Title: Engaging the Family in Juvenile Drug Courts Series: folder and benchcards Author: Bureau of Justice Assistance and National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Published: January 2003 Subject: court management, case processing, drug courts, judges, juvenile courts 8 pages 16,384 bytes ---------------------------- Illustration is not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site. ---------------------------- Engaging the Family in Juvenile Drug Courts Bureau of Justice Assistance U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges ---------------------------- Engaging the Family in Juvenile Drug Courts Juvenile drug courts throughout the United States face a common challenge: how to engage families. Simply offering family services is no longer enough. We must instead find new methods to engage and retain family members, however defined, in the complex process of rehabilitating drug court youth. The National Drug Court Training and Technical Assistance Program and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges invited consultants and practitioners from across the country to help define and articulate the most pressing family-related issues of juvenile drug courts. Each issue was examined and family engagement "tips" were offered to promote discussion among professionals serving on drug court teams and among community leaders in their jurisdictions. --National Drug Court Training and Technical Assistance Program and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges ---------------------------- How To Effectively Use These Benchcards These topic-specific tips provide well-considered, proactive focal points to prompt juvenile drug court team discussion and sound decisionmaking. Each action-based set of tips has bulleted discussion points to help develop strategies to engage families in each unique community. However, the common challenge remains to reconnect youth with a family system that supports and guides them through life' s difficult challenges. This information is provided to help begin, renew, or refocus the process of engaging families in your juvenile drug court. This project was supported by grant number 98-MU-VX-K016, awarded by the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. NCJ 197499 ---------------------------- Inside This Folder Inside this folder are eleven sets of tips, organized by topic, to use to more effectively engage families in your juvenile drug court. 1. Court's Role 2. Court Services 3. Culturally Competent Courts 4. Family-Focused Interventions 5. Family Responsibility 6. Family Inclusion 7. Family-Focused Staffing 8. Family Support Networks 9. Family Needs 10. Family Mental Health 11. Family Empowerment ---------------------------- For More Information Bureau of Justice Assistance U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs 810 Seventh Street NW., Fourth Floor Washington, DC 20531 202-616-6500 Fax: 202-305-1367 E-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Alcohol and Other Drugs Division P.O. Box 8970 Reno, NV 89507 E-mail: pwhite@ncjfcj.unr.edu Office of Justice Programs Home Page: www.ojp.usdoj.gov Bureau of Justice Assistance Home Page: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges Home Page: http://ncjfcj.unr.edu Contributors Margaret Borg, Missoula, Montana Ernest Brown, San Francisco, California Gayle Dakof, Miami, Florida Betty Gurnell, Chapin, South Carolina Andrew Hebert, Reno, Nevada Lisa Horlick, New York, New York Jackie Massaro, Freehold, New York Murray Pierce, Missoula, Montana Lilas Rajaee-Moore, Denver, Colorado Judge F.P. Segars-Andrews, Charleston, South Carolina Carol Shapiro, New York, New York Tricia White, Reno, Nevada ---------------------------- Benchcards ---------------------------- 1. COURT'S ROLE To articulate the court's role in engaging families, o Support counselors in engaging the family. o Help families and juveniles view the court system in a positive manner. o Develop plans to empower families and minimize additional burdens. o Encourage families to think imaginatively and creatively. o Help families overcome their fears of the court system when sharing information about a juvenile's drug use. o Recognize the impact of judicial praise. o Require family participation. o Set limits with families as part of the treatment process. o Provide convenient court access. o Connect with a juvenile's long-term support. o Bridge the gap between the court and treatment services. o Bridge the gap between treatment and permanency planning (efforts to secure a safe, permanent home). ---------------------------- 2. COURT SERVICES To facilitate a family-focused, coordinated continuum of services, o Recognize families as a resource. o Ensure that providers and drug court team members agree on the importance of including the family. o Encourage treatment providers and drug court team members to establish partnership criteria. o Encourage mental health, drug abuse, and juvenile justice treatment providers and drug court team members to coordinate their approaches and services. o Challenge providers and drug court team members to think outside the box. ---------------------------- 3. CULTURALLY COMPETENT COURTS To develop and maintain a culturally competent program and staff, o Implement and enforce ongoing cultural competency training. o Learn as much as possible about an individual's or family's culture. o Identify and engage cultural leaders from the community. o Work within cultural parameters regarding gender and age or "youth culture." o Ensure that staff members who make home visits first obtain information on culturally acceptable behaviors, courtesies, customs, and expectations. o Avoid court schedules and requirements that conflict with family cultural traditions. o Use bilingual staff or trained volunteers as interpreters for families and juveniles who require this assistance during assessments, meetings, or other events. o Provide notices and forms, when possible, in the language the family speaks