ensures that the youth receives the appropriate services on schedule and remains engaged in the treatment process.

Less than two-thirds (64 percent) of youth are in facilities that develop individualized substance abuse treatment plans, and less than half (47 percent) are in facilities that assign case managers to oversee and monitor plan compliance. Youth who reported the highest need for substance abuse counseling gave their counseling sessions the poorest ratings.9 Youth who reported that they were “high” several times a week or more often before their current custody rarely rated their substance abuse counseling as “very helpful” (35 percent vs. 51 percent of other counseled youth). More of these youth rated their substance abuse counseling as “not very helpful” compared to other youth in custody who received substance abuse counseling (28 percent vs. 16 percent).

Health Care

SYRP findings indicate that more than two-thirds (69 percent) of youth offenders in custody have some type of healthcare need. More than one-third (37 percent) reported that they needed dental, vision, or hearing care. More than one-fourth of those interviewed needed care for illness (28 percent), injury (25 percent), or some other physical healthcare need not listed in the SYRP interview (29 percent).10 For specific needs of youth in different types of facility programs, see figure 3.

Healthcare Services

Despite the recent attention to the health needs of incarcerated youth, there is no universal standard of care. SYRP findings show that the unmet needs of the population in custody are significant. More than one-third (36 percent) of youth who reported one or more types of healthcare needs say they did not receive all the care they needed. Unaddressed dental, vision, and hearing needs were more frequent (32 percent of those with these needs), compared to unmet healthcare needs in other areas (26 percent of youth needing care for illness, 28 percent of those with an injury needing medical attention).

Education

The link between education and delinquency problems is well established. Youth with low commitment to school are at risk for delinquency (Wasserman et al., 2003; Hawkins et al., 1998). Researchers have documented that youth with educational difficulties have a heightened risk of behavior problems (Byrd, Weitzman, and Auinger, 1997), violence (Borowski, Ireland, and Resnick, 2002), and crime (Levitt and Lochner, 2001; Lochner and Moretti, 2004). SYRP’s findings reveal the extent of educational deficits in the national population of youth in juvenile justice custody.

Youth in custody have a high nonenrollment rate (21 percent) at the time they enter custody, more than four times the rate of peers in the general population (5 percent). Nearly one-half (48 percent) of youth in custody are currently functioning below the grade level appropriate for their age, compared to 28 percent of youth in the general population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). The majority (61 percent) of youth in custody say they were expelled or suspended during the year before they entered custody, which is dramatically higher than the rate of less than 8 percent observed in the general population (U.S. Department of Education, 2007). Also, 25 percent of youth in custody report that they were held back a year in school, compared to 11 percent in the general population of youth (Lugaila, 2003).

Education Services

A typical school day is 6 to 7 hours long (U.S. Department of Education, 2003), but less than half (45 percent) of youth offenders spend at least 6 hours a day in school. Only 51 percent of all youth in custody think that their facility has a good school program, but 58 percent of those who attend school for at least 6 hours a day consider their facility’s school program good. Nonetheless, SYRP indicates that the majority (92 percent) of youth attend school when in custody. This differs from their situation at the time they entered custody, when 21 percent were not enrolled at all and 61 percent were suspended or expelled in the previous year. In addition, more than one-fifth (22 percent) of youth 16 or older who are in a facility for at least 180 days report earning their high school credentials during their time in custody.

Nearly one-third (30 percent) of youth in custody say they were diagnosed with a learning disability. This rate is more than seven times that of learning disabilities observed in the general population (U.S. Department of Education, 2005). According to the Federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, learning-disabled youth offenders must be identified, even in short-term facilities, and given special education and related services when eligible (Burrell and Warboys, 2000). Current educational services for youth in custody need improvement to meet this goal. Youth’s self-reports in SYRP show that less than one-half (46 percent) of those with a diagnosed learning disability are attending a special education program while in custody.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Further information about the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement can be found in the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report and other bulletins in this series, which include:

• Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

• Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

• Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

• Nature and Risk of Victimization: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

For more complete results of the survey findings on youth’s needs and services, go to:  www.syrp.org.

Females in Custody

The needs of female offenders differ from those of males, as do the services they receive. SYRP’s findings on the national population in custody validate findings in local populations that show that female offenders in placement have more mental health and substance use problems (Hubbard and Pratt, 2002; Teplin et al., 2002) and worse abuse histories (Blum, Ireland, and Blum, 2003; Hennessey et al., 2004).

Higher percentages of females report an above-average number of mental or emotional problems and traumatic experiences, compared to males (figure 4). Moreover, females reveal nearly twice the rate of past physical abuse (42 percent vs. 22 percent), more than twice the rate of past suicide attempts (44 percent vs. 19 percent), and more than four times the rate of prior sex abuse (35 percent vs. 8 percent) as males.

Female juvenile offenders are more commonly placed in residential treatment programs (compared to other types of programs), and nearly all youth in residential treatment programs are in facilities that provide onsite mental health services. Nevertheless, SYRP found no differences in the percentages of males and females who report receiving counseling in their facilities. The reasons youth give for why they do not receive counseling were also similar for both genders. More females receive individual counseling (85 percent vs. 67 percent) and fewer receive group counseling (40 percent vs. 49 percent). Females also give their counseling less positive ratings.

Females report significantly more drug experience than males, with 91 percent saying they had used at least one of the drugs listed (including marijuana, cocaine/crack, ecstasy, meth, heroin, inhalants, and an “other illegal drug” category) compared to 87 percent of males. More females than males report using nearly every substance listed and 47 percent (compared to 33 percent of males) report having ever used four or more of the listed substances. Although males and females use drugs and/or alcohol at the same frequency just before entering custody, more females report recent substance-related problems (71 percent vs. 67 percent). Notably higher percentages of females report that using drugs or alcohol kept them from meeting their responsibilities (46 percent of females vs. 37 percent of males) and report having a recent blackout experience (41 percent of females vs. 33 percent of males).

Despite females’ greater substance abuse problems, they are often housed in facilities that provide less access to substance abuse treatment. In comparison to males, fewer females are housed in facilities that offer substance-abuse education (77 percent vs. 88 percent), provide specialized units for substance-abusing youth (7 percent vs. 19 percent), or offer ongoing treatment for substance abuse (75 percent vs. 84 percent). While similar percentages of males and females say they have directly received substance abuse counseling while in custody, a larger percentage of females report having had more than one type of counseling—various combinations of group, individual, or family sessions (38 percent vs. 26 percent).

Females in custody have different health-care needs than males in custody. Males more commonly need treatment for injuries, but females have greater healthcare needs in other areas: illness (33 percent of females vs. 27 percent of males) and vision, dental, and hearing (44 percent vs. 35 percent). More females take regular medication compared to males (56 percent vs. 34 percent), generally to treat emotional or mental problems (59 percent). Additionally, females are less likely to report that they receive all the care they need (59 percent of females vs. 65 percent of males).

Education is the only area where females in custody do not exhibit greater needs than their male counterparts. More males are below grade level (50 percent of males vs. 41 percent of females), more males have been expelled (29 percent vs. 23 percent), and more males say they have been diagnosed with a learning disability (31 percent vs. 25 percent). Males and females attend school in custody and earn high school credentials at equal rates; however, more males than females receive job training (20 percent vs. 13 percent). More females receive no educational service beyond their regular school hours (57 percent vs. 45 percent).

Conclusion

SYRP provides a unique perspective on circumstances of juveniles in custody because it asks youth offenders about their mental, emotional, and physical problems and whether they are getting the services they need. It places youth’s needs in context by combining their answers with what facility administrators report about their screening protocols and the services provided at the facilities. The results reveal a broad range of needs in the custody population, show the extent to which existing services address these needs, and identify a number of areas in which improvements should be made.

Many important research questions about youth in custody remain unanswered. These include:

● Did youth receive any mental health or substance abuse treatment before they entered custody? What are their treatment needs when they are released from custody? Is there continuity in the services they receive after returning to the community?

● What percentage of youth with prior physical or sexual abuse had contact with the child protective services system because of that abuse? What percentage of youth had contact with the child protective services system for other reasons (e.g., caretaker neglect, incapacity, or absence)?

● When youth attend school in custody, what kind of curriculum do they receive? Does it coordinate with the course of study they would get in their home school? How do they score on basic literacy and mathematical skills?

● What healthcare needs do youth have when they enter custody? What injuries or illnesses do they acquire during their time in custody? How did they obtain health care before they entered custody? Did they have health insurance? What healthcare coverage will they have after release from custody?

The following recommendations are based on SYRP’s findings in this bulletin. They indicate several ways in which policies and programs could better address the needs of youth in custody:

● Improve coverage of mental health services. SYRP findings suggest that mental health services are not reaching the youth who need them. Although mental health services are generally available across facilities, nearly half of youth have not met with a counselor at their current facility and less than half are in facilities that provide mental health evaluations or appraisals for all residents. Additionally, these appraisals seem to make little difference for whether a youth receives counseling—youth are equally likely to receive counseling in their current facility regardless of their answers about their recent mental and emotional problems or previous traumatic experiences.

● Raise standards for the qualifications of mental health providers. SYRP documents considerable unevenness in the qualifications of mental health providers. Nearly 9 in 10 youth (88 percent) are in facilities where staff who counsel youth about their mental health problems are not mental health professionals. Youth whose survey answers indicate a need for counseling give poorer ratings to any counseling they do receive.

● Target substance abuse counseling and treatment more effectively. SYRP documented extensive substance abuse problems in the custody population, but existing intervention and treatment programs are not serving large sectors of youth who need them. Only about half of youth who report recent problems related to drug or alcohol use have received substance abuse counseling in their current facility.

● Provide more comprehensive substance abuse interventions and use more qualified substance abuse service providers. Substance abuse education and counseling are widely available, with the large majority of youth held in facilities that offer these services. However, less than two-thirds of youth are in facilities that develop specific treatment plans, less than half are in facilities that assign a case manager to oversee youth’s substance treatment, and just one in six youth are in living units specialized for substance abuse problems. Moreover, three in five youth are in facilities where noncertified counselors offer substance abuse counseling, whereas less than one-fourth of youth are in facilities where certified professionals provide all substance abuse treatment.

● Obtain systematic information on youth’s educational needs and services in placement and define more specific minimum standards. Little information is available on how facilities address the educational needs of youth in custody—what curriculums they use, whether they match what youth would receive in their community, and whether they assess and target materials and assignments to individual youth’s needs. SYRP findings suggest that most youth in custody spend fewer hours in school than their peers in the general population. In addition to increasing general education services, facilities should expand special education services. Although youth in custody have seven times the rate of diagnosed learning disabilities compared to youth in the general population, less than half receive a special education program while in custody.

Overall, the SYRP results presented in this bulletin illuminate ways that the juvenile justice system could improve programs and living environments for youth in custody. Continuing research on this topic would clarify how treatment and education programs might better address youth’s needs and improve their mental and physical health, which could help to reduce recidivism.

WesDax: Providing Survey of Youth in Residential Placement Data Online

WesDax is an online query and analysis system that allows users to construct their own results from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. The system is designed for audiences without technical or statistical expertise, including policymakers, service providers, and the general public.

The WesDax system:

• Operates in a standard Web browser and requires no special software.

• Offers a tutorial for new users, including a glossary of terms.

• Computes accurate totals and percentages.

• Can provide statistical measures of precision (in the form of standard errors or confidence intervals).

To use WesDax, see the “Online Analysis” link at  www.syrp.org.

Endnotes

1. See the sidebar “Research Questions Addressing Youth’s Needs and the Services They Receive in Custody,” which lists the research questions that guided the design of survey items related to the topics reported here.

2. Not all youth in custody have been charged with or adjudicated for offenses. Some have been placed in custody because of health and safety concerns (e.g., keeping them away from abusive parents or guardians).The focus of the SYRP study was on youth who were placed in custody as the result of an offense.

3. MAYSI is a 52-question survey designed to help juvenile justice facilities identify youth with special mental health needs.

4. MAYSI’s Depressed-Anxious Scale is a nine-question scale that asks youth about their symptoms of depression and anxiety to determine whether they require mental health treatment for these problems. SYRP included only part of this MAYSI scale (six of the nine items). The percentage of “caution” and “warning” scores would be even higher if SYRP had asked all nine MAYSI items in this domain. SYRP youth received “caution” scores if they answered yes to three of the Depressed-Anxious items or to two items in the section related to suicide; they received “warning” scores if they answered yes to six of the Depressed-Anxious items or to three or more of the suicide items.

5. Rates of 3 percent to 10 percent have been reported for local general population samples (Andrews and Lewinsohn, 1992; Lewinsohn, Rohde, and Seeley, 1996; Reinherz et al., 1995; Meehan et al., 1992; Safer, 1997; Shaffer et al., 1990; and Velez and Cohen, 1988). The two waves of the National Comorbidity Study (NCS–1 and NCS–R) show a rate of 6 percent for ages represented in SYRP (Harvard School of Medicine, 2005).

6. The authors supplemented the information the youth gave in their SYRP answers with information regarding security, services, and staffing that the facility administrators provided. Combining these sources provides a comprehensive view of the needs and experiences of youth in residential placement, the available services, and resources provided in response to those needs.

7. The authors computed all general population percentages in this section using data for 12- to 20-year-olds from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2003, at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive Online Data Analysis System, at http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/SAMHDA/DAS3/00064.xml.

8. A blackout is a period of memory loss for events that occurred while a person was intoxicated (White, 2003). Alcohol-related blackouts are common in adolescents who are clinically diagnosed with alcohol dependence and abuse (Martin et al., 2007).

9. SYRP responses are based on youth reports. A youth’s perception regarding the effectiveness of his or her counseling may not accurately reflect its true effectiveness.

10. Although SYRP did not inquire about the specific nature of illness or injuries, some research (Morris, 2005) suggests youth in custody face sexually transmitted infections, hepatitis, tuberculosis, orthopedic problems, gastrointestinal disorders, cancer, and dermatologic difficulties.

References

Andrews, J.A., and Lewinsohn, P.M. 1992. Suicidal attempts among older adolescents: Prevalence and co-occurrence with psychiatric disorders. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31:655–662.

Blum, J., Ireland, M., and Blum, R.W. 2003. Gender differences in juvenile violence: A report from Add Health. Journal of Adolescent Health 32:234–240.

Borowski, I.W., Ireland, M., and Resnick, M.D. 2002. Violence risk and protective factors among youth held back in school. Ambulatory Pediatrics 2(6):475–484.

Burrell, S., and Warboys, L. 2000. Special Education and the Juvenile Justice System. bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Byrd, R.S., Weitzman, M., and Auinger, P. 1997. Increased behavior problems associated with delayed school entry and delayed school progress. Pediatrics 100(4):654–661.

Desai, R.A., Goulet, J.L., Robbins, J., Chapman, J.F., Migdole, S.J., and Hoge, M.A. 2006. Mental healthcare in juvenile detention facilities: A review. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law 34:204–214.

Grisso, T., and Barnum, R. 2006. Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument, Version 2 (MAYSI–2): User’s Manual and Technical Report, 2006 Revised Edition. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press.

Grisso, T., Barnum, R., Fletcher, K.E., Cauffman, E., and Peuschold, D. 2001. Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument for mental health needs of juvenile justice youths. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 40(5):541–548.

Harvard School of Medicine. 2005. National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) and National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS–R). Available online: www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/ncs.

