Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 1

Safety, Fairness, Stability: 

Repositioning Juvenile 

Justice and Child Welfare

to Engage Families and 

Communities

Dr. Joan Pennell, Director of the Center for Family and Community 

Engagement and Professor of Social Work, North Carolina State University 

Carol Shapiro, Associate Research Scholar, Institute for Social and 

Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University

Dr. Carol Spigner, Emerita Associate Professor/Clinician Educator, 

University of Pennsylvania
2 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Cover Art:

Family relationships are among the most important relationships youth have. By maintaining youths’ family roots, their 

bond to their homes and their communities, the juvenile justice and child protection systems can help provide youth and 

their families with a sense of well-being, safety and fairness. The cover art represents a sort of family branch, where 

all of a youth’s positive relationships influence the path of their life, providing stability and support. The more family, 

communities, agency leaders, judges or lawyers get involved, the stronger the branch becomes.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities i

Safety, Fairness, Stability: 

Repositioning Juvenile 

Justice and Child Welfare

to Engage Families and 

Communities

May 2011

Dr. Joan Pennell, Director of the Center for Family and Community 

Engagement and Professor of Social Work, North Carolina State University

Carol Shapiro, Associate Research Scholar, Institute for Social and 

Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University

Dr. Carol Spigner, Emerita Associate Professor/Clinician Educator, 

University of Pennsylvania

Foreword by:

Shay Bilchik, Director and Research Professor, Center for Juvenile 

Justice Reform, Georgetown University

Commentaries by:

Trina Osher, President, Huff Osher Consulting, Inc.

Kordnie Jamillia Lee, Pathway to College Program

The Center for Juvenile Justice Reform would like to thank the U.S. Department of Health and 

Human Services: Administration for Children and Families, Administration for Children, Youth, and 

Families, Children’s Bureau; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Substance Abuse 

and Mental Health Services Administration; and the U.S. Department of Justice: Office of Juvenile 

Justice & Delinquency Prevention for their partial support of the production of this paper, as well as 

their support of the symposium at which this paper was released. (The content of this publication 

does not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or policies of these organizations.)
ii Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities iii

Contents

Foreword............................................................................................................................................................................... v

I. Introduction and Background..........................................................................................................................................1

Crossover Youth: Need for Intervention ..............................................................................................................................3

Disproportionate Minority Contact: Why Change Is Imperative ............................................................................................4

II. Shifting Views of Parents and Youth: Historical Development and Opportunity for Change ........................................5

Rights of Youth and Families .............................................................................................................................................5

History of Family Engagement in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare..................................................................................6

 Juvenile Justice............................................................................................................................................................7

 Child Welfare ................................................................................................................................................................8

Recent Developments ......................................................................................................................................................11

Lessons from the Mental Health System ..........................................................................................................................12

A Time for Change ...........................................................................................................................................................13

III. Family Engagement: What It Means .............................................................................................................................15

IV. Practice Strategies: Putting Family into Action ...........................................................................................................19

Encouraging Family Group Leadership .............................................................................................................................19

Child Welfare ...................................................................................................................................................................20 

Juvenile Justice...............................................................................................................................................................20 

Schools............................................................................................................................................................................21

Mental Health ..................................................................................................................................................................22 

V. Process and Outcomes: What Helps..............................................................................................................................23

Child Welfare ...................................................................................................................................................................23 

 Safety.........................................................................................................................................................................23 

 Fairness .....................................................................................................................................................................24

 Stability .....................................................................................................................................................................25

Juvenile Justice ..............................................................................................................................................................25

 Safety ........................................................................................................................................................................26

 Fairness......................................................................................................................................................................27 

 Stability .....................................................................................................................................................................28

Schools............................................................................................................................................................................28

Mental Health .................................................................................................................................................................29

VI. Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare: Next Steps

Vision and Principles.....................................................................................................................................................31

Commentary—Trina W. Osher.............................................................................................................................................33

Commentary—Kordnie Jamillia Lee ....................................................................................................................................39
iv Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Appendix A: Systems of Care Values and Principles ........................................................................................................43

Appendix B: Achievement of Family Group Conferencing Objectives ..............................................................................45

Appendix C: Juvenile Relational Inquiry Tool....................................................................................................................49

Appendix D: Tools for Identifying Family and Community Relationships ........................................................................49

Family Case Management Flowchart................................................................................................................................49 

Strength-Based Genogram ..............................................................................................................................................51

