Alternative Treatments for Troubled Youth

The Case of Diversion from the Justice System

The purpose of this volume is to present the whole story of our research program on alternative interventions with delinquent youth. It is our goal to describe the development of an alternative intervention model, to examine its salient processes, to provide a test of its relative effective­ ness, and to give a description of its systemic impacts. The process described was based on the notion that improvement in our approaches to troubled youth lies in a systematic examination of the efficacy of innovative models. As the reader is probably aware, the history of inter­ ventions with troubled youth is more a record of failure than success. Thus, the search for alternatives is extremely critical. The book proceeds as a detailed research monograph. The first four chapters describe the historical and theoretical antecedents of the devel­ opment of the research program. Chapters 5 through 11 describe re­ search on the efficacy of alternative intervention approaches for delin­ quent youth, research on the impact on nonprofessional change agents, an attempt to integrate contemporary theoretical propositions about de­ linquency causation and the effects observed, and research examining the systemic consequences of providing innovative interventions to de­ linquent youth. The final chapter integrates the findings with contempo­ rary work and provides suggestions for future work.