Hawkins, J.D., Herrenkohl, T., Farrington, D.P., Brewer, D., Catalano, R.F., and Harachi, T.W. 1998. A review of predictors of youth violence. In Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions, edited by R. Loeber and D.P. Farrington. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., pp. 106–146.

Hennessey, M., Ford, J.D., Mahoney, K., Ko, S.J., and Siegfried, C.B. 2004. Trauma Among Girls in the Juvenile Justice System. Los Angeles, CA: National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

Hubbard, D.J., and Pratt, T.C. 2002. A meta-analysis of the predictors of delinquency among girls. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 34:1–13.

Huizinga, D., Loeber, R., Thornberry, T.P., and Cothern, L. 2000. Co-Occurrence of Delinquency and Other Problem Behaviors. bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Levitt, S.D., and Lochner, L. 2001. The determinants of juvenile crime. In Risky Behavior Among Youths: An Economic Analysis, edited by J. Gruber. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 327–373.

Lewinsohn, P.M., Rohde, P., and Seeley, J.R. 1996. Adolescent suicidal ideation and attempts: Prevalence, risk factors, and clinical implications. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 3:25–46.

Lochner, L., and Moretti, E. 2004. The effect of education on crime: Evidence from prison inmates, arrests, and self-reports. American Economic Review 94(1):155–189.

Lugaila, T.A. 2003. A Child’s Day: 2000 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-being). Household Economic Studies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau.

Martin, C.S., Kaczynski, N.A., Maisto, S.A., Bukstein, O.M., and Moss, H.B. 2007. Patterns of DMS–IV alcohol abuse and dependence symptoms in adolescent drinkers. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 56(6):672–680.

McBride, D.C., VanderWaal, C.J., Terry, Y.M., and VanBuren, H. 1999. Breaking the Cycle of Drug Use Among Juvenile Offenders. Technical Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice.

Mears, D. 2001. Critical challenges in addressing the mental health needs of juvenile offenders. Justice Policy Journal 1(1).

Meehan, P.J., Lamb, J.A., Saltzman, L.E., and O’Carroll, P.W. 1992. Attempted suicide among young adults: Progress towards a meaningful estimate of prevalence. American Journal of Psychiatry 149:41–44.

Morris, R.E. 2005. Healthcare for incarcerated adolescents: Significant needs with considerable obstacles. Virtual Mentor, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 7:3.

National Commission on Correctional Healthcare. 2004. Standards for Health Services in Juvenile Detention and Confinement Facilities. Chicago, IL: National Commission on Correctional Healthcare.

Reinherz, H.Z., Giaconia, R.M., Silverman, A.B., Friedman, A., Pakiz, B., Frost, A.K., and Cohen, E. 1995. Early psychosocial risks for adolescent suicidal ideation and attempts. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 34:599–611.

Safer, D.J. 1997. Self-reported suicide attempts by adolescents. Annals of Clinical Psychiatry 9:263–269.

Sedlak, A.J., and Bruce, C. Forthcoming. Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Shaffer, D., Vieland, V., Garland, A., Rojas, M., Underwood, M., and Busner, C. 1990. Adolescent suicide attempters: Response to suicide-prevention programs. Journal of the American Medical Association 264(24): 3151–3155.

Skowyra, K., and Cocozza, J.J. 2006. A Blueprint for Change: Improving the System Response to Youth with Mental Health Needs Involved with the Juvenile Justice System. Delmar, NY: National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice.

Skowyra, K., and Cocozza, J.J. 2007. Blueprint for Change: A Comprehensive Model for the Identification and Treatment of Youth with Mental Health Needs in Contact with the Juvenile Justice System. Delmar, NY: Policy Research Associates, Inc.

Teplin, L.A., Abram, K.M., McLelland, G.M., Dulcan, M.K., and Mericle, A.A. 2002. Psychiatric disorders in youth in juvenile detention. Archives of General Psychiatry 59:1133–1143.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2005. Single grade of enrollment and high school graduation status for people 3 years old and over, by age (single years for 3 to 24 years), race, and Hispanic origin: October 2003 (table 2 at school enrollment—social and economic characteristics of students: October 2003, detailed tables). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Education and Social Stratification Branch.

U.S. Department of Education. 2003. The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education; National Institute on Student Achievement, Curriculum, and Assessment; Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

U.S. Department of Education. 2005. 26th Annual (2004) Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, vol. 1. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Office of Special Education Programs.

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. 2007. Civil rights data collection: 2004. Digest of Education Statistics, 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Velez, C.N., and Cohen, P. 1988. Suicidal behavior and ideation in a community sample of children: Maternal and youth reports. Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 27:349–356.

Wasserman, G.A., Keenan, K., Tremblay, R.E., Coie, J.D., Herrenkohl, T.I., Loeber, R., and Petechuk, D. 2003. Risk and Protective Factors of Child Delinquency. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

White, A.M. 2003. What happened? Alcohol, memory blackouts and the brain. Alcohol Research and Health 27:186–196.

Wintersteen, M.B., Diamond, G.S., and Fein, J.A. 2007. Screening for suicide risk in the pediatric emergency and acute care setting. Current Opinion in Pediatrics 19:398–404.

Acknowledgments

Andrea J. Sedlak, Ph.D., Vice President and Associate Director of Human Services Research at Westat, is Project Director of the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP). Karla S. McPherson, Ph.D., is a Senior Study Director at Westat and SYRP Analyst. Other Westat staff who made key contributions to the study included David Cantor, Ph.D., John Hartge, John Brown, Alfred Bishop, Gary Shapiro, Sheila Krawchuk, Carol Bruce, Ph.D., Monica Basena, Kristen Madden, and Ying Long, as well as many other dedicated Westat staff, too numerous to name here.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) assisted during the SYRP design and preliminary analyses under a subcontract to Westat. Contributing NCCD staff included Madeline Wordes, Ph.D., Eileen Poe-Yamagata, and Christopher J. Hartney.

Several OJJDP program managers provided support and guidance over the course of the project: Joseph Moone, Barbara Allen-Hagen, and Janet Chiancone. Many members of the SYRP Advisory Board offered constructive advice at critical points. Finally, this study would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the many state directors and hundreds of local facility administrators who provided the information, space, and staff support needed to conduct the survey and the thousands of youth who agreed to participate and contributed their time and the details of their lives and experiences in answering the SYRP questions.

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This bulletin was prepared under grant number 2001–JR–BX–K001 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice.

Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance; the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the National Institute of Justice; the Office for Victims of Crime; and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking.

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NCJ 227728

Conditions of Confinement

Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Andrea J. Sedlak and Karla S. McPherson

May 2010

A Message From OJJDP

The environment in which juvenile offenders are confined can affect their future behavior and may even contribute to recidivism. To obtain a clearer picture of the conditions of juvenile confinement, OJJDP initiated the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP), the first comprehensive national study to gather information about youth in custody by interviewing the detained offenders.

This bulletin draws on SYRP’s findings to examine the characteristics of the facilities in which youth are confined and of the programs provided to them. It reports on the security status of these residential facilities and the types of youth offenders in various programs and their placement with other youth. It also describes the physical and program environments, the access offenders have to emotional support and legal representation, the relationship between youth and staff, the clarity of the facility’s rules, and the nature of the disciplinary measures used to enforce those rules.

While self-reported data bear certain limitations, the findings reported in this bulletin indicate areas in which some conditions of confinement fail to meet best practice guidelines. The authors provide helpful recommendations to address such deficiencies.

OJJDP is committed to enhancing the conditions of confinement for youth in residential custody. It is our hope that the findings of this study will help facilities in their efforts to address the needs of the youth offenders in their care.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the third component in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s constellation of surveys providing updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census, which are biennial mail surveys of residential facility administrators conducted in alternating years. SYRP is a unique addition, gathering information directly from youth through anonymous interviews. This bulletin series reports on the first national SYRP, covering its development and design and providing detailed information on the youth’s characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations; the conditions of their confinement; their needs and the services they received; and their experiences of victimization in placement.

This bulletin presents findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement about the conditions of confinement for youth in a range of different facilities and programs. Results focus on the structural and operational characteristics of these environments and indicate how youth offenders are distributed across various programs and facilities of different size and complexity.

SYRP research provides answers to a number of questions about the characteristics and experiences of youth in custody, including:

● How are youth grouped in living units and programs?

● Which youth are placed together?

● What activities are available in each facility?

● How accessible are social, emotional, and legal supports?

● What is the quality of the youth-staff relationships?

● How clear are the facility’s rules?

● How clear is the facility’s commitment to justice and due process?

● What methods of control and discipline do staff use?

SYRP’s findings are based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 7,073 youth in custody during spring 2003, using audio computer-assisted self-interview methodology. Results examined youth offenders’ self-reports about conditions in their facility and living unit and in their placement program (i.e., detention, corrections, camp, community-based, or residential treatment). Facility administrators provided additional information by verifying or updating their answers on the most recent Juvenile Residential Facility Census (JRFC) survey,1 by completing the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP) survey^2 (to give administrative data on the sampled youth), and by providing information about facility structure and operations. Using these data, SYRP describes the custody environment at three different levels: the facility’s organization and security, the program characteristics, and the specific conditions in a youth’s living unit. For more information about data collection in SYRP, see “Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology”.

Facility and Program Characteristics

Facilities that hold juvenile offenders vary widely in size, organizational complexity, and layout. Many are single-function facilities, providing only one type of placement program (e.g., a boot camp or a detention center), while others are more complex. The more complex facilities offer various programs in separate groups of living units. These facilities can occupy multiple buildings on a single campus or have housing units at multiple locations. Facilities and their programs also differ in size, security, the types of offenders they hold, and the average length of stay for their residents. Most youth (93 percent) live in facilities that provide a single primary program. The remaining 7 percent of youth are in operationally complex facilities that provide different programs for different groups of residents. The majority (58 percent) of youth in custody are in facilities that house 100 or fewer youth, and most youth (65 percent) are in public facilities.3 For more information about facility capacity, layout, and ownership, see table 1.

SYRP classifies residential programs into five general categories by grouping together living units that have the same primary function. As table 2 shows, most youth are in either corrections programs (32 percent) or detention programs (26 percent). The remainder of youth are in community-based programs (18 percent), residential treatment programs (14 percent), or camp programs (10 percent).

Overall, 26 percent of youth in residential placement are in programs that have one or more specialized subunits. Specialized subunits include reception/diagnostic units, targeted treatment units (e.g., for sex offenders, violent offenders, drug treatment), and variations of the primary program (e.g., a camp program that includes both a boot camp and a forestry camp, or a community-based program that incorporates a shelter, group homes, and independent living subunits). Most youth in camps (59 percent) reside in a program with specialized subunits (figure 1).

Security

Facilities are typically classified as “staff secure” or “secure” according to whether locks confine youth in their living units during the day. More than one-third (35 percent) of youth are placed in programs that do not use locks, but almost half (46 percent) are confined by three or more locks during the day. Youth in detention are held most securely, with 83 percent confined by three or more locks during the day. Locks secure youth in buildings (64 percent), in areas within buildings (e.g., corridors, wings, floors) (58 percent), and within external fences or walls (59 percent). Detention and corrections programs use locks for most residents. In addition, 53 percent of youth offenders live in facilities that lock residents into their sleeping rooms under certain conditions.

Types of Offenders in Different Programs

Youth placed in custody have committed a variety of offenses. Including current offenses and past convictions, SYRP shows that all types of offenders are comparably represented in each kind of program.

Some significant, small differences occur across programs. Youth with the most serious career offenses (i.e., murder, rape, or kidnapping) are most prevalent (14 percent or more) in corrections, residential treatment, and community-based programs. Camp programs have the highest percentage of property offenders (30 percent), and detention and camp programs have the highest percentage of drug and public order offenders (11 percent). Female offenders constitute 15 percent of the total youth offender population and are most prevalent in detention (19 percent) and residential treatment programs (29 percent).

Youth Placement With Other Youth

SYRP examined how youth are grouped together in programs and living units and revealed certain imbalances. Placing youth who are different ages or who have dissimilar personal histories or offense records together in programs and living units may not provide these youth with optimal environments for growth and change.

Age

Age differences mark important differences in youth’s maturity and experience. These disparities are magnified during childhood and adolescence. Most experts agree that housing young juvenile offenders with older youth is a practice that should be avoided. Separation of adults and juveniles in custody is also one of the core requirements of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act.

SYRP does not include juveniles who are held in adult prisons and jails, but the findings do reveal considerable age mix in juvenile facilities as well as substantial mixing of juveniles with young adults. Mixing juveniles with young adults poses challenges for implementing developmentally appropriate programming and for safety (Committee on Adolescence, 2001; Steinberg, Chung, and Little, 2004).

One-fifth of offenders in juvenile facilities are in living units with others who are 3 or more years older than they are. Moreover, 43 percent of juveniles in placement are housed in living units with young adults. Such units with older offenders tend to have more serious offenders. Juveniles (younger than 18 years old) who are in units with young adults are more than twice as likely as juveniles not living in units with young adults (42 percent versus 20 percent) to be living with youth whose most serious career offense is murder.

Sex

Thirty-six percent of youth in custody live in facilities that house both males and females. Similarly, 35 percent of programs are coed. However, coed placement in living units is uncommon (6 percent). Coed placement predominates in detention programs—86 percent of youth are in a coed program and 17 percent are in a coed living unit.

Race/Ethnic Group

The core requirements of the JJDP Act mandate that states must work to improve their response to disproportionate minority contact. Despite the requirement, SYRP findings on differences in custody rates (Sedlak and Bruce, forthcoming) reconfirm the numerous earlier studies that have demonstrated that minority youth are still disproportionately represented in the placement population (Hsia, Bridges, and McHale, 2004; Pope, Lovell, and Hsia, 2002).

In addition, SYRP reveals that different races and ethnicities tend to be held in different types of programs—more Black/African American youth in placement are in corrections programs compared with other races/ethnicities (42 percent versus 31 percent or less of other races/ethnicities), more Hispanic youth in placement are in camp programs (17 percent versus 7 percent), and more White youth are in residential treatment programs (20 percent versus 9 percent). These findings confirm that the patterns previously observed only in local samples (Cohen, 1991; Drakeford and Garfinkel, 2000; Kaplan and Busner, 1992; Richissin, 1999) also hold at the national level for the total population of youth in custody. SYRP data can provide a resource for examining factors that might explain the observed distributions, such as youth’s backgrounds, offense histories, and service needs.

Placement With Other Victims

Results indicate that youth with experiences of physical or sexual abuse tend to be clustered together in the same living units. These patterns could stem from deliberate programming decisions, whereby youth with similar abuse histories are housed together for specialized treatment. Clustering of abuse victims is particularly strong for females. This may reflect the joint influence of two dynamics: females have fewer placement alternatives and they are more likely to have experienced prior physical or sexual abuse.

One-fourth (25 percent) of youth in custody report past experiences (prior to placement) of frequent or injurious physical abuse and nearly one-eighth (12 percent) acknowledge prior sexual abuse. Among youth with physical abuse histories, 77 percent of males and 95 percent of females are in living units where more than 20 percent of residents claim they were physically abused. A similar pattern is evident for prior sexual abuse: victims of both sexes are more likely to be living with higher percentages of other victims (52 percent of male victims and 84 percent of female victims).