Family and Institutional Ecomaps.....................................................................................................................................52

References ..........................................................................................................................................................................53

About the Authors...............................................................................................................................................................65
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities v

Foreword

There is no other relationship with greater significance in 

our lives than those we have with our families—whether 

they are our birth or chosen families. They should serve as 

the anchor in our lives, as the lifeline to everything else we 

accomplish. As noted by the authors of this paper, Joan 

Pennell, Carol Shapiro, and Carol Spigner, “for youths to 

grow into responsible and productive adults, they need a 

foundation of safety, fairness, and stability.” Further noting 

that “this foundation is especially weakened for youths 

involved with both child protection and juvenile justice,” 

they make the case for devoting our efforts to maintaining 

youths’ connections to their homes, schools, and 

communities in an appropriate manner, and by doing so 

give youth who are too often alienated from their families 

and our mainstream society “a sense of belonging, 

competence, well-being, and purpose.” It is this sense of 

belonging that many youth involved with child welfare and 

juvenile justice lose as they and their families experience 

these systems. 

This paper provides a pathway to improving these systems 

in a manner that will leave children, youth, and families 

with a different set of experiences. But this pathway 

requires those working within those systems—as 

agency leaders, supervisors, line staff, or judges and 

lawyers—to adopt a new lens in viewing their work in 

engaging families. Socrates once said, “I can not teach 

anybody anything. I can only make them think.”1 That is 

the challenge undertaken by the authors, and I commend 

them for tackling this challenge not only with one system 

of care, but by asking readers to understand the challenge 

across systems—and to think differently about how 

we work with families that are frequently experiencing 

multiple systems at the same time.

It is my hope, therefore, that this paper makes you think 

about how you can look at family engagement in a different 

light, build upon your work to date, and make progress in 

improving how you work with the families with whom you 

come in contact, whether it be in the field of juvenile justice, 

child welfare, behavioral health, or education. I believe 

the authors of Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning 

Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and 

Communities paint a hopeful picture of our readiness to 

do so, to move to the next level of work—of practice and 

policy—within and across these systems.

My hopefulness is supported by the fact that there is a 

different kind of field building underway in this country—

it is no longer just the child welfare field, the juvenile 

justice field, the behavioral health field, or the education 

field. These fields are doing their work—viewing their 

work—in a different way: across systems. This change in 

perspective is essential, and the work being undertaken 

across systems to achieve better outcomes reveals a very 

specific effort to work more effectively to create stronger 

connections for the children and youth in those systems—

pro-social connections that will support them in their path 

to adulthood.

I hear a lot about “connections” in the dialogue about 

our work with children and youth. I interpret this to mean 

“connections” that lead to, or help restore, significant family 

relationships that provide safety, fairness, and stability 

in a meaningful way. That is what the workforce in child 

welfare, juvenile justice, behavioral health, and education do 

as a key part of their work—provide these connections. In 

many instances, this means creating a stronger connection 

to pro-social peers and adults outside of the family domain; 

in others, it means supporting families in their efforts to 

better nurture their youth. This includes providing a sense 

of safety, improving well-being, and creating permanence 

in their lives. I share these thoughts as part of this foreword 

because the lessons learned in my career are that if we 

get this very basic and fundamental element right, we will 

have a better chance of succeeding in our work to improve 

the life outcomes for the children and youth with whom we 

come in contact in our work.

So how do we move forward in advancing this work and 

bringing this perspective to life? What are the implications 

for our policies and practices? On a policy and practice 1

 Socrates. (n.d.) QuotationsBook.com. Retreived from quotationsbook.

com/quote/38395/.
vi Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

level, in order to do this work well, our focus must be 

on children, youth, and families within the context of the 

communities in which they live. We have to understand 

and then act upon the notion that the families and 

communities from which the children in our care come 

are not enemy territory. And when we “wrap” services, 

support, and supervision around each child and family 

in an individualized way, these efforts must be based 

in the community and backed by strong community 

connections. It is in this way that we make positive longterm connections for children and youth and create a 

sense of stability in their lives. 

As suggested by the authors, to do this we must develop 

strong local, state, and national policies that address what 

we want every child and youth to have as the developmental 

underpinnings of their growth into adulthood—policies 

that encompass elements related to child welfare, juvenile 

justice, behavioral health, and education, but that are 

family focused. We must embrace the idea that whether 

it is children and youth in our child welfare or juvenile 

justice systems, their families have both strengths and 

weaknesses, and in working with them we need to identify 

and build on those strengths and help them to overcome 

their weaknesses.

