This research has been recently funded by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. It is being conducted by Professor Warren and Jeanette DuVal, Director of Juvenile Competence Services, Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services.
In 1999, the Commonwealth of Virginia's General Assembly enacted a law mandating that all juvenile offenders charged with a delinquency offense had the right to raise the issue of competency to stand trial before proceeding with an adjudicatory process. This requirement emanated from the 6th Amendment of the Constitution, which has traditionally offered all citizens of the United States the right to the assistance of counsel when faced with any type of criminal procedure. Codified in the Dusky v. United States decision handed down by the Supreme Court in April 1960, this law requires that each defendant has a "sufficient present ability to consult with his attorney with a reasonable degree of rational understanding and has a rational as well as factual understanding of proceedings against him." The new legislation enacted in 1999 explicitly and for the first time in Virginia applied this principle to juvenile offenders and defined the procedures that would apply to the assessment of children and adolescents when they faced adjudication of delinquency offenses in juvenile court.
In response to this enactment of this legislation, the Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services (DMHMRSAS) began the process of developing a comprehensive system of community based evaluation and restoration services designed to offer evaluation and restoration services to youth in the least restrictive alternative setting allowed by the courts. The VJCP drew its service delivery philosophy from the outpatient perspective that had characterized the forensic service delivery for adults since the early 1980's combined with a Systems of Care Model pioneered by Pires (2002) for providing care to children with mental health problems. Rooted in the philosophy that services would be most productive if they were child-centered but family-focused, community-based, and culturally and linguistically competent; the model emphasizes services guided by an individualized service plan, provided in the least restrictive appropriate setting, involving families whenever possible, and coordinated through a primary case manager. Although historically used in the mental health system, this framework begun to receive support and engagement in the juvenile justice system (McKinnon-Lewis, Kaufman, & Frabutt, 2002) and was determined to be the optimal conceptual framework for structuring the Virginia Juvenile Competence Program.
The VJCP provides court ordered services to all youth found incompetent to stand by juvenile court judges in each of the court jurisdictions throughout the state. Since its inception, the program has received 613 court orders to arrange for the provision of juvenile competence restoration services with the number of court orders increasingly linearly over the eight years.
The program began with 40 court orders for restoration services in fiscal year 2000 and has increased in a linear fashion to 122 court orders being received by the Commissioner in the first six month or 2007.
The ages of the children served by the program this far range from eight years of age to 20 years old with 48 percent of the children ordered into services being 13 years of age or younger. Seventy five percent of the youth ordered into restoration services had been charged with felony crimes suggesting significant periods of incarceration should they be found guilty.
The current project is designed to:
- Conduct a stringent evaluation of the efficacy, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the program to demonstrate its applicability to courts and state government and to better inform future development of the program in Virginia and nationally. This evaluation will involve the legal outcome measure for each child with the data being used to assess the developmental, psychiatric, intellectual, situational, and programmatic factors that best inform differences in restoration outcome.
- Enhance the quality of the instruction now available to younger and older youth being offered restoration services through the development of a Spanish version of Jamal in a Jam, an interactive restoration tool (developed earlier with funding from the VDCSJ); the design and implementation of a new interactive CD with more sophisticated Miranda and competence related issues presented by a female character in both English and Spanish; and the design of flash cards, board games, and work/coloring books to enhance the learning objectives introduced in the new CD interactive tool.
- Design of more inclusive quality assurance case specific data management system which will allow for on-going evaluative research and the generation of cost projections relevant to the funding of the program over time. Through the program evaluation, additional program elements and case specific variables will be identified and programmed into the centralized quality data management system currently maintained by the VJCP. The various manuals, teaching adjuncts, training agendas, supervisory guides, training tapes, and data base specifications will also be integrated into a single Juvenile Restoration Package for use by forensic evaluators, restoration providers and supervisors, and training faculty.
For more information about this initiative please contact Janet I. Warren, DSW, at jiw@virginia.edu.