Coplacement of Offender Types

SYRP shows that most youth (63 percent) live in units where the majority of other residents are person offenders. Nearly one-fifth of the less serious career offenders (status offenders, technical parole violators, and youth who report no offense) are placed in living units with youth who have killed someone, and about one-fourth reside with felony sex offenders. (For more specific details on how less serious youth offenders are placed with serious youth offenders, see table 3.) Extensive mixing of youth who have dramatically different offense histories raises concern about the safety of the less serious offenders. From another perspective, placing youth together who have committed the same specific kind of offense (e.g., robbery, felony sex, felony drug) can have a reinforcing effect, increasing the probability that a juvenile will recidivate on the shared crime (Bayer, Pintoff, and Pozen, 2004).

These facts may seem somewhat surprising in light of the assumption that more serious offenders are remanded to the more secure placement contexts. However, the career offense categories in this survey depend on self-reports of both prior convictions and current offenses. Current placements will substantially depend on current offenses and assessed risks (Austin, Johnson, and Weitzer, 2005) as well as youth’s needs and the types of placements available at the time.

Unlike serious career offenders for robbery or drug offenders, sex offenders are more typically separated. SYRP indicates that youth who are in custody for a current rape offense are in living units where the majority of residents have rape offense histories (55 percent on average), whereas youth who are in custody for current offenses other than rape are in units where just 6 percent of residents (on average) are felony sex offenders. This type of clustering is dictated to a considerable extent by treatment programs geared toward specific types of offenders. In fact, nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of youth in custody for a current rape offense are in specialized living units for sex offenders.

Placement With Nonoffenders

Some facilities house youth who are in custody because the juvenile court wants to protect them (i.e., they have been neglected or abused), they do not have a parent or guardian, or their families have voluntarily placed them in a private facility for specific services, such as mental health or substance abuse treatment. SYRP surveys only offender youth, but administrative data on their facilities also indicate whether they are housed with nonoffender youth. Twelve percent of youth in residential placement reside in facilities that also house nonoffenders. Ten percent participate in programs with nonoffenders, and 8 percent reside in primary living units with nonoffenders.

Physical and Program Environment

The physical features of a facility and the programs it provides define day-to-day reality for youth in custody. SYRP asks youth about their sleeping arrangements, the reasons for any difficulty sleeping, the cleanliness of the environment, the quality of the food and of the recreation and educational programs, and the amount of time they spend watching television.

Sleeping Arrangements

Slightly more than one-third (36 percent) of youth in custody sleep in a private room, so most youth share their room with one or more other residents. About 17 percent stay in a room with 10 or more other residents.

Sleeping arrangements vary with security level—more youth who are locked in during the day have private sleeping rooms (42 percent) compared with youth who are not locked in during the day (23 percent). Sleeping arrangements also vary with type of program. For instance, 60 percent of youth in detention programs have single rooms, whereas 55 percent of youth in camp programs share their rooms with 10 or more other youth.

Difficulty Sleeping

Important changes in sleep patterns occur during adolescence, shifting to later circadian cycles (Carskadon, Vieri, and Acebo, 1993). At the same time, traditional schedules (e.g., the early start of the school day) do not accommodate these new daily cycles, so most teens suffer from chronic sleep deprivation (Carpenter, 2001; Carskadon et al., 1998; Carskadon, 2005). Adolescents’ sleep problems have been the focus of increased attention in recent years, with some policymakers recommending that schools shift their start times. Researchers have explored the implications of juveniles’ sleep deprivation, documenting its association with poorer grades (National Sleep Foundation, 2006), depression (Graham, 2000), behavior problems (Stein et al., 2001), and increased suicide risk (Liu, 2004).

SYRP finds that youth in custody report more sleep problems compared with high school-aged youth in the general population. About one-third (34 percent) of youth in custody say they “often” or “always” have a problem falling asleep at night, whereas only 11 percent of 9th to 12th graders in the general population say they have difficulty falling asleep “every night” or “almost every night.” Just 28 percent of youth in custody say they have “no problem” falling asleep, compared with almost half (48 percent) of 9th to 12th graders who “rarely” or “never” have that problem (National Sleep Foundation, 2006).4 Females tend to have more trouble falling asleep then males. More females report that they have trouble sleeping “often” (23 percent vs. 16 percent) or “always” (20 percent vs. 16 percent), whereas more males say they have no problem falling asleep (30 percent vs. 18 percent).

Youth’s View of Facilities and Amenities

SYRP asks youth to describe their facility by choosing characteristics from a list of positive and negative qualities. More than half of youth in custody have polarized views on these items. One-fourth of youth (25 percent) select no positive feature to describe their facility, while just slightly more (29 percent) identify no negative feature. For information about what youth like and dislike about their facilities, and how these likes and dislikes vary between programs, see table 4.

Television

Youth also indicated that they watched an average of 2.9 hours of television on a typical weekday. These numbers are comparable to those in the general American population, where youth watch an average of 2.5 hours of television a day (Woodard and Gridina, 2000). Youth in community-based programs spend the most time watching television (averaging 3.5 hours per day). The number of hours youth say they watch television is unrelated to whether they think their facility has a good recreation program.

Safety

Several questions focus on issues related to youth’s safety in their facilities, including whether they know what to do in case of fire or how to get help if they are threatened, whether they ever left their facility without permission, and whether they are afraid of being attacked while living there.

Most youth in custody (78 percent) say they know what to do in case of fire in their facility. Only 5 percent report having left their facility without permission. More than one-third of youth (38 percent) say they fear attack by someone, which includes 25 percent who fear attack by another resident, 22 percent who are afraid that a staff member will physically attack them, and just 15 percent who fear attack by someone coming into the facility from the outside. Ninety percent of youth report that they know how to find help if they are threatened or assaulted. For information about program differences on these measures, see table 5.

More females than males say they fear being attacked (44 percent versus 36 percent). More girls express fear of attack from another resident and from someone outside the facility.

Access to Support

SYRP asks youth about their access to different types of support, including their families, emotional support from facility staff, and legal representation.

Family Contact

The vast majority of youth in custody (92 percent) said that since arriving at their facility, they had some contact with their families, either through phone calls or visits. Nearly 9 in 10 youth talked with their family on the telephone, and more than two-thirds had an in-person visit.

The percentage of youth in contact with family varies by program type. While most youth have spoken on the telephone with their families, fewer youth in detention (80 percent) and camps (74 percent) have done so compared with those in other programs (93 percent). Fewer youth in corrections (61 percent) and camp programs (63 percent) report in-person visits with their families. Fewer youth in camps (80 percent) have any family contact compared with youth in other programs (camps are commonly in remote locations). Frequency of family contact also depends on the program. Youth in corrections and camp programs are nearly twice as likely to have a low rate of family contact. Thirty-nine percent of corrections and camp youth have family contact less than once a week, compared with 20 percent of youth in other programs.

One-third (33 percent) of youth who have no in-person visits indicate that this is due to time constraints (facility visiting hours are inconvenient) or distance (their family lives too far away). One-fifth of those who have no phone calls or no visits say that their families have resource constraints (e.g., a phone call would be long distance, a visit would cost too much, or the family does not have transportation). About one in seven (14 percent) youth without contact claim that the lack of contact exists because their facility does not allow it. Relatively few youth without contact say it is because they do not want to talk or visit with their family (7 percent) or because their family does not want to talk or visit with them (6 percent).

The majority of all youth in custody (59 percent) say that it would take their families 1 hour or longer to travel to visit them. For more than one-fourth of youth (28 percent), their families would have to travel 3 hours or longer to see them.

Emotional Support From Facility Staff

Eighty-four percent of youth in custody know how to find a staff member to talk to if they are upset. Youth in residential treatment programs are most likely to know how to find this support (93 percent) and those in camps are least likely (77 percent).

Legal Counsel

Improving access to legal counsel has been a policy concern (Hsia and Beyer, 2000; Puritz and Scali, 1998), but SYRP shows that youth’s access to legal support is infrequent. Only a minority of youth in custody report that they have a lawyer (42 percent), have requested contact with a lawyer (20 percent), or requested and received access to a lawyer (13 percent).

Youth in detention facilities are most likely to have a lawyer (50 percent) and to request contact (28 percent). More females (49 percent) have lawyers than males (41 percent).

Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the only national survey that gathers data directly from youth in custody using anonymous interviews. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention designed the survey in 2000 and 2001. SYRP surveys offender youth between ages 10 and 20. It draws a nationally representative sample from state and local facilities that are identified by the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and Juvenile Residential Facility Census surveys.

SYRP interviewed youth from a representative selection of 205 eligible, responsive facilities listed on the census as of September 2002. The survey team interviewed 7,073 youth between the beginning of March and mid-June 2003. Surveys were electronic and used an audio computer-assisted self-interview system to ask questions and record answers.

When using this system, youth wear headphones and hear a prerecorded interviewer’s voice read the words on the screen. Youth indicate their response choice by touching it on the screen. The computer program automatically navigates to the next appropriate question based on the youth’s earlier answers, storing all the data anonymously and securely.

Statisticians assigned weights to reflect the sampling probabilities of the facility and the youth respondents and to adjust for nonresponse. In this way, the survey of 7,073 provided accurate estimates of the size and characteristics of the national youth offender population in custody (estimated as more than 100,000 youth).

Facility Climate

SYRP asks questions about relationships between youth and facility staff, gang memberships, and whether youth were offered contraband.

Youth-Staff Relations

Youth distrust of facility staff and conflict with them can undermine program efforts to alter delinquent career paths and ele-vate discipline, control, and safety issues. Overall, youth in custody are lukewarm in their ratings of staff. Based on consensus within living units, 43 percent of youth are living in units with relatively poor youth-staff relations. Youth in unlocked units are more than twice as likely to live in units with good youth-staff relations (26 percent versus 12 percent). Those in locked units are almost twice as likely to live where youth-staff relations are poor (53 percent versus 28 percent).

In selecting specific characteristics to describe staff, about one-half of youth (49 percent) feel staff are friendly and 47 percent describe staff as helpful. More than one-third say that staff genuinely seem to care about them (38 percent), are fun to be with (38 percent), and act as good role models (34 percent). In contrast, 40 percent of youth say staff are hard to get along with, 38 percent say staff are disrespectful, and 29 percent describe staff as mean. Youth in community-based and residential treatment programs have the most positive perceptions of staff.

Gangs

The presence of gangs in a facility can exacerbate conflicts and disruptions and complicate facility operations. Nearly one-third of the custody population professes some gang affiliation—a level of gang involvement consistent with rates among high-risk youth (Thornberry, 1998). A majority of youth in custody (60 percent) report that there are gangs in their facilities.

On average, youth in residential placement are in living units where 19 percent of residents are members of gangs in the facility. Most youth (64 percent) are living in units where one-fifth or fewer of the residents are gang members, less than one-third (30 percent) are in living units where between one-fifth and one-half of youth are gang members, and 6 percent are living in units with a majority of gang members.

The presence of gangs can affect the custody environment for all youth present. SYRP reveals that the presence of gangs in a facility is significantly related to the percentage of youth who say they have been offered contraband (24 percent versus 8 percent) and to the percentage of youth who are in living units characterized by poor youth-staff relations (51 percent versus 30 percent). Certain problematic conditions tend to cluster in custody environments. When problems escalate, facilities sometimes engage in last-resort control methods. For instance, when there are gangs in a facility, significantly more youth are in living units where one or more residents say that staff sprayed them with pepper spray (38 percent versus 18 percent).

Contraband

One indicator of disregard for rules involves whether youth can easily obtain prohibited items such as alcohol, drugs, and weapons. Sixteen percent of youth in custody say they have been offered such contraband since they arrived at their facility. Youth most frequently report they have been offered marijuana (12 percent) and other illegal drugs (10 percent). Primarily, youth say other residents offered the contraband (12 percent), rarely implicating staff (6 percent) or someone outside the facility (4 percent).

More residents in community-based programs report offers of contraband (26 percent). These offers are often likely to come from other residents (16 percent) or from outside the facility (13 percent). Additionally, males report being offered contraband twice as often as females (18 percent versus 9 percent).

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Further information about the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement can be found in the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report and other bulletins in this series, which include:

● Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Nature and Risk of Victimization: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

For more complete results of the survey findings on conditions of confinement, see the “Reports” link at  www.syrp.org.

Rules and Justice

SYRP asks youth whether they understand the rules at their facility, know how to file a complaint, receive fair and reasonable treatment, have been placed in solitary confinement, or have experienced other methods of control.

Clarity and Consistency of Rules

Youth should be given copies of the facility’s rules and should learn and follow them. Seventy-five percent of youth say they received a copy of the facility’s rules when they arrived, and 90 percent believe they understand the rules. The majority of youth (68 percent) feel that facility rules are applied equally to all residents.

Access to a Grievance Process

Youth who wish to file a grievance about staff should have access to an adequate grievance process that is readily available, easy to use, and impartial (Roush, 1996). However, the findings reveal that one-third of youth in custody (33 percent) have some type of problem with the grievance process; either they do not know how to file a complaint (19 percent) or are concerned about retribution if they do so (20 percent).

Fair and Reasonable Treatment

Best practice fosters juvenile accountability through principles of balanced and restorative justice (Beyer, 2003), but many youth in custody do not perceive fairness or justice in their facility environments. One-half of youth in custody report that staff apply punishment without cause, and more than one-third claim that staff use unnecessary force. About one-third (34 percent) think that staff treat residents fairly, and less than one-third (30 percent) say punishments are fair. These views are strongly correlated with whether youth live in units that are locked during the daytime. Youth in locked units have more negative views of fair and reasonable treatment in all categories compared with youth in units that are staff secure in the daytime.

Discipline

Common disciplinary measures in a facility involve group punishment, which 49 percent of youth have experienced, and removing special privileges (such as television), which 43 percent have experienced. Twenty-six percent of youth in custody have been confined to their rooms, 24 percent were placed in solitary confinement, 23 percent were given extra chores or work, and 20 percent were moved to another location in the facility. Table 6 shows that youth in different programs are likely to experience different disciplinary measures.

Solitary Confinement

Maintaining discipline and control is critical but challenging, considering that the large majority of youth in custody have previous involvement with the juvenile justice system and most (57 percent) have a history of person offenses (Sedlak and Bruce, forthcoming). Nevertheless, some may find SYRP findings on the prevalence of solitary confinement both surprising and problematic.

More than one-third of youth in custody (35 percent) report being isolated—locked up alone or confined to their room with no contact with other residents. The vast majority of youth who were isolated (87 percent) say this was for longer than 2 hours and more than one-half (55 percent) say it was for longer than 24 hours. Best practice guidelines recommend that solitary confinement exceed 24 hours only if the facility director explicitly approves and that youth who are held in solitary confinement for longer than 2 hours see a counselor (Roush, 1996). SYRP has no information on procedures for approving lengthy times in solitary confinement, but the interview does ask youth whether they talked to a counselor about their feelings or emotions. The majority (52 percent) of those isolated longer than 2 hours indicate that they have not talked to a counselor since coming to the facility.

Control and Use of Restraints

Best practice dictates that restraints should be used only for youth who are out of control (Roush, 1996). More than one-fourth of youth in custody (28 percent) say that facility staff used some method of physical restraint on them—whether handcuffs, wristlets, a security belt, chains, or a restraint chair. Although the questions mean to ask youth about their experiences at the facility, some youth may report being handcuffed or otherwise restrained during transportation to or from the facility, which would be common for youth in more secure placement environments. This possibility should qualify interpretations of their reports regarding these restraints.

However, this qualification would not apply to youth’s answers about experiences with a restraint chair or pepper spray. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Performance-Based Standards program dictates using a restraint chair or pepper spray only as a last resort following appropriate protocol (Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, 2007). SYRP indicates that these practices, although infrequent, are used—4 percent of youth say that facility staff placed them into a restraint chair and 7 percent report that staff used pepper spray on them.