Further, we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that 

we can or should separate these youths from their families. 

Whether it be a youth receiving services while remaining in 

the home, reentering the community from placement in the 

juvenile justice system, reuniting with family members after 

being removed from their care and custody due to abuse 

or neglect, or aging out of foster care or the juvenile justice 

system (or both), we need to work with our young people as 

they reengage with their families, helping them to navigate 

those families in a healthy way.

This push and pull around the role of families has been 

a focal point of the juvenile court since its inception 110 

years ago. We have been conflicted about how to best 

apply the doctrine of parens patriae, allowing the system 

to serve temporarily as the parent, while at the same 

time working in a respectful and supportive way with the 

families of the children and youth who have come to our 

attention—often failing to provide the family-centered 

and family-driven resources needed to serve the child and 

family’s best interests. We have struggled, in this regard, 

with how to view and place the family in our work with 

their children, and what we know now is that we do our 

best work if the family is at its core, not the periphery. 

This requires us to approach our work in a different manner, 

ensuring that our efforts reflect the traits of effective 

practice, those that are captured as the essence of this 

paper. In order to make this conversion, we must build 

a strong workforce that embraces the underlying values 

that support this work. It is a workforce that fully supports 

involving family as part of the team and demonstrates 

sensitivity to each child’s race, culture, gender, and sexual 

orientation—and the need for “connections,” primarily to 

family. It is a workforce open to adopting new policies and 

practices that better support the key roles families should 

play in mapping out their future.

Abraham Maslow once said: “I suppose it is tempting, if 

the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as 

if it were a nail.”2 In the same vein, the authors suggest 

an array of “tools” that allow us to work with greater 

precision and effectiveness in achieving greater safety, 

well-being, and permanence as our primary goals.

This is difficult work. It is about building bridges between 

workers and the families they serve; between the child 

welfare, juvenile justice, behavioral health, and education 

systems and communities, and between systems. Peter 

Block, a leading thinker and author on organizational 

change and collaboration, addresses what it takes to 

work in a collaborative manner. He discusses the need 

to share power, turf, and control; to share resources; to 

be transparent; to tell the truth—the truth about what we 

do well and what we don’t do well; to trust one another; 

and to engage in acts of surrender. This is difficult to do, 

particularly in difficult financial times, when our tendency is 

to protect what is ours. But these traits must be shown in 

not only how the workforce in these systems engage each 

other, but in part how they engage the families they serve: 

being transparent, telling the truth, and building trust.

Therefore, we need to create a shared vision, in part by 

identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our service 

systems and by developing greater levels of cooperation 

2

 Maslow, A. H. (1966). The psychology of science: A reconnaissance. 

New York: Harper & Row.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities vii

between the child welfare, juvenile justice, and related 

systems of care. We need to create an environment of 

trust that leads to risk taking without the threat of blame. 

Indeed, it will take all of these things for us to be successful 

in better engaging families and the youth to whom they are 

connected. As the authors and commentators so powerfully 

convey, we cannot be successful in reconnecting our 

children and youth to their families and communities unless 

we think about this work differently, through the lens of the 

family and from a truly family-centered perspective. I thank 

both the authors and commentators for exploring this issue 

in such a meaningful way and helping us to understand how 

we can better engage families within and across systems 

and achieve better outcomes for the children, youth, and 

families we serve.

Shay Bilchik

Research Professor and Center Director

Georgetown University Public Policy Institute
viii Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 1

I. Introduction and Background

For youths to grow into responsible and productive adults, 

they need a foundation of safety, fairness, and stability. 

This foundation, however, is especially weakened for 

youths involved with both child protection and juvenile 

justice. These youths have experienced the maltreatment 

and resulting trauma that eats away at safety. Their 

cultural and economic backgrounds along with defiant 

attitudes can jeopardize their social, educational, and legal 

rights and undermine a sense of fairness, only escalating 

oppositional behaviors. Their histories of maltreatment 

and offending often lead to their removal from their 

homes, schools, and communities. These separations can 

further erode the connections that give youth a sense of 

belonging, competence, well-being, and purpose. 