at home. ---------------------------- 4. FAMILY-FOCUSED INTERVENTIONS To provide effective family-focused interventions, o Provide opportunities for appropriate and comprehensive services. o Ensure that family therapy is provided. o Require that drug treatment programs provide family treatment by trained family therapists. o Ensure that education is available to families on stress and anger management, parenting skills, and conflict resolution. o Identify and use nontraditional and culturally based interventions with outcome-based models. o Develop and, if necessary, enforce ways to get family members who need treatment to acknowledge their need and to participate. o Develop and, if necessary, enforce ways to overcome families' resistance to participation in nontreatment programs. o Encourage families of participants to support each other. o Consider each family as a unit. o Consider family members as individuals within a unit. o Require home visits. ---------------------------- 5. FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY To articulate the role and responsibility of the family, o Recognize the stressors and family responsibilities placed on parents. o Enforce parents' obligations to meet their parenting responsibilities. o Help parents recognize that their child's life is at stake. o Help parents maintain hope for their children. o Encourage parents to address past enabling behaviors and provide new behavior patterns while handling old issues. o Make plans to work with youth whose family has given up on them. o Help parents recognize that their own substance abuse can harm themselves, their children, and their families. o Develop tools to address the impact of incarcerated parents on juveniles and their families. ---------------------------- 6. FAMILY INCLUSION To include family members in assessment, planning, and case management, o Define "family treatment" by exploring available family treatment services. o Identify challenges to the change process. o Develop individualized programs--what works for one family does not necessarily work for another. o Allow juveniles and their significant adults to define who and what is meant by the term "family." o Be flexible with family goals--find out parents' goals for themselves and for their children. o Discover the roles within each family and set realistic expectations. o Involve families actively in the decisionmaking process. o Identify a positive adult to function as an involved parent or mentor in each juvenile's life. o Involve positive peers and other age-appropriate individuals. ---------------------------- 7. FAMILY-FOCUSED STAFFING To develop and support family-focused recruiting, training, and accountability standards for program staff, o Ensure that drug court staff and programs emphasize the need to hold families accountable. o Develop accountability standards for program staff. o Recruit, select, and train motivated, family-focused treatment specialists. o Obtain broad-based agency support for training. o Provide training to increase the competence level of drug court and treatment provider staff. ---------------------------- 8. FAMILY SUPPORT NETWORKS To develop continuing support networks, o Empower family members to help each other after the juvenile has graduated from drug court. o Determine and develop community resources to support the family during and after the juvenile drug court process. o Identify and recruit people to support each juvenile's success in and beyond the drug court process. o Develop with families a plan for continuing care. o Connect families with expanded support systems. ---------------------------- 9. FAMILY NEEDS To address basic needs, o Connect families to community resources. o Ensure that families are provided with childcare, transportation, time management assistance, and medical services. o Help secure safe, economical housing (parents are at risk of losing public housing if their child is arrested for drug-related offenses). o Identify and encourage participation in prosocial and family-based activities. o Examine the impact of domestic violence on families. o Learn how drug abuse can affect the physical safety of all family members and educate them in how to avoid this pitfall. o Separate juveniles from their families to ensure their safety when they are at risk in the home. o Develop ways to accommodate family members who do not have telephones. ---------------------------- 10. FAMILY MENTAL HEALTH To recognize mental health needs within families, o Learn how drug use interacts with mental health problems. o Look at family histories and patterns. o Recognize that drug use, mental illness, and trauma tend to be generational. o Address multigenerational addiction and mental health problems. o Recognize that trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and violence) can affect many family members. o Recognize that co-occurring disorders may require a lifetime of ongoing community-based support. o Identify family members who have mental health problems and/or addictions that need treatment, and make referrals. o Help parents distinguish between mental health, drug use, and criminal behavior issues that may relate to their children. ---------------------------- 11. FAMILY EMPOWERMENT To empower families, o Implement a strength-based view of families and juveniles in the justice and service systems. o Educate families about the juvenile justice system. o Put the family back in control whenever possible and as soon as possible. o Recognize and celebrate each family's successes during and after drug court involvement, including the family's definition of success. o Use strength-based and culturally sensitive family assessments. o Identify and develop family strengths. o Develop positive relationships with families. o Clarify family roles. o Help parents recognize the power of parental influence. o Connect families to other positive families--family mentoring. o Hold hearings and other functions at times when parents can attend.