Apart from these personal experiences, however, SYRP reveals that these practices indirectly affect a much larger segment of youth in custody. Thirty percent of youth in custody live in units where one or more residents experienced the use of pepper spray and more than one in five youth in custody (21 percent) are in living units where staff used pepper spray on more than 10 percent of residents. Twenty-nine percent of youth live with one or more residents who received time in a restraint chair, and 16 percent are in units where more than 10 percent of residents report that staff placed them into a restraint chair.

Conclusion

Although youth’s self-reports have limitations, the findings reported here convey internally consistent patterns. Moreover, they portray confinement conditions and raise concerns that have been longstanding issues in juvenile justice (Guarino-Ghezzi and Loughran, 2006), indicating areas where future policies and practices can measurably improve the custody environments. The findings in this bulletin highlight several areas where confinement conditions do not meet best practice guidelines and where improvement efforts could begin, including the following:

● Prioritize developmentally appropriate programming and document its implementation and success. SYRP revealed a considerable age mix within living units. One in five young offenders are housed in living units with offenders who are 3 or more years older than they are, and more than two in five juveniles are housed with young adults who are 18 years or older. These arrangements present barriers to creating developmentally appropriate programming and undermine youth safety. Moreover, no systematic information exists regarding facilities’ efforts to implement programs, interventions, or activities designed for specific age ranges or on the success of facilities’ efforts.

● Explore factors that might explain disproportionate confinement of minorities. SYRP confirms that minority youth continue to be disproportionately represented in the population of youth in custody. The study also reveals that, even within the placement population, different races and ethnicities tend to be assigned to different types of programs. Exploring the information that SYRP collects on youth’s backgrounds, offense histories, and service needs may help explain these different placement rates and patterns.

● Improve understanding of the risks and benefits of mixing different types of offenders versus grouping youth with similar offense histories. SYRP indicates that a number of less serious offender youth are housed in living units with some of the most serious offenders. It also shows that youth who are grouped together in living units often share common backgrounds, such as membership in a gang or a history of physical or sexual abuse (possibly because the facility contains a specialized treatment program).

Mixing youth with different offense histories and backgrounds raises safety concerns, but grouping youth who have committed similar offenses may enhance deviancy training (i.e., bonding with other group members around deviance and reinforcing the delinquent behavior). Although studies have demonstrated the negative effects of aggregating offenders, they have also shown that these negative effects do not occur in all circumstances or for all youth (Dodge, Dishion, and Lansford, 2006). Further research should specifically identify how and when deviance training occurs. Such research can help guide recommendations for grouping offender youth to minimize safety issues and avoid deviance training.

● Ensure that youth know the facility fire safety procedures. Best practice guidelines dictate that facilities post a clear evacuation plan and hold regular, documented fire drills (Roush, 1996). SYRP results show that more than one in five youth in custody (22 percent) do not know what to do if there is a fire in their facility.

● Select placement locations that facilitate family contact. Although family interventions can be more effective with delinquent youth than individual treatment (Perkins-Dock, 2001; Quinn, 2004; Quinn and VanDyke, 2004), involving families is often difficult while the youth is incarcerated. SYRP shows that most youth have contact with their families but indicates that more than one-fourth of youth are placed a considerable distance from their families—requiring the family to travel 3 hours or longer to visit the youth. When assigning youth to placements, the court should consider how the facility’s location could affect their family’s involvement in an intervention program.

● Increase access to legal counsel, particularly before adjudication. The Juvenile Justice Standards (Institute for Judicial Administration–American Bar Association, 1980), developed as a result of the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (P.L. 93–415), require legal representation for juveniles from the outset of the court process. However, SYRP indicates that less than one-half of all youth in custody (42 percent) have a lawyer and just one-half (50 percent) of those held in detention facilities have a lawyer.

● Improve the quality of youth-staff relations, require fair treatment, and establish an effective grievance process. Positive relationships with older, prosocial role models can counteract the negative effects of placing delinquent youth with other youth offenders (Dodge, Dishion, and Lansford, 2006). Unfortunately, poor relations with staff characterize life in custody for more than two in five youth (43 percent). A majority of youth in custody say punishments are unfair, while more than one-third feel that staff use unnecessary force. Similarly, one-third of youth have difficulties with their facility’s grievance process—either they do not know how to file a complaint or they fear retribution if they do so. Standards for staff conduct should require that staff treat youth fairly and issue fair and reasonable punishments commensurate with the infraction. The facility should maintain a grievance process that is clear and universally understood and that includes protections for youth who submit complaints.

● Implement best practice guidelines in the use of solitary confinement and of last-resort control methods of pepper spray and restraint chairs. SYRP indicates that, contrary to best practice guidelines (Roush, 1996), the majority of youth who were isolated longer than 2 hours did not see a counselor. When youth are held in solitary confinement for longer than 24 hours, facility staff should document the specific circumstances and verify that the facility director explicitly approved the period of confinement in that particular case. Staff should also establish timely records detailing the situations where staff use pepper spray or a restraint chair, verifying that the events warranted these measures and that staff followed appropriate protocol.

WesDax: Providing Survey of Youth in Residential Placement Data Online

WesDax is an online query and analysis system that allows users to construct their own results from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. The system is designed for audiences without technical or statistical expertise, including policymakers, service providers, and the general public.

The WesDax system:

● Operates in a standard Web browser and requires no special software.

● Offers a tutorial for new users, including a glossary of terms.

● Computes accurate totals and percentages.

● Can provide statistical measures of precision (in the form of standard errors or confidence intervals).

To use WesDax, see the “Online Analysis” link at www.syrp.org

Endnotes

1. The JRFC collects data about the characteristics of facilities that house juveniles and the services these facilities provide.

2. The CJRP collects data about the personal characteristics of youth offenders in custody.

3. These findings and others cross-validate well with findings from the CJRP.

4. SYRP has no information about facilities’ schedules, so whether or how they may contribute to residents’ sleep complaints is unknown. However, the issue deserves further attention in light of the fact that juveniles’ sleep difficulties can contribute to or mark a host of other significant problems.

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National Sleep Foundation. 2006. 2006 Sleep in America Poll. Washington, DC: National Sleep Foundation.

Perkins-Dock, R.E. 2001. Family interventions with incarcerated youth: A review of the literature. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 45(5):606–625.

Pope, C.E., Lovell, R., and Hsia, H.M. 2002. Disproportionate Minority Confinement: A Review of the Research Literature From 1989 Through 2001. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Puritz, P., and Scali, M.A. 1998. Beyond the Walls: Improving Conditions of Confinement for Youth in Custody. Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Quinn, W.H. 2004. Family Solutions for Youth at Risk: Applications to Juvenile Delinquency, Truancy, and Behavior Problems. New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge.

Quinn, W.H., and VanDyke, D.J. 2004. A multiple family group intervention for first-time juvenile offenders: Comparisons with probation and dropouts on recidivism. Journal of Community Psychology 32(2):1–24.

Richissin, T. 1999. Race predicts handling of many young criminals: Care vs. punishment of mentally ill youth correlates with color. The Baltimore Sun (June 25):IA.

Roush, D.W., ed. 1996. Desktop Guide to Good Juvenile Detention Practice. Research Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and Bruce, C. Forthcoming. Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Stein, M.A., Mendelsohn, J., Obermeyer, W.H., Amromin, J., and Benca, R. 2001. Sleep and behavior problems in school-aged children. Pediatrics 107:60.

Steinberg, L., Chung, H.L., and Little, M. 2004. Reentry of young offenders from the justice system: A developmental perspective. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 2(1):21–38.

Thornberry, T.P. 1998. Membership in youth gangs and involvement in serious and violent offending. In Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions, edited by R. Loeber and D.P. Farrington. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Woodard, E.H., and Gridina, N. 2000. Media in the Home 2000: The Fifth Annual Survey of Parents and Children. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Acknowledgments

Andrea J. Sedlak, Ph.D., Vice President and Associate Director of Human Services Research at Westat, is Project Director of the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP). Karla S. McPherson, Ph.D., is a Senior Study Director at Westat and SYRP Analyst. Other Westat staff who made key contributions to the study included David Cantor, Ph.D., John Hartge, John Brown, Alfred Bishop, Gary Shapiro, Sheila Krawchuk, Carol Bruce, Ph.D., Monica Basena, Kristen Madden, and Ying Long, as well as many other dedicated Westat staff too numerous to name here.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) assisted during the SYRP design and preliminary analyses under a subcontract to Westat. Contributing NCCD staff included Madeline Wordes, Ph.D., Eileen Poe-Yamagata, and Christopher J. Hartney.

Several OJJDP program managers provided support and guidance over the course of the project: Joseph Moone, Barbara Allen-Hagen, and Janet Chiancone. Many members of the SYRP Advisory Board offered constructive advice at critical points. Finally, this study would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the many state directors and hundreds of local facility administrators who provided the information, space, and staff support needed to conduct the survey and the thousands of youth who agreed to participate and contributed their time and the details of their lives and experiences in answering the SYRP questions.

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Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of Justice.

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NCJ 227729

Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds

Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Andrea J. Sedlak and Carol Bruce

December 2010

A Message From OJJDP

To better understand the reasons that youth in confinement have offended, we need to examine their backgrounds and characteristics and review the offenses that led to their custody placement.

OJJDP’s Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) asks youth to identify the offenses they have committed and the personal and environmental factors that may have contributed to their delinquency. SYRP complements related OJJDP research such as the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement. However, as the only national survey that gathers information directly from youth in custody, SYRP provides data that are not available from other sources.

This bulletin draws on SYRP’s findings to examine the characteristics and backgrounds of youth in custody. It describes their demographic characteristics and reports on their current and prior offenses, disposition, family and educational backgrounds, and expectations for the future.

SYRP’s findings echo those from local studies and indicate national patterns. Moreover, its findings provide insights into how we might best combat recidivism while promoting positive outcomes.

As we strive to learn more about youth who commit offenses so that we may provide them with more effective intervention and treatment programs, OJJDP hopes that the findings presented in this bulletin will inform our strategies and programs.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the third component in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s constellation of surveys providing updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census, which are biennial mail surveys of residential facility administrators conducted in alternating years. SYRP is a unique addition, gathering information directly from youth through anonymous interviews. This bulletin series reports on the first national SYRP, covering its development and design and providing detailed information on the youth’s characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations; the conditions of their confinement; their needs and the services they received; and their experiences of victimization in placement.

This bulletin presents key findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement that describe the characteristics of youth in placement. Specifically, this bulletin focuses on the youth’s demographic characteristics, current and prior offenses, current disposition, family and educational backgrounds, and expectations for the future.

SYRP’s findings are based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 7,073 youth in custody during 2003, using audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI) methodology. Researchers analyzed answers from all youth in custody and assessed differences among subgroups based on their age, sex, and placement program (i.e., detention, corrections, community based, camp, or residential treatment). When other studies offered corresponding data about youth in the general population, researchers compared those findings to the SYRP results for youth in custody. For more information, see “Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology.”

Many of the topics covered in this bulletin will be familiar to juvenile justice researchers and practitioners. However, SYRP results extend current information and provide new perspectives. The following discussion highlights several issues where the findings underscore, clarify, and enlarge current understanding of the characteristics and backgrounds of youth in custody.

Demographic Characteristics

SYRP targets youth in custody between ages 10 and 20. Based on the SYRP interviews in spring 2003, an estimated 101,040 youth in this age range are in residential placement in the United States because they were arrested for, charged with, or adjudicated for an offense. This reflects a custody rate of 224 youth per 100,000 in the general youth population—about 0.22 percent of 10- to 20-year-olds nationwide.1

Sex

Eighty-five percent of all youth in residential placement are male. The custody rate for females is less than one-fifth the rate for males (70 females versus 370 males per 100,000).2

Age

The majority (51 percent) of youth in placement are 16 or 17 years old. More than 15 percent are between ages 18 and 20. Preteens (ages 10–12) comprise 1 percent of the placement population.3

Race/ethnicity

About one-third (35 percent) of youth in residential placement are White non-Hispanic and no other race. Nearly another one-third (32 percent) are Black or African American and no other race, and close to one-fourth (24 percent) are Hispanic. Very few youth identify themselves as any other single race category—3 percent classify as American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, or Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander. An estimated 6 percent identify as multiracial.

Considering custody rates, SYRP results indicate that multiracial youth have a substantially greater custody rate as compared with other race/ethnicity categories—an estimated 751 of 100,000 multiracial youth are incarcerated, compared with 123 White youth per 100,000 and 463 Black/African American youth per 100,000 (table 1).4

For more information about the demographic characteristics of youth in custody, including race and ethnicity, see table 1.

Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the only national survey that gathers data directly from youth in custody, using anonymous interviews. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention designed the survey in 2000 and 2001. SYRP surveys offender youth between ages 10 and 20. It draws a nationally representative sample from state and local facilities that are identified by the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and Juvenile Residential Facility Census surveys.

SYRP interviewed youth from a representative selection of 205 eligible, responsive facilities listed on the census as of September 2002. The survey team interviewed 7,073 youth between the beginning of March and mid-June 2003. Surveys were electronic and used an audio computer-assisted self-interview system to ask questions and record answers.

When using this system, youth wear headphones and hear a prerecorded interviewer’s voice read the words on the screen. Youth indicate their response choice by touching it on the screen. The computer program automatically navigates to the next appropriate question based on the youth’s earlier answers, storing all the data anonymously and securely.

Statisticians assigned weights to reflect the sampling probabilities of the facility and the youth respondents and to adjust for nonresponse. In this way, the survey of 7,073 provided accurate estimates of the size and characteristics of the national youth offender population in custody (estimated as more than 100,000 youth).

Current Offenses

SYRP asks youth about all the offenses that led to their current stay in the residential facility (table 2). Nearly one-third of the youth (31 percent) report just one offense. Another one-third (33 percent) indicate two or three offenses, and the remaining one-third (34 percent) indicate four or more offenses.5

Table 2 shows the percentages of youth who say that the offenses led to their current custody. The greatest percentages of youth report property offenses (45 percent), person offenses (43 percent), and status offenses (42 percent). The table also shows how probation and parole violators compared with other youth offenders—they are more likely to report status offenses and less likely to report person offenses.

Circumstances of the Current Offense

Alcohol or drug use was a factor in current offenses for a number of the youth. Forty-four percent of youth in custody say they were under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of one or more of the offenses that led to their being placed in custody. Additionally, most youth (55 percent) had committed their current offense with someone else. These findings are consistent with earlier observations of the tendency of juveniles to commit their offenses with others (McCord and Conway, 2005; Warr, 1996) and while under the influence of drugs or alcohol (Wallisch, 1992; White et al., 2002). But although others (e.g., Stormshak, Comeau, and Shepard, 2004) have observed that delinquent youth tend to have both drug and alcohol problems and deviant peers, SYRP reveals a previously unreported finding: not only do the same youth report both drug and alcohol abuse and association with deviant peers, but the youth who report them say that both factors occurred during the same crimes. SYRP finds that youth who commit their offenses with others are also significantly more likely to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of those offenses. Overall, the odds of youth being under the influence are almost three times as great when they are with an accomplice than when they act alone. The difference is even greater for youth who report the less serious property offenses (e.g., trespassing, vandalism), drug offenses, public order offenses, or status offenses. In these cases, the odds of youth being under the influence are more than four times as great when they are with an accomplice than when they act alone.