Youths involved with both child welfare and juvenile 

justice need:

 Safety— protection from maltreatment and 

resulting trauma

 Fairness— respect for rights and cultural diversity

 Stability— sustained familial and community 

connections

A strategy for strengthening these crucial connections, 

and more broadly providing greater safety, fairness, and 

stability, is for child welfare, juvenile justice, mental and 

behavioral health, schools, and other involved systems 

to work together in engaging youths and their families in 

decision making and planning. This strategy, called family 

engagement, has been defined as any role or activity 

that enables families to have direct and meaningful input 

into and influence on systems, policies, programs, or 

practices affecting services for children and families (New 

York State Council on Children and Families, 2008). In 

this context, the family needs to be broadly defined to 

encompass those whom youths see as their family group, 

whether based on biological, social, foster, or adoptive 

ties. Many youths turn to their familial connections on 

leaving care or custody, and joint planning can help in 

making these transitions successful (Collins, Spencer, 

and Ward, 2010; Ryan and Yang, 2005). This collaborative 

approach needs to take place with youths and families 

about their particular situations and more generally 

about agency programming and public policy (Briggs 

and McBeath, 2010; Luckenbill and Yeager, 2009). This 

multilevel engagement will help involved systems figure 

out how best to serve youths as well as members of their 

families, schools, and communities.

Family groups are those whom youths see as their 

lasting connections, those to whom they turn over the 

long term. 

Child welfare and juvenile justice have much to offer in 

helping young people and their families, and by acting 

together, the two systems can remove false dichotomies 

between upholding the best interests of the child and 

those of the greater society. Nevertheless, for youths who 

cross over between child welfare and juvenile justice, 

family engagement presents complex challenges. First, 

the services of these two systems are usually mandatory 

rather than voluntary, sometimes involving removal of 

the youth from the home for the safety of the youth or the 

public, and as a result, can generate tensions between the 

agencies and the families with whom they work. Second, 

in making decisions, practitioners often conflate race, 

risk, and poverty; this produces disparities in treatment for 

children and youth of color living in poverty and heightens 

tensions between their families and public agencies 

(Baumann et al., 2011). Third, child welfare and juvenile 

justice are too often operating at cross purposes because 

of differences in mandates, cultures, and organizational 

structures, making it difficult for youths to navigate the 

transition into adulthood (Altschuler et al., 2009). The lack 

of collaboration adversely affects youths’ schooling and 

access to mental health services (Leone and Weinberg, 

2010). In other words, conflicting purposes lead to 

competing directives to youths and their families.
2 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

For crossover youth—those involved with both child 

welfare and juvenile justice—family engagement 

is complicated. These systems deliver involuntary 

services, often with the greatest impact in 

communities of color. The two agencies have different 

mandates and often send competing directives to 

youths and their families.

A fourth complexity is the expansion of the number of 

parties who need to be involved when addressing both 

youth protection and youth offending. If the focus is on 

a protection plan, then child welfare should invite the 

participation of the youths, their families, and other relevant 

services. If instead the focus is on the offense, then juvenile 

justice should involve the youths, their families, relevant 

services, and the victims along with their supports (MacRae 

and Zehr, 2004). The victims of crime may come from 

within the family, schools, online forums, and community; 

their participation clarifies the impact of offending. For 

crossover cases, further decisions need to be made about 

which agency convenes the meeting, who takes part in the 

deliberations on offending versus protective issues, and who 

authorizes the plan and its resourcing.

For crossover youth, two streams of practice theory can 

inform how to engage families. These are system of care 

(Stroul and Friedman, 1986) and restorative justice (Zehr, 

1990). System of care emphasizes wrapping services 

around youths and their families in a manner that they 

see as empowering them to act on their needs and 

aspirations. Because family groups are invested in their 

young relatives, family members work to get youths back 

on track emotionally, behaviorally, and spiritually while 

keeping them in their homes and communities. A family 

group approach extends a system of care beyond formal 

services to include informal supports, and this combination 

of formal and informal networks is best referred to as 

systems of care. Restorative justice emphasizes helping 

youths make amends for their wrongdoing, renewing the 

relationship between youths and those they have harmed, 

and addressing the underlying causes of the problem 

behaviors. Combining systems of care and restorative 

justice advances the leadership of youths, their families, 

and others affected by the wrongdoing in decision making 

while maintaining supports, protections, and limits firmly 

around youths. 

Family engagement promotes both systems of care, 

which wraps services around youths and their families, 

and restorative justice, which addresses the youths’ 

wrongdoing and renews relationships.

Integrating system of care and restorative justice 

approaches has the potential to reposition juvenile justice 

and child welfare so that they collaboratively engage 

youths, families, victims, and others in the community in 

advancing safety, fairness, and stability. In explicating how 

such engagement works, the three authors of this paper 

bring a depth of understanding based on their long-term 

involvement in child welfare and juvenile justice reform, 

their research and scholarship, and their commitment 

to social and cultural equity. This paper is based on the 

premise that system change is necessary and feasible. 

The authors assume that positive system change results 

from engaging youths and their families and communities, 

including the victims of crime, in setting goals, making 

action plans, and collaborating on efforts. 

To be effective, the leadership of the youth and family 

participants needs to be evident in making case 

decisions as well as in shaping agency programming and 

public policy. Such multilevel engagement repositions 

power relationships by tapping into the strengths of 

all participants, developing a sense of individual and 

collective efficacy, and promoting trust among groups 

with lengthy histories of suspicion and anger toward each 

other. Such repositioning is especially needed because it 

is all too common for both the juvenile justice and child 

welfare systems to have strained relationships not only 

with the youths and their families and communities but 

also with other child-serving agencies. Given this aim of 

repositioning relationships, the authors’ primary focus 

is on mechanisms for inclusive and culturally respectful 

decision making and enactment of these decisions, rather 

than on changing youths through therapy or correctional 

measures. 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 3

Family engagement repositions child welfare and 

juvenile justice to work collaboratively with youths, 

families, victims, community members, and other 

systems. 

The paper begins with a call for change. Without 

intervention, the authors assert that crossover youth are 

all too likely to head further down pathways of trauma 

and alienation and that disparate treatment elevates these 

threats for minority groups. The paper then explicates why 

a strategy of family engagement is particularly timely: 

It counters historical approaches that have estranged 

youths from their families; it responds to current political 

and demographic trends; it fits with legislative changes 

and conventions on human rights; it aligns with recent 

research findings; and it supports partnership approaches. 

Family engagement is broadly defined in terms of who 

participates and at what levels. The family group includes 

the youths as well as their relatives and social kin. 

Levels of input range from practice to program to policy. 

The authors examine strategies for advancing family 

leadership at the practice, program, and policy levels 

and summarize the findings on family engagement in 

child welfare and juvenile justice practice. In conclusion, 

the authors make a series of recommendations for 

repositioning juvenile justice and child welfare to engage 

youths and their families, victims of offending, other 

systems, and the broader community. 

By highlighting the strategy of family engagement, this 

paper:

•	Counters historical approaches that estranged youths 

from their families

•	Responds to current political and demographic trends

•	Fits with domestic legislative changes and international 

conventions on human rights

•	Aligns with recent research findings

•	Supports partnership approaches to practice, 

programming, and policy 

Crossover Youth: 

Need for Intervention

Safety, fairness, and stability are in short supply for 

youths who come from struggling families in impoverished 

communities. Children from these families are at risk of 

child maltreatment, which often becomes the precursor to 

antisocial behaviors (Maughan and Moore, 2010). These 

youths are more likely to start offending as children, to run 

away from home, to leave school early, to use drugs and 

alcohol, and to associate with problematic peers. Unless 

the underlying causes of their offending are addressed, 

they are on a trajectory to commit serious and violent 

juvenile offenses and to continue criminal activity well into 

adulthood (Farrington and Loeber, 2002; Moffitt, 2007; 

Vazsonyi, Trejos-Castillo, and Huang, 2007). 

These troubled youths show up on the caseloads of 

child welfare, juvenile justice, or both systems as well 

as on those of other child-serving agencies. They are 

the crossover cases between child welfare and juvenile 

justice. Some may be involved with both systems at 

the same time, and of these, a smaller group is dually 

adjudicated by the courts. The extent of the overlap 

is difficult to gauge because the United States lacks a 

national database that links cases from child welfare and 

juvenile justice. Studies have suggested that between 9 

and 29 percent of children involved with the child welfare 

system later engage in delinquent activities (Herz, 2010). 

Though we do not have a firm grasp of the number of 

children who flow from the child welfare system to the 

juvenile justice system, we can say that the phenomenon 

reflects, in part, an inadequacy of the child welfare system 

in its capacity to assist families in resolving the issues 

that brought children into care. In addition, significant 

numbers of youth age out of the child welfare system each 

year without being anchored to family and/or significant 

relationships (U.S. Department of Health and Human 

Services, 2010; Pecora et al., 2005). These young adults 

are at risk of homelessness, incarceration, unemployment, 

and depression (Courtney et al., 2009).