Most Serious Current Offense

More than two-fifths of youth in custody (43 percent) are currently classified as person offenders. Nearly one-half of them (20 percent of youth) are classified with some form of assault as their most serious current offense. Most person offenders (69 percent) say they knew their victims. Another one-fourth of youth in custody (26 percent) have a property offense as their most serious current offense, with most of them (19 percent of youth) reporting burglary, arson, or theft. For more information about youth’s most serious current offenses, see table 3.

Differences Between Male and Female Offenders

Males and females differ in their offense patterns (figure 1). Greater percentages of males than females are in placement for murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, drug offenses, and public order offenses. Greater percentages of females than males are in placement for status offenses and assaults.

SYRP findings underscore the historically greater rates of status offenses among females (Chesney-Lind, 2001; Chesney-Lind and Shelden, 2004). FBI data from 2003 (the year SYRP was conducted) on arrests of youth younger than 21 years old show that females are charged with status offenses twice as frequently as males (12 percent of arrested females versus 6 percent of arrested males).6 Related SYRP findings, displayed in figure 1, indicate that status violations are the most serious offense leading to custody for twice as many females as males (18 percent versus 9 percent).

During the past decade, arrests of juvenile females increased more (or decreased less) than male arrests for the same offense categories. The Uniform Crime Reports show that between 1999 and 2008, juvenile arrests for aggravated assault dropped 21.8 percent for males but only 2.5 percent for females. During this same period, simple assault arrests for juvenile males decreased 5.8 percent but increased 15.9 percent for juvenile females (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2009). Additional research has shown that females have not become more violent during this period (Steffensmeier et al., 2005). Rather, the evidence indicates that the shift is likely an unintended result of changes in arrest policies, specifically the use of mandatory and proarrest laws for domestic violence. In these cases, juvenile females are being arrested for altercations with family members—incidents that were previously handled informally or documented as status offenses (e.g., “ungovernable”) (Strom et al., unpublished paper). This trend is evident in analyses of arrest data (Snyder and Sickmund, 2006), which find that a greater percentage of aggravated assaults by juvenile females are against family members or intimate partners, as well as in SYRP, which finds that females in custody for violent offenses are more likely than males to report that they know or are related to their victims (82 percent of females versus 67 percent of males with current person offenses).

Justice System Involvement

SYRP asks youth whether they were previously taken into custody, on probation or parole, or convicted of any offenses—information that enters into court decisions about where to place them in the juvenile justice system. The large majority (85 percent) of youth interviewed have prior convictions. Ten percent report only prior custody, probation, or parole. Only 5 percent of youth in custody have no prior involvement with the justice system.

The authors examined youth’s answers about their current offenses and previous convictions and classified youth according to their most serious career offense. Youth with no prior justice system involvement are more likely to have committed murder, rape, or kidnapping as their most serious current (and career) offense (35 percent) than youth with only prior custody or probation (13 percent) or with prior convictions (12 percent). Most youth with prior convictions (74 percent) have committed another person offense or property crime^7 as their most serious career offense.

In addition, for most youth with prior convictions, their current most serious offense is less severe or at the same level of severity as the most serious offense in their prior convictions. Only 22 percent of youth identified a current offense that is more serious than their prior convictions.

Adjudication and Placement in Programs

Two-thirds of youth in custody (66 percent) have been adjudicated and assigned to placement in their current program (i.e., committed). Seven percent have been adjudicated and await placement and/or disposition, 14 percent have not yet been adjudicated, and 13 percent have been adjudicated but SYRP could not determine their disposition status.

Committed Youth in Detention Programs

The percentage of youth who are committed is substantially less in detention programs than in other types of programs (28 percent in detention versus 80 percent in other programs). Although this difference is expected, readers might be surprised that the percentage of committed youth in detention is this high, in view of the concerns in the juvenile justice field regarding the use of detention facilities for postadjudication placements (Roush, 1999). Nevertheless, sentences to detention have become increasingly popular and are available as a disposition in 32 states. In addition, 40 states use detention as a sanction for probation violations (National Center for Juvenile Justice, 2006).

Length of Stay

The amount of time youth offenders spend in a facility typically depends on many factors, including time in detention prior to adjudication, the nature and severity of their offense(s), and their commitment status. SYRP does not assess youth’s total length of stay but can measure how long they have been in their facility at the time of their interview. About one-third (35 percent) of all youth in custody have been in their facility for 60 days or less, and the same percentage (35 percent) have been held between 61 and 180 days. About 1 in 10 (11 percent) have been in their facility for more than a year.

Family Background

SYRP asks youth about their family backgrounds, including who raised them and whom they lived with at the time they were taken into custody. Many youth in custody (46 percent) report that both parents helped raise them, although this could have been in separate households. A slightly lower percentage (42 percent) had just one parent caring for them when they were growing up. Eleven percent report no parental care while growing up.

At the time they were taken into custody, more youth were living with one parent (45 percent) than with two parents (30 percent), and one-fourth of youth (25 percent) were not living with any parent. SYRP data describing where youth were living when they entered custody indicate that the risk of being taken into custody is significantly greater for juveniles who live with a single parent (558 per 100,000) or with no parent (1,652 per 100,000) than for juveniles living in two-parent households (153 per 100,000).8 Table 4 shows more information about who raised youth in custody and whom they lived with when taken into custody.

SYRP also indicates that significantly more females than males enter custody from no-parent living arrangements (32 percent of females versus 24 percent of males) and from foster family or agency care (7 percent of females versus 4 percent of males). However, more males than females lived with a single parent (46 percent of males versus 40 percent of females).

Childbearing

Fourteen percent of youth in custody report that they have children. More males have children than females (15 percent versus 9 percent). These rates are much greater than in the general population (2 percent of males and 6 percent of females between ages 12 and 20) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004). Twelve percent of youth, some of whom already have children, say they are currently expecting a child (i.e., females report they are pregnant; males report that someone is pregnant with their child). A combined total of 20 percent of youth in custody have or are expecting children.

Other researchers have observed strong associations between teen fatherhood and delinquent behavior in smaller, local samples of juvenile offenders and at-risk youth (Thornberry et al., 2000; Unruh, Bullis, and Yovanoff, 2003, 2004). SYRP findings indicate that this association is reflected in the national population of male youth in residential placement. The association is not as strong for female youth in placement, probably because pregnant females are less prevalent in the placement population than males who are expectant fathers.

Educational Background

Researchers have consistently documented a number of educational deficiencies among delinquent youth in local samples. Delinquent youth perform at less than expected academic levels (Wang, Blomberg, and Li, 2005; Zabel and Nigro, 2001). They have poor school attendance and greater rates of grade retention^9 (Laird, 1980; Silberberg and Silberberg, 1971; Wang, Blomberg, and Li, 2005; Zabel and Nigro, 1999). When they are in school, they exhibit more disciplinary problems, resulting in greater suspension rates (Finn, Scott, and Zarichny, 1988; Loeber and Farrington, 1998; Wang, Blomberg, and Li, 2005; Zabel and Nigro, 1999). SYRP results corroborate these findings in the nationwide population of youth in custody.

SYRP asks youth about their enrollment, school experience, grade level, and learning disabilities. Although a majority (76 percent) of youth were enrolled in school when they entered custody, this is significantly less than the rate of youth in the general population who are the same age (88 percent) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). Only 3 percent of youth who were not enrolled when they entered custody had already graduated from high school or earned their general equivalency diploma.

More than one-half (53 percent) of youth in custody admit skipping classes in the year before they entered custody, and the majority (57 percent) had been suspended in the same year. Also, 26 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds say they repeated a grade in the year prior to entering custody, which is more than twice the lifetime rate of grade retention (11 percent) among youth of the same age in the general population (Lugaila, 2003). Almost one-half (48 percent) of youth in custody are at less than the typical grade level for their age, compared with 28 percent of youth in the general population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005).

Additionally, SYRP data indicate that youth in custody have disabilities that would make school more difficult for them. Thirty percent of youth in custody report that they have been diagnosed with a learning disability, compared with 5 percent of youth between the ages of 10 and 20 in the general population (U.S. Office of Special Education Programs, 2003).

Nonetheless, more than two-thirds of youth in custody report that they have aspirations of higher education. About one-half (47 percent) say they want to go to college and another one-fifth of youth (21 percent) say they would like to go to graduate school, medical school, or law school. Females are significantly more likely than males to aspire to some type of advanced degree (37 percent of females versus 18 percent of males). Most youth in custody think they will achieve their educational goals. When asked how far they thought they would go in school, the majority (57 percent) say they expect to go at least as far as they want.

Youth’s positive aspirations also apply to their future employment. Most youth in custody (88 percent) say they expect to have a steady job in the future.

Expectations About Release

More than one-half (51 percent) of youth in custody say they have been told when they will be released. One-third (33 percent) expect to be released in 1 month or sooner, 23 percent think they will be in custody for another 1 to 3 months, one-fifth (20 percent) believe they will be released in another 3 to 6 months, and one-fifth (20 percent) expect to be in custody for longer than 6 more months.

Youth who have been committed (i.e., adjudicated and assigned to placement in their current program) expect their further time in custody to be considerably longer than other youth. Only 26 percent of committed youth believe they will be released in 1 month, compared with 51 percent of other youth.

When they leave their current facility, one-half of youth (50 percent) say they will be placed on probation or parole, 11 percent think they will be released with no court supervision, and 8 percent expect to go to another facility. Close to one-third of the population in custody (30 percent) say they have not been told what will happen when they leave. Once released, majorities of youth in custody think they will have to report to a probation or parole officer (59 percent) or attend school regularly (56 percent). Some (42 percent) say they will have to take drug tests and a similar percentage (40 percent) say they will be required to work at least part time. Only a little more than one-third (35 percent) say they will be expected to go to counseling, and just more than one-fifth (22 percent) say they will have to pay for damages they caused.

Similarities and Differences Between Youth Surveys

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) and the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP)1 both provide information about the size of the custody population; its age, sex, and race/ethnicity composition; and youth’s most serious current offenses. SYRP findings on age, sex, race/ethnicity, population size, and current offenses closely parallel those reported for the 2003 CJRP (Sickmund, Sladky, and Kang, 2008). Any differences in population size and in age and sex distributions may stem from methodology differences or from changes over time and seasonal fluctuations: SYRP describes the population in spring, whereas CJRP reflects the population in October.

SYRP and CJRP custody rates differ slightly, with SYRP rates slightly lower than those given in the CJRP Databook (Sickmund, Sladky, and Kang, 2008). This difference reflects the use of slightly different population denominators. CJRP rates are based on the number of juveniles in the general population ages 10 through the upper age of the original court jurisdiction in each state,2 whereas SYRP rates are based on all juveniles ages 10 through the upper age of extended juvenile court jurisdiction.3

The two surveys also offer different race/ethnicity classifications, reflecting their different methodologies and answer categories: CJRP requires administrators to assign a single race/ethnicity classification to each youth, whereas SYRP permits youth to identify as multiracial. The CJRP-type classification has been used universally until only recently, and it still remains the standard for available administrative data (Snyder and Sickmund, 2006). SYRP’s expanded answer choices conform to the new Census Bureau standard for measuring race/ethnicity. Moreover, this expansion reveals that multiracial youth have a substantially greater custody rate.

In comparison to CJRP data, SYRP findings indicate that the most serious offense leading to current placement is more commonly a person offense (Sickmund, 2004; Sickmund, Sladky, and Kang, 2008). The SYRP data show that 43 percent of youth are in their current placement because of a person offense, whereas the CJRP data show only 34 percent. This discrepancy is an understandable consequence of measurement differences between the SYRP interview answers and administrative data used to categorize offenses.

CJRP asks facility administrators for a single response that summarizes each youth’s offense record. In contrast, the SYRP self-report interview explicitly asks separate questions about all offenses, affording youth more opportunities to report a more serious offense. The vast majority of youth in placement have previous convictions, so when asked to recall and report the events that led to their current placement, they may not clearly distinguish these events from their prior offenses. In actuality, their view on this may be quite realistic because courts undoubtedly consider offense histories when deciding to place youth. Finally, differences between what the youth did and the charges to which they finally pled should be systematic, with pled charges less serious. If youth describe what they actually did and administrative records indicate the charge for which they were adjudicated after their plea, then self-report data will convey offenses that are more serious. (For example, a youth may describe an assault while the record may show a disorderly conduct charge.) Given these dynamics of memory, interpretation, and circumstances, neither the self-report nor the administrative record is necessarily more valid. Both methods provide important, alternative perspectives on offender youth in placement.

SYRP data concerning offense behaviors go well beyond what administrators (surveyed through CJRP) can currently provide. SYRP gives details about the circumstances of current offenses, identifies patterns of past involvement in the justice system, identifies first offenders, and classifies youth by their most serious career offense. Until records systems become substantially more advanced, researchers must rely on interviews with youth to obtain this extensive information.

1 CJRP surveys residential facilities in the United States to collect data on youth in custody; SYRP collects data from facilities and the youth themselves. Like SYRP, CJRP collects information on sex, age, race/ethnicity, most serious offense, court adjudication status, and more.

2 This is the oldest age at which a juvenile court has jurisdiction over an individual for law-violating behavior. In 38 states, the juvenile court has original jurisdiction over all youth charged with an offense who were younger than age 18 at the time of the offense, arrest, or referral to court (King and Szymanski, 2006). In many states, the juvenile court has original jurisdiction over young adults who committed offenses while they were juveniles.

3 This is the oldest age for which the juvenile court can retain jurisdiction over youth’s dispositions in delinquency matters. Extended jurisdiction laws enable the juvenile court to provide sanctions and services even for older juveniles who have reached the age at which original juvenile court jurisdiction ends. This upper limit varies by state, depending on what is considered to be in the best interests of the juvenile and the public. In 33 states, this is age 20 (King and Szymanski, 2006).

Youth Expectations About Future Offending and Sanctions

SYRP asks youth whether they think they will reoffend in the future. To assess youth’s thoughts on the workings of the juvenile justice system and on graduated sanctions,10 SYRP asks whether they expect to be apprehended and confined for any future offenses and what they believe their future punishments will be.

Most youth in custody (59 percent) say they definitely will not reoffend in the future. This belief is particularly prevalent among first-time offenders (78 percent). Although this is the socially desirable response, the anonymity of the interview should have minimized youth’s concerns about conveying a good image. Despite this, the majority of youth in all groups affirm they will not reoffend. At the same time, nearly two-fifths (39 percent) think it unlikely they would be caught if they reoffended in the future. Nonetheless, the majority of youth recognize that if they were caught for a future offense, they would be punished. More than three-fourths (76 percent) think they would be remanded to custody, and 75 percent believe their future punishment would be greater than their current punishment.

Youth’s expectations about the workings of the juvenile justice system are revealing, particularly considering that nearly two-fifths of youth in custody think they are unlikely to be apprehended for any repeat offense (most of whom say they “definitely will not be arrested”). Perhaps these youth feel they will be better at eluding law enforcement in the future, or perhaps they recognize the considerable challenge that officers face in solving crime and apprehending those responsible. Whatever their reasoning, youth’s answers on this series of SYRP questions suggest that arrest or apprehension is the weakest link in the sanctioning process.

Conclusion

The findings presented here represent a major advance in statistics about youth in custody. They provide a rich portrait of the characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations of these youth. SYRP results provide information about the national population of youth in placement that is not available through any other source. For example, until now no information has been available for the national population in custody regarding the overall prevalence of all offenses for which youth are incarcerated or the characteristics of these offenses, such as the presence of accomplices and youth’s use of drugs or alcohol during the offenses.