Heavy reliance by both systems on foster care, group 

homes, congregate care facilities, and secure custody 

disrupts a young person’s family connections and 
4 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

schooling and can lead to identification with antisocial 

and/or delinquent peers and to behavioral, cognitive, and 

mental health problems. Moreover, incarceration of youths 

in correctional facilities is likely to inculcate criminal 

norms, forge gang affiliations, and discourage youths from 

taking responsibility for their actions (Calhoun and Pelech, 

2010). All of this is to the detriment of the safety of both 

young people and the public (Walgrave, 2008). 

Heavy reliance by both systems on foster care, group 

homes, congregate care facilities, and secure custody 

disrupts the young person’s family connections and 

schooling and can lead to identification with antisocial 

and/or delinquent peers.

Disproportionate Minority Contact: 

Why Change Is Imperative

In the United States, youths of color are more likely than 

their White counterparts to be charged and incarcerated 

(Muncie, 2009). Substitute care elevates these disparities 

for minority groups. It is well documented that, compared 

to White children, African American and Native American 

children are more likely to be removed from their homes 

by child welfare and to be retained longer in care. The 

same is true for Latino children in some states (Belanger, 

Green, and Bullard, 2008; Texas Department of Family 

and Protective Services, 2010). If these placements 

destabilize and children experience multiple placements, 

the likelihood of juvenile justice involvement increases, 

especially for African American and Latino youths (Barth et 

al., 2010; Ryan et al., 2007). 

Furthermore, dually involved youths are less likely to 

be put on probation and more likely to be ordered into 

a group or correctional setting, with detention a more 

likely outcome for minority youths (Ryan et al., 2007). 

Congregate care is an expensive option, often physically 

far from youths’ families, which, in turn, increases the 

psychological distance between youths and their families 

(Barth and Chintapalli, 2009). Moreover, group homes are 

associated with greater placement instability, increased 

use of psychotropic medications, academic problems, 

and further offending (Ryan et al., 2008). Juvenile justice 

involvement has been an avenue for providing needed 

services to youths experiencing mental health crises; 

however, the programs available cannot meet the volume 

of demand and may be ineffective due to their culturally 

insensitive approach to African American youths (Briggs 

and McBeath, 2010). 

Displacement for young people, especially those of 

color, is compounded by the exceptionally high rates of 

incarceration of one or both of their parents. Almost 2.5 

million children have at least one parent incarcerated, 

depriving them of potential economic support even 

after the parent is released, since “ex-cons” are often 

unemployable (Garland, 2001, p. 103). Of the more than 

2.2 million adults incarcerated, 62 percent of female 

prisoners and 51 percent of male prisoners have children 

under the age of 18 (Sabol and Couture, 2008). Forty 

percent of incarcerated fathers are African American 

(Sabol and Couture, 2008). This trend is moving upward: 

Between 1991 and 2007, the number of children of 

incarcerated parents increased 80 percent (Glaze and 

Maruschak, 2008). Fifty percent of these children are 

under the age of ten, while 32 percent are between the 

ages of ten and fourteen (Glaze and Maruschak, 2008). 

The impact of the criminal justice system goes beyond jail 

and prison. When probation and parole supervision are 

added to the equation, more than 7 million children are 

affected (Drucker, 2006).

This background and summary of the research on child 

welfare and juvenile justice policy and practice as they 

relate to family engagement make it clear that change is 

needed. However, to effectively plan our path forward, 

it is important to understand the historical context of 

how these systems have engaged—or not engaged—

families over time and how current trends can support 

a fundamental shift in how we work with the families of 

system-involved youth.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 5

II. Shifting Views of Parents and Youth: Historical 

Development and Opportunity for Change

Understanding the history of the child welfare and juvenile 

justice systems as it relates to family engagement will 

help to identify both the values and the major tensions 

that are embedded in current operations. The main 

underlying values related to this topic concern the 

rights and responsibilities that children and families 

possess and the role the state should play when these 

responsibilities are not met. The history of how both the 

child welfare and juvenile justice systems engage—or do 

not engage—families is intertwined with how the systems 

view these rights and responsibilities and the role of the 

state in enforcing them. Therefore, this section begins 

with an overview of the evolution of how the rights and 

responsibilities of youth and families have been perceived 

and uses that framework to discuss the historical evolution 

of how systems have viewed—or not viewed—families as 

partners in serving youth in their care.

Rights of Youth and Families

The legal and policy framework that provides rights 

to children and their families has evolved over time. 

Children have moved from a position of property within 

their families to become individuals who have rights 

and who deserve to be protected from exploitation and 

abuse. Discussions of the relationship among children, 

adolescents, the family, and the state have occurred both 

within countries and in the global community. The most 

noteworthy example of the global discussion occurred in 

1989 when the United Nations General Assembly enacted 

the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). 

Children have moved from a position of property within 

their families to become individuals who have rights 

and who deserve to be protected from exploitation 

and abuse.

Built upon the framework of human rights, the CRC 

acknowledges children’s need for special protection 

because of their immaturity, the primacy of families in 

caring for children, and the responsibility of governments 

to enact policies that promote the advancement of 

children’s rights. It recognizes circumstances that require 

a child to be removed from the home and explicitly 

establishes rights to judicial determination of the child’s 

best interest, ongoing parental contact, and suitable 

alternative care (Articles 9 and 20) (United Nations, 1989). 

The CRC also acknowledges that children’s capacities 

increase over time and that as they mature, they should 

increasingly exercise their rights to express their views, 

including in administrative and court hearings. For young 

people who have committed offenses, the CRC requires 

legal and judicial safeguards (Article 40) and humane 

treatment (Article 37).

Although the United States has not ratified the CRC, the 

government has moved closer to its terms and has ratified 

some CRC Optional Protocols (Campaign for the U.S. 

Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 

2008). Consistent with the United Nations’ Convention, 

American law views children as immature persons who 

are developing and cannot speak for themselves. As 

such, they need the protection of a guardian. Parents 

are viewed as the natural guardians of their children. 

The rights of children are not specifically addressed in 

the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights, but children’s 

rights have been based in common law, state laws, case 

law, and social policies. Under the family law codes of 

the states, children and their parents by birth or adoption 

are legally bound to a relationship of reciprocal rights 

and responsibilities. The relationship is protected by law, 

and parents are given broad authority to make decisions 

on behalf of their children and raise them according to 

their own wishes. Within this context, children have the 

right to the support of their parents for food, shelter, 

clothing, and medical care. Children have the right to an 
6 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

education that allows them to reach their potential and 

have the right to be protected from abuse, neglect, and 

exploitation. Additionally, social policies related to child 

labor, compulsory education, protective services, and child 

health have further defined the rights of children. 

Parents as natural guardians have the right to custody and 

control of their children. They can make major decisions 

for their children, including giving consent for minors to 

receive medical treatment, get married, and enlist in the 

military. Parents have the right and duty to protect, train, 

and discipline their children. With these rights come the 

responsibilities to support their children and provide food, 

shelter, medical care, and education (U.S. Department 

of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1961; American Bar 

Association, 2004). 

The state has an interest in the well-being of children 

and in the development of individuals who can contribute 

to the civic and economic health of the society. As such, 

the state has the right to intervene in the life of a family 

when children are found to be in jeopardy and in need of 

protection due to maltreatment or delinquent behavior. 

Acting as parens patriae, or “parent of the country,” the 

state can conduct investigations, initiate legal actions in 

juvenile or family court, and remove children from their 

parents. In these circumstances, the state has an obligation 

to make decisions guided by the best interest of the child. 

Given this context of the rights of parents, families of 

dependent and delinquent children have historically been 

viewed as neglecting their responsibilities and therefore 

being a contributing factor to their child’s dependency 

or delinquency status. Indeed, as the next section will 

explore, families have historically not been engaged as 

partners in their child’s child welfare or delinquency cases. 

However, practitioners and policymakers are increasingly 

seeing the value of engaging families. Although the 

framework of children’s and parent’s rights has been used 

to vilify parents and disconnect them from their children, 

the framework has also supported a historical shift to the 

current focus on family engagement in effectively serving 

youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Practitioners and policymakers are increasingly seeing 

the value of engaging families.

Implicit in our understanding of the rights of children and 

the rights and responsibilities of parents is recognition 

of the psychological importance of the parent-child 

relationship to the child or adolescent’s development. 

Our society has an obligation to protect and rehabilitate 

children and teens in the context of their families, 

whenever safely possible. But the child welfare and 

juvenile justice systems have not been able to sufficiently 

institutionalize family engagement strategies in order to 

best use the power of these relationships to bring about 

changes in families, communities, and child-serving 

systems. To better understand why this has not occurred, 

and how we can better support family engagement moving 

forward, the next section presents an overview of how the 

child welfare and juvenile justice systems have historically 

viewed and engaged families in their work.