A number of the SYRP findings reiterate results from small, local studies. These findings provide a valuable contribution to the research literature on delinquent youth because they demonstrate that the patterns are not just local but apply more generally to the national population of youth in custody. Other observations provide unprecedented glimpses into the backgrounds, expectations, and beliefs of juveniles in custody.

Several findings have implications for reducing recidivism and enhancing positive outcomes:

• Develop programs that address the specific needs of youth who are parents or expectant parents. SYRP discovered that 20 percent of youth in custody already have children or are expecting a child. Juvenile justice programs have not commonly focused on the unique needs of these young parents and have overlooked how youth’s unmet needs may affect their children. To reduce youth’s recidivism and enhance the outcomes for their children, future initiatives should focus on programs that support parent-child bonds, improve youth’s parenting skills, develop realistic release plans to preserve these new families, and enhance youth’s ability to support and safely parent their children in the future.

• Capitalize on youth’s aspirations to motivate positive changes in their lives. SYRP found that most youth say they want to go to college, or even to graduate school, and that the large majority expect to hold a steady job in the future. Intervention programs to reduce recidivism could motivate critical changes in youth’s behavior by tapping their own specific aspirations for their further education and productive future lives.

SYRP can inform program and policy by providing details about the kinds of offenders in custody. Further analyses of the SYRP data can answer a wide range of questions about youth’s offense patterns, including the following:

• Do certain combinations of offenses typically occur together? What types of offenses do the same youth tend to commit?

• How do the offenses that gang members report differ from the offenses that other youth report? Do gang members have different offense profiles than other youth? Are gang members more likely to report using a weapon, injuring their victims, having accomplices, or being under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they committed their current offenses?

• How do youth’s current offenses relate to their family situations? What are the current offenses of youth who were living with two parents when they entered custody, and do these offenses differ from the offenses of youth who were living with a single parent or with no parent? What kinds of offenses do youth commit if they have children of their own or are expecting a child?

• Do different types of offenders have different expectations about their future education or employment or about their future offending and sanctions? Are violent offenders less positive about their future education or employment? Are they more skeptical about the workings of the justice system?

WesDax: Providing Survey of Youth in Residential Placement Data Online

WesDax is an online query and analysis system that allows users to construct their own results from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. The system is designed for audiences without technical or statistical expertise, including policymakers, service providers, and the general public.

The WesDax system:

● Operates in a standard Web browser and requires no special software.

● Offers a tutorial for new users, including a glossary of terms.

● Computes accurate totals and percentages.

● Can provide statistical measures of precision (in the form of standard errors or confidence intervals).

To use WesDax, see the “Online Analysis” link at www.syrp.org.

Endnotes

1. All SYRP custody rates are computed as rates per 100,000 U.S. youth, including youth in the ages covered by extended juvenile court jurisdiction. Numbers of youth ages 10 through 20 in the general population were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly population estimates for April 2003, which was the midpoint of SYRP data collection (U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, 2004). These numbers were adjusted by removing youth not within the purview of the juvenile court in states where extended court jurisdiction ends before age 20.

2. The SYRP bulletins report only differences that are statistically significant.

3. Fewer than 100 SYRP respondents are in this age category (n=82). Here and throughout the SYRP bulletins, estimates based on fewer than 100 respondents are flagged as less reliable.

4. The body of research on multiracial youth and delinquency is just emerging, so although these findings suggest that elevated rates of delinquency may be evident among multiracial youth in the custody population nationwide, the findings should be considered in context. Only recently have studies and data collection activities—both small and large scale—allowed respondents to indicate mixed race/ethnicity. Further research is needed to better understand the factors that may influence this finding. Until these findings are better understood, their implications for disproportionate minority contact programs and policies are unclear.

5. Some participants (n=139) did not select any of the listed offenses.

6. The authors computed these rates from information provided in tables 39 and 40 of Crime in the United States, 2003 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004).

7. Property crimes include burglary, arson, and theft as well as the less serious property offenses—trespassing, joyriding, and vandalism.

8. Corresponding statistics on 12- to 17-year-olds in the general population are available (U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, 2004). The rates given in the text reflect this subgroup (and exclude younger and older SYRP youth).

9. Grade retention means that youth repeated a grade in school.

10. “Graduated sanctions” refers to justice system responses that can take a variety of specific forms but always involve a continuum of consequences (dispositions, punishments, services, or intervention programs) calibrated to address the severity and chronic nature of the specific crimes and the individual offender’s history and characteristics.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Further information about the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement can be found in the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report and other bulletins in this series, which include:

● Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Nature and Risk of Victimization: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

For more complete results of the survey findings on youth’s characteristics and backgrounds, see the “Reports” link at  www.syrp.org.

References

Chesney-Lind, M. 2001. Are girls closing the gender gap in violence? Criminal Justice Magazine 16(1):1–9. Available online: www.abanet.org/crimjust/cjmag/16-1/chesneylind.html.

Chesney-Lind, M., and Shelden, R.G. 2004. Girls, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice, 3d ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2004. Crime in the United States, 2003. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2009. Crime in the United States, 2008. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Finn, J.D., Scott, M.W.R., and Zarichny, K.T. 1988. School performance of adolescents in juvenile court. Urban Education 23(2):150–161.

King, M., and Szymanski, L. 2006. National overviews. In State Juvenile Justice Profiles. Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice.

Laird, A.W. 1980. A comprehensive and innovative attack of action programs for delinquency prevention and classroom success. Education 101(2):118–122.

Loeber, R., and Farrington, D.P., eds. 1998. Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Lugaila, T.A. 2003. A Child’s Day, 2000 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Available online: www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p70-89.pdf.

McCord, J., and Conway, K.P. 2005. Co-offending and Patterns of Juvenile Crime. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice.

National Center for Juvenile Justice. 2006. State Juvenile Justice Profiles. Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice. Available online: www.ncjj.org/stateprofiles.

Roush, D. 1999. Helpful juvenile detention. Reaching Today’s Youth 3(3):63–68.

Sickmund, M. 2004. Juveniles in Corrections. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sickmund, M., Sladky, T.J., and Kang., W. 2008. Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement Databook. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Available online: ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/cjrp.

Silberberg, N.E., and Silberberg, M.C. 1971. School achievement and delinquency. Review of Educational Research 41(1):17–38.

Snyder, H.N., and Sickmund, M. 2006. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report. Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Steffensmeier, D., Schwartz, J., Zhong, H., and Ackerman, J. 2005. An assessment of recent trends in girls’ violence using diverse longitudinal sources: Is the gender gap closing? Criminology 43(2):355–405.

Stormshak, E.A., Comeau, C.A., and Shepard, S.A. 2004. The relative contribution of sibling deviance and peer deviance in the prediction of substance use across middle childhood. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 32:635–649.

Strom, K., Warner, T., Tichavsky, L., and Zahn, M. Unpublished paper. Policing daughters: The role of domestic violence arrest policies in child-parent conflicts.

Thornberry, T.P., Wei, E.H., Stouthamer-Loeber, M., and Van Dyke, J. 2000. Teenage Fatherhood and Delinquent Behavior. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Unruh, D., Bullis, M., and Yovanoff, P. 2003. Community reintegration outcomes for formerly incarcerated adolescent fathers and nonfathers. Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders 11:144–156.

Unruh, D., Bullis, M., and Yovanoff, P. 2004. Adolescent fathers who are incarcerated juvenile offenders: Explanatory study of the co-occurrence of two problem behaviors. Journal of Child and Family Studies 13:405–419.

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U.S. Census Bureau. 2005. Single grade of enrollment and high school graduation status for people 3 years old and over, by age (single years for 3 to 24 years), race, and Hispanic origin: October 2003 (Table 2 at School enrollment—Social and economic characteristics of students: October 2003, detailed tables). U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Education and Social Stratification Branch. Available online: www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2003.html.

U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division. 2004. Monthly Population Estimates, 2000 to 2004. Monthly postcensal resident population (by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin for the United States). Available online: http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/2004_nat_res.html.

U.S. Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). 2003. Number of children served under IDEA Part B, by disability and age (table AA7). (Data tables for OSEP state-reported data: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Data.) Available online: www.ideadata.org/arc_toc5.asp.

Wallisch, L.S. 1992. Substance use among youth entering Texas Youth Commission reception facilities in 1989. Austin, TX: Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Available online: www.tcada.state.tx.us/research/criminaljustice/tyc/1989/89tyc2ndrpt.pdf.

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Warr, M. 1996. Organization and instigation in delinquent groups. Criminology 34:11–37.

White, H.R., Tice, P., Loeber, R., and Stouthamer-Loeber, M. 2002. Illegal acts committed by adolescents under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 39:131–152.

Zabel, R.H., and Nigro, F.A. 1999. Juvenile offenders with behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, and no disabilities: Self-reports of personal, family, and school characteristics. Behavioral Disorders 25(1):22–40.

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Acknowledgments

Andrea J. Sedlak, Ph.D., Vice President and Associate Director of Human Services Research at Westat, is Project Director of the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP). Carol Bruce, Ph.D., is a Senior SYRP Analyst. Other Westat staff who made key contributions to the study included David Cantor, Ph.D., John Hartge, John Brown, Alfred Bishop, Gary Shapiro, Sheila Krawchuk, Karla McPherson, Ph.D., Monica Basena, Kristin Madden, and Ying Long, as well as many other dedicated Westat staff too numerous to name here.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) assisted during the SYRP design and preliminary analyses under a subcontract to Westat. Contributing NCCD staff included Madeline Wordes, Ph.D., Eileen Poe-Yamagata, and Christopher J. Hartney.

Several OJJDP program managers provided support and guidance over the course of the project: Joseph Moone, Barbara Allen-Hagen, and Janet Chiancone. Many members of the SYRP Advisory Board offered constructive advice at critical points. Finally, this study would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the many state directors and hundreds of local facility administrators who provided the information, space, and staff support needed to conduct the survey and the thousands of youth who agreed to participate and contributed their time and the details of their lives and experiences in answering the SYRP questions.

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Please direct your comments and questions to:

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This bulletin was prepared under grant number 2001–JR–BX–K001 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice.

Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance; the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the National Institute of Justice; the Office for Victims of Crime; and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking.

Access OJJDP publications online at ojjdp.gov/publications/index.html.

NCJ 227730

Nature and Risk of Victimization

Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Andrea J. Sedlak, Karla S. McPherson, and Monica Basena

June 2013

A Message From OJJDP

The Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement, Juvenile Residential Facility Census, and Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) comprise the nation’s most comprehensive data collection program on youth in custody and the facilities that hold them. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) sponsors these surveys and disseminates the findings to provide a snapshot of the youth who comprise the nation’s juvenile placement population, the facilities where they reside, and the conditions in which they live.

Conducted in 2003, SYRP is the first study to assess rates of victimization for youth in custody and the only study to do so across a range of domains: theft, robbery, physical assault, and sexual assault. As reported in this bulletin, the researchers found that 46 percent of youth had property taken in their absence, 10 percent were directly robbed, 29 percent were threatened or beaten, 9 percent were beaten and injured, and 4 percent were forced to engage in sexual activity. These findings signal the urgent need for policy and program initiatives that will reduce victimization and improve protections for confined youth.

One of OJJDP’s primary mandates is to prevent the victimization of youth in custody. We hope that this bulletin will inform juvenile justice professionals and policymakers about how youth experience confinement and how they can improve facility structure and operations that often exacerbate those experiences.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the third component in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s constellation of surveys providing updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census, which are biennial mail surveys of residential facility administrators conducted in alternating years. SYRP is a unique addition, gathering information directly from youth through anonymous interviews. This bulletin series reports on the first national SYRP, covering its development and design and providing detailed information on the youth’s characteristics, backgrounds, and expectations; the conditions of their confinement; their needs and the services they received; and their experiences of victimization in placement.

This bulletin covers key findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement on youth’s victimization in placement, including their experiences of theft, robbery, physical assault, and sexual assault. It presents the details of youth’s reports about these victimization experiences, indicating the prevalence and frequency of victimization, the perpetrators involved, the use of weapons, and any injuries resulting from the victimization. Because SYRP provides substantial information about youth’s characteristics, needs, and conditions of confinement (Sedlak and Bruce, 2010; Sedlak and McPherson, 2010a, 2010b), it also provides a rich basis for understanding the context of victimization. The bulletin describes a variety of youth characteristics and facility conditions that correlate with victimization rates and identifies a core set of risk factors that predict the probability of a youth experiencing violence in custody.

SYRP findings are based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of 7,073 youth in custody during spring 2003, using an audio computer-assisted self-interview methodology. Facility administrators provided additional information about facility structure and operations by verifying the facility’s answers on the most recent Juvenile Residential Facility Census (JRFC) survey and by completing the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP). For more information, see the sidebar “Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology.”1

The research questions listed in table 1 guided the analyses reported here. To address the first general research question, the authors analyzed youth’s answers to SYRP questions about their experiences of theft, robbery, physical assault, and sexual assault while in their current facility. To address the remaining research questions, the authors examined how a variety of youth and facility characteristics correlated with rates of self-reported victimization. To address the last research question, the authors also conducted a final series of multifactor analyses, which isolated a core set of risk factors, each of which independently predicts youth’s risk of victimization. Each core risk factor is a unique contributor to a youth’s overall level of victimization risk regardless of whether other core risk factors are also present. Findings from the study offer valuable guidance to the field because many strong risk factors for victimization are features that policy and/or practices can modify.

Victimization Experiences

SYRP asks youth about their victimization experiences while living in their current facility. Questions covered theft (“Have you had personal property stolen when you weren’t around to protect it?”), robbery (“Have you had personal property taken directly by force or by threat?”), physical assault or threat (“Have you been beaten up or threatened with being beaten up?”), and sexual assault (“Has anyone forced you to engage in sexual activity?”).

Theft

Forty-six percent of youth claim their personal property was stolen when they were not present. Youth whose property was taken identify the thief or thieves as another resident they know (41 percent), another resident they do not know (35 percent), a staff member (19 percent), or someone else (8 percent). However, 39 percent of theft victims say they do not know who took their property.2

Overall, victims report an average of six episodes of theft during their stay in their current facility. Twenty-two percent of theft victims say theft occurred once, but the majority experienced multiple theft events, with 20 percent of theft victims saying that items were stolen from them more than five times during their residence in their current facility.

Surveying Youth in Residential Placement: Methodology

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the only national survey that gathers data directly from youth in custody, using anonymous interviews. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention designed the survey in 2000 and 2001. SYRP surveys offender youth between ages 10 and 20. It draws a nationally representative sample from state and local facilities that are identified by the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and Juvenile Residential Facility Census surveys.

SYRP interviewed youth from a representative selection of 205 eligible, responsive facilities listed on the census as of September 2002. The survey team interviewed 7,073 youth between the beginning of March and mid-June 2003. Surveys were electronic and used an audio computer-assisted self-interview system to ask questions and record answers.

When using this system, youth wear headphones and hear a prerecorded interviewer’s voice read the words on the screen. Youth indicate their response choice by touching it on the screen. The computer program automatically navigates to the next appropriate question based on the youth’s earlier answers, storing all the data anonymously and securely.

Statisticians assigned weights to reflect the sampling probabilities of the facility and the youth respondents and to adjust for nonresponse. In this way, the survey of 7,073 provided accurate estimates of the size and characteristics of the national youth offender population in custody (estimated as more than 100,000 youth).

Robbery

Ten percent of youth in custody say that during their time living in their current facility, someone used force or threat to steal their personal property. The majority of robbery victims (52 percent) identify the perpetrator as another resident they know; about one-fourth (26 percent) say it was another resident they do not know. Two-fifths (41 percent) of youth who claim they had property taken by force or threat say that a staff member did this.3 Nine percent of robbery victims say someone else forced them to relinquish their property, whereas 8 percent say they do not know who robbed them.

Youth who say they were victims of robbery also reported whether a weapon was used in the robbery, what kind of weapon was used, whether they were injured in the robbery, what injuries they received, and whether they were treated for any injuries received during the robbery.

More than one-fourth of robbery victims (28 percent) say their assailant used a weapon to force or threaten them. Most of these youth (53 percent) identify the weapon as a sharp object other than a knife, such as scissors or a pencil. This would include any handcrafted makeshift weapons created within the facility.

About one-third of robbery victims (34 percent) say they were injured as a result of the robbery. Almost a third of those injured (31 percent) received medical care for their injuries. Youth identified the injuries they received when robbed in their facility. More than one-fourth of robbery victims (28 percent) report that they sustained bruises, a black eye, cuts, scratches, swelling, or chipped teeth.

About one-fourth of robbery victims (24 percent) report they were forced to relinquish their property only once while living in their current facility, but the majority experienced multiple episodes. One-fourth of robbery victims report that they were robbed more than five times while living in the facility. Robbery victims who were injured report significantly more robbery episodes (an average of 10 or more episodes) than uninjured robbery victims (an average of 5 episodes).

Assault

Twenty-nine percent of youth in custody say they were beaten up or threatened with being beaten up since coming to their facility.4 These assault victims identified their assailants as another resident they knew (70 percent), another resident they did not know (36 percent), a facility staff member (24 percent), or someone else (6 percent).

Nearly one-sixth (16 percent) of these assault victims say that a weapon was involved in their attack or threatened attack. Again, victims who reported weapons most commonly identified a sharp object other than a knife (49 percent), but some reported the use of blunt objects (33 per-cent) or other items.

Twenty-nine percent of assault victims claim they were injured, and 47 percent of these victims received medical care as a result of their injuries. One-fourth of assault victims (24 percent) say they suffered bruises, black eyes, cuts, scratches, swelling, or chipped teeth, while 14 percent report one or more other injuries.

Overall, youth who experienced threatened or actual attacks report an average of nine or more such episodes. Eighteen percent of these victims say they were assaulted or threatened once, but most experienced multiple threats or attacks. More than one-third of assault victims (36 percent) say they had more than five experiences of this type while living in their current facility. As with robbery victims, physical assault victims who were injured report significantly more occurrences (an average of 11 or more) than those who were not injured (an average of 9).

Although only 9 percent of assault victims say their assault experiences were reported to a staff member, counselor, teacher, or someone else who could help them, 33 percent say that something has been done to stop the kind of assault or threat they experienced from happening again.5

Sexual Assault

Four percent of youth in custody say they were forced to engage in sexual activity while living in their current facility. The SYRP interview includes a single question about the nature of the sexual activity: “Did this person put any part of their body inside you?” Two-fifths of the sexual assault victims (41 percent) say this occurred during the coerced sexual activity they described. One-half (50 percent) of sexual assault victims identify facility staff as their assailants, 53 percent say the perpetrator was another resident they knew, 15 percent claim their attacker was another resident they did not know, and 5 percent say it was someone else.

At least one-sixth of sexual assault victims (17 percent)6 indicate that their assailant used a weapon to threaten or force them to participate in sexual activity. Most of these youth (53 percent) identify the weapon as a sharp object other than a knife, 35 percent say the weapon was a knife, and 29 percent report it was a blunt object such as a rock or club.

At least one-fifth (20 percent) of sexual assault victims say they were injured during their assault experiences, and 21 percent of these victims report that they received medical care for their injuries. Among sexual assault victims, 17 percent claim they received bruises, black eyes, cuts, scratches, swelling, or chipped teeth, and 19 percent report one or more other kinds of injuries.

For the victims, these sexual assaults are not isolated occurrences. Youth who report any sexual assault experienced an average of six or more similar events during their time in residence. Only one-fourth of sexual assault victims say this type of assault happened only once, whereas one-third (33 percent) of sexual assault victims say they were forced into sexual activity more than five times while residing in their facility.

About two-fifths of sexual assault victims (39 percent) say their assault experiences were reported to a staff member, counselor, teacher, or someone else who could help them, and 27 percent of victimized youth say that something has been done to stop their sexual assaults from happening again.

Overlap of Victimization Experiences

Fifty-six percent of youth in custody experienced one or more of the types of victimization described above. About one-sixth of youth in custody (17 percent) report one or more of the three types of violent victimization experiences, including being robbed, being injured in a physical assault,7 or being sexually assaulted. Sixty-one percent of these victims report being injured during their experiences, and nearly one-half (47 percent) say they received medical care for injuries from these events.

The different forms of violence tend to occur to the same youth. Youth who report any one form of violent victimization are significantly more likely to report another type. Youth who say they were robbed are more likely to report being injured in a physical assault (36 percent) than those who were not robbed (6 percent). Youth who were robbed are also more likely to report being coerced into sexual activity (19 percent) than those who were not robbed (2 percent). Youth who report injurious physical assault (9 percent) are more likely to also report being robbed (40 percent) than youth who do not report injurious physical assault (7 percent). Youth injured in a physical assault are also more likely to report being sexually assaulted (17 percent) than youth who did not experience an injurious physical assault (3 percent). Sexually assaulted youth are more likely to say they were robbed (48 percent) than youth who were not sexually assaulted (8 percent) and are also more likely to experience injurious physical assault (36 percent) than other youth (7 percent).

Factors Related to Risk of Victimization in Custody

To understand where youth are victimized and which youth are victimized, the authors identified the most important independent predictors of risk for victimization using a two-stage process. In the first stage, they identified a comprehensive set of youth and facility features that are correlated with victimization risk and determined which of these features were also related to each other and which were relatively independent of the others. In the second stage, they determined which of these independent features were the most important predictors of victimization risk while simultaneously considering the effects of other independent predictors of risk.8

Developing a Comprehensive Set of Individual, Independent Correlates of Risk

The authors reviewed all the information available in SYRP and identified 51 characteristics of youth, their facilities, and their placement contexts that could potentially relate to their risk of experiencing violence in custody. They grouped these characteristics into five categories (table 2). Three categories comprise characteristics of the facility environment, and two categories relate to the youth’s characteristics. The table indicates which characteristics correlate with youth’s experiences of robbery, injurious physical assault, sexual assault, or any of these types of violence. Thirty of the characteristics correlate with all four measures of violence, whereas only three characteristics have no relationship to any measure of violence.

The first category, which includes 11 measures, describes the facility’s structural and organizational characteristics. The next two categories describe youth’s characteristics:

• Youth’s personal demographics and background experiences (12 measures), such as age, prior sexual abuse, and gang membership.

• Youth’s social context (11 measures), including characteristics of residents in the same living unit (such as the percentage of living unit residents with rape as an offense) and the youth’s status compared with other residents (such as their age compared with the oldest youth in their program).

The last two categories of characteristics define the facility climate:

• Based on the individual youth’s descriptions of the facility (11 measures), such as their views about living conditions.

• Based on the patterns of residents’ answers in the youth’s living unit (six measures), such as the percentage in the living unit who say they understand the facility rules.

(See table 2 for a list of all measures described above.)

Table 2 summarizes initial efforts to understand victimization risk. The authors computed the correlations for all pairs of the characteristics listed in table 2 to identify a subset of 18 relatively independent characteristics for further analysis:9 the 11 characteristics listed in the first column of table 3 and 7 others—program type, sleeping arrangements (number of roommates), youth’s gang membership, race/ethnicity, sex, prior placement in a foster or group home, and the percentage of youth in the living unit who know how to find help if assaulted or threatened. For further information about the characteristics listed in table 2, their individual correlations with rates of violence, and their correlations with each other, see the associated technical report (Sedlak and McPherson, forthcoming).

Predictors of Risk

The next stage of analysis determined the most important independent predictors of victimization risk when the effects of other important predictors of victimization risk are taken into account.

The 18 characteristics all correlate with victimization rates. Although these characteristics, or factors, are moderately independent of each other, they are not entirely uncorrelated. For example, youth’s age relates to their length of stay in their current facility (older youth have generally been in their facility longer); detention programs more often use makeshift beds (i.e., temporary sleeping locations to house youth beyond the facility’s built capacity, such as cots, rollout beds, mattresses, and sofas) and their youth have shorter stays; and youth in correction programs have less frequent family contact, experience more forms of physical control, and are more likely to say that the rules are not applied fairly.10 Single-factor analyses can lead to mistaken conclusions because of all of these underlying relationships. For instance, if older youth have higher rates of violent victimization, is this primarily related to their age or to their longer stays in the facility? A multivariate model simultaneously considers multiple predictors or variables (multi = multiple; variate = variables). This approach determines whether each factor relates to or predicts victimization risk when the effects of all other factors in the model are taken into account (or held constant). For example, a multivariate analysis can show whether youth’s age is still related to their victimization risk when their length of stay in the facility is taken into account (or held constant). Thus, the multivariate model can essentially compare youth who are different ages but have similar lengths of stay to assess the independent effect of age on their victimization risk.

Using the 18 characteristics identified in the first stage, the authors developed separate models for robbery, injurious physical assault, sexual assault, and any violence.11 Table 3 gives the odds ratios for significant characteristics in each final model. The odds ratios compare the chances of a youth experiencing violence when the risk factor is present compared with when it is absent. For risk factors measured on a numerical scale (in table 3, these are scores, percentages, and months), the odds ratios show the change in the odds of experiencing violence for each additional scale unit. The more an odds ratio differs from 1, the larger the effect the factor has on the risk of violent victimization. Odds ratios larger than 1 indicate that the factor raises youth’s risk of experiencing violence; those smaller than 1 indicate that the factor lowers the risk of experiencing violence.12

The general pattern in table 3 indicates that the different forms of violence have many of the same risk factors. This section discusses the risk factors as listed in table 3. Because the multivariate analysis simultaneously considered the effects of all of these predictors, the percentages presented for each risk factor reflect victimization rates for youth with the same characteristics on other risk factors (i.e., youth who otherwise have equal risk).13

Ineffective Grievance Process

The risk for all types of violence is considerably higher when youth indicate that the facility has an ineffective grievance process. This measure ranged from 0 to 2, reflecting the sum of a youth’s scores on the following two items:

• Do you know how to file a complaint if you are being mistreated? (Score = 1 if “no”)

• Something bad might happen to me if I file a grievance. (Score = 1 if “yes”)

The odds ratios for this risk factor (table 3) are all quite high, showing that for each answer indicating an ineffective grievance process, the risk of violent victimization increases by a large amount. For youth with the same characteristics on other risk factors, 12 percent of those who do not indicate problems with the grievance process experience some form of violence, in contrast to 40 percent of youth who say they do not know how to file a complaint if they are mistreated and that they expect bad consequences if they do so. The pattern is similar across all three specific types of violence.

Prior Abuse

Youth who say they experienced any physical or sexual abuse while they were living with their family or in another household have a significantly higher risk of experiencing violence while in custody. Among youth with the same characteristics on other risk factors, approximately one-fifth (21 percent) of youth with prior abuse experience some type of violence in custody, in contrast to 15 percent of youth who had no prior abuse. Prior victims have a higher risk of all types of violence while in custody.

Methods of Physical Control

Youth were asked about the different methods of physical control they had experienced and received a score (from 0 to 6) based on how many types of physical control staff had used on them since they arrived in the facility. These methods included being:

• Held down.

• Placed in handcuffs or wristlets.

• Placed in a security belt or chains.

• Strip searched.

• Sprayed with pepper spray.

• Put in a restraint chair.

Youth’s scores on this measure relate to their risk of experiencing violence. Figure 1 shows these patterns for youth who do not differ on the other important risk factors. Ten percent of youth who did not receive any of these physical control methods reported experiencing some form of violence, compared with 58 percent of youth who experienced all six forms of physical control in their facility. The rates for robbery and injurious physical assault follow a similar pattern, ranging from 5 percent for youth who had no experience of these physical control methods to 40 percent for youth who experienced all six forms of physical control. Moreover, among youth with no physical control experiences, the rate of sexual assault is 2 percent, but for youth who experienced all six physical control methods, the sexual assault rate is 19 percent.

Percentage of Residents in Youth’s Living Unit Who Say Rules Are Not Applied Fairly

This risk factor reflects the views of all residents in a youth’s living unit. Figure 2 shows the patterns for all types of violent victimization when youth do not differ on the other risk factors listed in table 3. The rate of any violence ranges from only 12 percent in living units where 10 percent or fewer residents think the rules are not applied fairly to 32 percent in units where more than 90 percent of residents think rules are not applied fairly. Significant differences in risk are also evident for specific types of violence. When comparing living units where less than 10 percent of residents feel the rules are not applied fairly with units where more than 90 percent of residents think they are not applied fairly, the risk ranges from 7 to 18 percent for robbery, from 6 to 16 percent for physical assault, and from 3 to 6 percent for sexual assault.

Youth’s Age

Figure 3 depicts the relationship between youth’s age and the likelihood that they will experience violence when all other risk factors are taken into account. Younger youth have a higher risk for all types of violence. The model indicates that, among youth with equal risk of experiencing violence based on their other characteristics, more than one-fourth of youth younger than age 13 experience some type of violence in custody, compared with 9 percent of 20-year-old youth.14

Makeshift Beds

Only 8 percent of youth in custody reside in facilities that report using makeshift beds. Youth who reside in these facilities have a significantly lower risk of experiencing violence in three of the four violence categories.15 Among youth with the same characteristics on other risk factors, 11 percent of youth in facilities that use makeshift beds experience some type of violence, compared with 17 percent of youth in other facilities. Facilities that use makeshift beds may have structural features or staffing arrangements that allow closer observation of the youth.

Learning Disability

Youth who say they have a diagnosed learning disability have a significantly higher risk of experiencing all types of violence except sexual assault. When youth have the same characteristics on other risk factors, 21 percent of those with a learning disability experience some type of violence in custody, compared with 15 percent of other youth.

Length of Stay

Figure 4 displays the relationship between youth’s length of stay in their current facility and two categories of violence—any type of violence and physical assault. Youth who stay in their facility longer than 12 months have a notably higher risk of experiencing violence. When other risk factors are equal, less than 17 percent of youth in residence for a year or less experience some form of violence, compared with nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of youth in custody between 18 and 24 months and one-third (33 percent) of those who have been in their facility for more than 2 years. Between 7 and 9 percent of youth who are in their facility for 1 year or less experience injurious physical assault, compared with 20 percent of those who stay in the facility for more than 2 years.

Most Serious Offenders in Living Unit

Youth who report offenses that are among the most serious in their living unit have significantly higher risk of victimization. Among youth who do not differ on the other risk factors, 20 percent of the most serious offenders experience some form of violent victimization, in contrast with 15 percent of other residents. The most serious offenders in their units also are sexually assaulted twice as frequently as other youth (6 percent versus 3 percent).

Frequency of Family Contact

Youth who have more frequent telephone or face-to-face contact with their family have a lower risk of experiencing robbery. When youth have the same characteristics on other risk factors, 11 percent of those who see their family less than once a week have something taken from them by force or threat, compared with 8 percent of those who say they see their family three or more times a week.

Poor Programs

Youth scores range from 0 to 4 on this measure, based on their answers to four questions about the facility’s activities and programs: whether they attended school in the facility, spent any time watching television, thought the facility had a good school program, and thought the facility had a good recreational program. Among youth with the same characteristics on other risk factors, those with higher scores on this index are more likely to experience injurious physical assault: 7 percent of youth with scores of 0 (i.e., who answered “yes” to all four questions) report being physically assaulted and injured, compared with 11 percent of youth with maximum scores (i.e., who answered “no” to all four items).

Discussion and Recommendations

SYRP is the first study to assess rates of victimization for youth in custody and the only study to do so across a range of domains: theft, robbery, physical assault, and sexual assault. The study determined that 46 percent of youth had their property stolen in their absence, 10 percent were directly robbed, 29 percent were threatened or beaten, 9 percent were beaten and injured, and 4 percent were forced to engage in sexual activity. The results signal the need for policy initiatives and programs that will reduce victimization risk and improve protections for youth held in juvenile justice custody.

Predictors of Victimization

SYRP also indicates that different types of victimization experiences often occur to the same youth. The analyses show that this clustering of violent events can be explained by the fact that the different forms of violence have very similar risk factors, so all forms of violence are more prevalent among youth and in facility environments that possess these risk factors.

Factors that affect violent victimization risk for youth in custody have been found to affect the risk of victimization in other contexts as well:

• Youth who are among the most serious offenders in their living unit have a higher risk of being victims of some form of violence. Although others studying juveniles who were not in custody have also described the correlation between the severity of youth’s offenses and their likelihood of being victimized (Huizinga and Jakob-Chien, 1998; Loeber, Kalb, and Huizinga, 2001), Shaffer’s (2003) results are directly relevant to the SYRP finding because they documented the importance of the peer group dynamics underlying this relationship. Shaffer found that youth in more prominent positions within their offender peer groups^16 were more likely to be victimized.17

• Youth with prior physical or sexual abuse have a higher risk of experiencing all forms of violent victimization while in custody. This is consistent with the revictimization patterns commonly observed in the general population, where adults who were sexually or physically abused as children are more likely to be revictimized as adults (e.g., Classen, Palesh, and Aggarwal, 2005; Dietrich, 2000; Messman and Long, 1996; Messman-Moore and Long, 2000; Schaaf and McCanne, 1998). Clinicians and researchers have examined a variety of ways that normal coping or reactive responses to the earlier abuse could lead to maladaptive emotional, cognitive, or interpersonal dynamics that increase the likelihood of subsequent victimization (Chu, 1992; Cloitre, 1998; Dietrich, 2000, 2007; DePrince, 2005; Messman and Long, 1996).

• Youth in custody who have a learning disability are significantly more likely to experience nearly all forms of violence. There is a similar link between disability and victimization in the general population for both children and adults, although this varies with the nature of the disability and by type of victimization. Persons with intellectual disabilities are more likely to be maltreated (Horner-Johnson and Drum, 2006) and to be victims of crime than those who do not have such disabilities (Rand and Harrell, 2009; Petersilia, 2001). Some have suggested that this is because they lack adequate social skills (Mayfield, 2005).

• Youth who say they experienced more methods of physical control are more likely to experience violence. These youth may exhibit more behavior problems (aggression and outbursts of anger) that facility staff respond to with physical control methods. Research has found that such youth are more likely to be victimized by their peers and more likely to become involved in high-conflict relationships where they experience more violence, both as perpetrator and victim (Maas et al., 2010; Shields and Cicchetti, 2001). In custody, these youth would pose a particular challenge in settings where staff lack training in how to subdue juveniles through communication and situational strategies before resorting to physical controls (Cellini, 1994).

Implications for Juvenile Justice Policy and Practice

The results presented in this bulletin offer several insights into ways that juvenile facilities can prevent the victimization of youth in custody:

• The structural features of a facility are not important risk factors for violent victimization. The size and type of facility do not relate to victimization rates when characteristics of the youth, their social context, and the facility’s climate are taken into account. (See examples of these characteristics in table 2.) Strategies for preventing violent victimization should focus on these youth, social context, and facility climate features.

• Certain youth have a higher risk of experiencing violence in custody, including those who are younger, those who have histories of prior abuse, and those who have a learning disability. Facilities should take special precautions to protect these more vulnerable youth, such as enhancing staff monitoring and structuring living arrangements to minimize the extent to which these vulnerable youth are exposed to older and more aggressive youth.

• Youth who are the most serious offenders in their living units and those who receive more methods of physical control also experience higher rates of violence in custody. Although these youth may seem capable of protecting themselves, SYRP results show that they also need protection. These youth may benefit from monitoring by staff who are aware of this higher risk and who are trained to use behavioral interventions, instead of relying on physical methods of control, to resolve conflicts and promote positive interactions.

• Rates of violent victimization are highest in places where youth lack faith in the just and fair operation of their facility. Facilities without an effective grievance process put youth at much higher risk of victimization, as do those where youth say the rules are not applied fairly. Facilities that ensure that youth know how to file a complaint and feel confident they will be protected from retaliation if they do so can substantially reduce the risk of violent victimization. Facilities that ensure that staff apply the rules fairly and consistently can further improve the safety of youth in their custody.

All of these recommended improvements focus on facility policies and practices that can be changed. Yet, changing traditional policies and longstanding practices always poses challenges. Administrators and staff must be convinced that changes will be beneficial and then become motivated to change. New approaches must have clear protocols and ways to verify that they are implemented.

A key implication of these findings is that facilities need not change physical structures or programs, but they should monitor the needs of youth who are at risk of experiencing violence and enhance staff training on the use of behavioral interventions. Extensive policy, procedural, and cultural changes are needed in facilities that have an inadequate grievance process and where staff treat youth unfairly. Because youth in these facilities are at the highest risk of experiencing violence, changes here can have the greatest impact.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement

Further information about the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) can be found in the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Technical Report and other bulletins in this series, which include:

● Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

● Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement.

Learn more about SYRP at  www.syrp.org.

Endnotes

1. As Sedlak (2010) described, because of the policy importance of the SYRP victimization findings, the authors took special precautions to prevent suspicious answer patterns from distorting the results. First, they examined 18 markers of extreme answers and excluded youth with more than one extreme answer (“outliers”) to verify the findings reported here on the incidence, characteristics, correlates, and predictors of victimization experiences. Second, the authors again verified the incidence of violent victimization experiences and the predictors of victimization risk by excluding youth whose survey answers identified them as more serious offenders than administrative records indicated (“exaggerated offenders,” more than 26 percent of the study sample). The verified results differed only slightly from the overall patterns in a few instances, as noted.

2. Youth who were victims report all perpetrators, so the percentages of different types of perpetrators sum to more than 100 percent here and in subsequent sections. Multiple types of perpetrators could be involved in a single incident, and multiple incidents could involve different perpetrators.

3. This relatively high level of staff involvement suggests that the youth may have included incidents where staff confiscated contraband items or took away items temporarily as a punishment. SYRP data cannot clarify this because the survey did not ask details about what was taken or why it was taken.

4. Some facilities refused to allow the victimization questions about physical and sexual assault. This prevented researchers from obtaining answers on these items from 120 sample youth (representing 3 percent of the population of youth in custody). Throughout the SYRP bulletins, percentages are based on youth who provided substantive answers.

5. SYRP did not ask further questions about this issue, so the data do not indicate what was done or whether the facility administrators or staff intervened in any way.

6. Because sexual assault is the least frequent of the victimization events, its characteristics were more readily distorted by the responses of a few outlier youth. The verified percentages (excluding outliers) are reported here as minimum estimates when they differ from the overall findings.

7. Because the assault question asked whether youth were beaten up or threatened with being beaten up, not all youth who reported assaults were physically attacked—some were simply threatened. This group was narrowed to those youth who were injured as a result of the assault to focus on a subset of youth who experienced physical violence.

8. The authors followed these strategies to reflect how multiple factors simultaneously influence a youth’s risk of victimization in the real world. Identifying the individual correlates of risk provides an oversimplified view of how the individual characteristics influence a youth’s risk of victimization. Considering only how a single characteristic or feature relates to the risk of experiencing violence can even be misleading at times because the victimization patterns that appear for that single characteristic in isolation may be quite different from the patterns that appear when the effects of other important characteristics are considered. In fact, this occurred when analyzing the relationship between youth’s age and risk of violence, as described in endnote 14.

9. Using the Pearson correlation coefficient, r, which indexes the strength of an association between two measures, the authors identified all pairs of moderately correlated features (correlated at r = .25 or higher). In each pair, they selected the characteristic most strongly associated with victimization rates for further analysis.

10. Although these correlations are less than r = .25, they are not trivial, with r’s around .20.

11. At each step, researchers removed the nonsignificant characteristics and reran the model. They repeated this process until no nonsignificant characteristics remained. Tests to determine whether any of the omitted characteristics could be significant in the reduced model did not lead to any additions.

12. Chances are not the same as odds, and odds ratios are different from simple odds. The chances of violent victimization may be 2 in 3 with the risk factor present, in which case the odds are 2:1—that is, 2 chances in 3 that the youth will be victimized to 1 chance in 3 that he or she will not be victimized. If a youth’s chance of experiencing violence is only 1 in 3 when the risk factor is absent, his or her odds of being victimized are 1:2—or 1 chance of being victimized to 2 chances of not being victimized. The odds ratio is the odds of victimization with the risk factor divided by the odds without it. In this example, the odds ratio is 2/(1 divided by ½), which is equal to 4. Footnote 2 in table 3 also provides an explanation.

13. Because these percentages are for youth with equal risk on all the other important risk factors, they are not the same as the percentages that users of the SYRP data would see if they ignored the other risk factors and simply calculated the victimization rates for each individual risk factor separately.

14. The results in figure 3 demonstrate the importance of the multivariate analyses. The initial analyses, which examined victimization rates for different ages without considering any other risk factors, found a very different relationship between age and victimization rates, with higher rates of victimization for both older and younger youth. Older youth have additional other risk factors, such as longer stays in custody, and these other risk factors confound the single-characteristic results. The multivariate model indicates that the underlying relationship between age and risk of violent experiences is simpler: figure 3 shows a continuous decrease in risk of violent victimization with increasing age when the other important predictors of victimization risk (listed in table 3 and shown in the other figures in this report) are held constant.

15. SYRP obtained information about facilities’ use of makeshift beds from their most recent Juvenile Residential Facility Census. The facility administrators verified that the responses still applied at the time of the SYRP interviews.

16. These are youth who are nominated as a friend by many others; that is, other youth know and want to be known by the youth in central positions.

17. Shaffer (2003) suggested that a perpetrator of violence may expect that a successful attack on the more prominent group member offers a potential gain in status or prestige that outweighs the potential risks.

References

Cellini, H.R. 1994. Management and treatment of institutionalized violent juveniles. Corrections Today 98:100–102.

Chu, J.A. 1992. The revictimization of adult women with histories of childhood abuse. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 1:259–269.

Classen, C.C., Palesh, O.G., and Aggarwal, R. 2005. Sexual revictimization: A review of the empirical literature. Trauma Violence Abuse 6(2):103–129.

Cloitre, M. 1998. Sexual revictimization: Risk factors and prevention. In Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies for Trauma, edited by V. Follette, J.I. Ruzek, and F.R. Abueg. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

DePrince, A.P. 2005. Social cognition and revictimization risk. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 6(1):125–141.

Dietrich, A.M. 2000. As the pendulum swings: The etiology of PTSD, complex PTSD, and revictimization. Traumatology 6(1):41–59.

Dietrich, A.M. 2007. Childhood maltreatment and revictimization: The role of affect dysregulation, interpersonal relatedness difficulties and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 8(4):25–51.

Horner-Johnson, W., and Drum, C.E. 2006. Prevalence of maltreatment of people with intellectual disabilities: A review of recently published research. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities 12:57–69.

Huizinga, D., and Jakob-Chien, C. 1998. The contemporaneous co-occurrence of serious and violent juvenile offending and other problem behaviors. In Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions, edited by R. Loeber and D.P. Farrington. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 47–67.

Loeber, R., Kalb, L., and Huizinga, D. 2001. Juvenile Delinquency and Serious Injury Victimization. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Maas, C.D., Fleming, C.B., Herrenkohl, T.I., and Catalano, R.F. 2010. Childhood predictors of teen dating violence victimization. Violence and Victims 25(2):131–149.

Mayfield, D.L. 2005. Bully victimization: A comparison of nonverbal learning-disabled and language-based learning-disabled students in grades four through eight. Doctoral dissertation. Minneapolis, MN: Capella University.

Messman, T.L., and Long, P.J. 1996. Child sexual abuse and its relationship to revictimization in adult women: A review. Clinical Psychology Review 16(5):397–420.

Messman-Moore, T.L., and Long, P.J. 2000. Child sexual abuse and revictimization in the form of adult sexual abuse, adult physical abuse, and adult psychological maltreatment. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 15(5):489–502.

Petersilia, J.R. 2001. Crime victims with developmental disabilities: A review essay. Criminal Justice and Behavior 28:655–694.

Rand, M.R., and Harrell, E. 2009. Crime Against People with Disabilities, 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Schaaf, K.K., and McCanne, T.R. 1998. Relationship of childhood sexual, physical, and combined sexual and physical abuse to adult victimization and posttraumatic stress disorder. Child Abuse and Neglect 22:1119–1133.

Sedlak, A.J. 2010. Introduction to the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and Bruce, C. 2010. Youth’s Characteristics and Backgrounds: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and McPherson, K.S. 2010a. Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and McPherson, K.S. 2010b. Conditions of Confinement: Findings From the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sedlak, A.J., and McPherson, K.S. Forthcoming. Survey of Youth in Residential Placement: Nature and Risk of Victimization. Rockville, MD: Westat.

Shaffer, J.N. 2003. The victim-offender overlap: Specifying the role of peer groups. Doctoral dissertation. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University.

Shields, A., and Cicchetti, D. 2001. Parental maltreatment and emotion dysregulation as risk factors for bullying and victimization in middle childhood. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 30:349–363.

Acknowledgments

Andrea J. Sedlak, Ph.D., Vice President and Associate Director of Human Services Research at Westat, is Project Director of the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP). Karla S. McPherson, Ph.D., and Monica Basena are Westat Senior Study Directors and SYRP Analysts. Other Westat staff who made key contributions to the study included David Cantor, Ph.D., John Hartge, John Brown, Alfred Bishop, Gary Shapiro, Ph.D., Sheila Krawchuk, Carol Bruce, Ph.D., Kristen Madden, and Ying Long, as well as many other dedicated Westat staff too numerous to name here.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) assisted during the SYRP design and preliminary analyses under a subcontract to Westat. Contributing NCCD staff included Madeline Wordes, Ph.D., Eileen Poe-Yamagata, and Christopher J. Hartney.

Several OJJDP program managers provided support and guidance over the course of the project: Joseph Moone, Barbara Allen-Hagen, and Janet Chiancone. Many members of the SYRP Advisory Board offered constructive advice at critical points. Finally, this study would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the many state directors and hundreds of local facility administrators who provided the information, space, and staff support needed to conduct the survey and the thousands of youth who agreed to participate and contributed their time and the details of their lives and experiences in answering the SYRP questions.

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This bulletin was prepared under grant number 2001–JR–BX–K001 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice.

Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of Justice.

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