History of Family Engagement in 

Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare

Current responses to maltreated and delinquent children 

and youth are built upon a historical foundation that viewed 

parents as absent, inconsequential, and/or detrimental to 

the well-being of their children. Based on this premise, 

children were placed in institutions or removed and sent 

to alternative families long distances from their original 

communities (Axinn and Stern, 2008; Rothman, 2002). To 

the extent that the children came from distinct racial, ethnic, 

and cultural communities (such as Native American tribes, 

European immigrant groups, or descendants of Africans), 

their communities were also disparaged and seen as 

contributing to the children’s problems. 

Although child welfare and juvenile justice systems have 

the same origins, they have diverged in their development 

because of differences in goals, functions, and areas of 

controversy. The antecedents to the current approach to 

child and youth services are the practices that developed 

to care for dependent and delinquent children early in the 

history of this country. These children were often orphans 

who had lost their parents to death by disease, war, or 

abandonment. Because the emerging communities of the 

colonial era needed all available labor, they took action to 

limit or reduce dependency. Therefore, children in need 

were provided with care and given the opportunity to 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 7

learn a skill through either apprenticeship or indenture. 

Those not able to work and deemed “worthy” (such as 

widows and their children, the disabled, and the elderly) 

received cash relief from public authorities and/or charities 

(Bremner, 1974; Axinn and Stern, 2008; Myers, 2008; 

Abramowitz, 1988). 

Although child welfare and juvenile justice systems 

have the same origins, they have diverged in their 

development because of differences in goals, functions, 

and areas of controversy. 

As the nation developed and wealth was acquired, 

specialized institutions—including orphanages for children 

and houses of refuge for youth who broke the law—were 

created, and a system of service through philanthropy 

was established. These facilities for children and youth 

were built by religious organizations and philanthropists 

as well as by local governments. The focus was on the 

care and training of youth, and the facilities operated on a 

rigid schedule to foster discipline. Due process rights were 

not afforded to delinquent youths or their parents, and 

juveniles were often maltreated or forced to do hard labor 

at the houses of refuge (Shoemaker, 2009).

For youths who were not orphaned and whose parents 

were alive, little attention was paid to the parents, who 

were viewed as contributors to the delinquency and 

dependency of their children. Within these institutions, 

there was general distrust for the competence of parents 

who were poor—so much so that superintendents of 

children’s institutions discouraged visits by parents except 

under extremely restricted conditions. Separating children 

from the bad influence of their parents became a priority.

Despite these efforts, a troubling number of indigent 

children lived on the streets of New York City in the early 

nineteenth century. As a result, in 1855 the Children’s Aid 

Society was established and soon thereafter began moving 

indigent children, most of whom came from immigrant 

families, by train to the Midwest to live with farm families. 

But not everyone was happy with this approach. A number 

of children ran away from their foster homes to return to 

their families, while a number of parents attempted to find 

their relocated children.

During this period, families, especially poor immigrant 

families, were commonly viewed as a threat to their 

children’s development because parents continued to 

practice the ways of the old country and were believed 

to be unprepared to help their children participate in 

American life. In contrast, the Progressive Era brought 

about community-based efforts to help immigrant families 

and their children adjust to American culture through the 

establishment of settlement houses, which taught language 

and other life skills and established kindergartens and social 

programs for children and their families. 

In 1875, the first Society for the Protection of Cruelty 

to Children (SPCC) was established in New York City in 

response to the highly publicized abuse of a youngster by 

the name of Mary Ellen. Though a voluntary association, the 

SPCC used an “arm of the law” approach and investigated 

reports of maltreatment and initiated prosecution of parents 

who had failed to properly care for their children. The 

authority of the court was used to punish and fine parents, 

and when necessary, remove children from their care. 

Children were placed in institutions or in foster homes. 

The SPCC spread rapidly to the large cities and established 

a model of investigation and intervention that was later 

incorporated into child protective services. 

It is important to note that the organizations and 

procedures developed in the nineteenth century did not 

apply to African American children. African American 

children did not enter the child welfare system during 

either the slavery or post-slavery era because their status 

as property meant they were afforded minimal protections. 

Once the juvenile court developed at the turn of the 

twentieth century, the evolution of the child welfare and 

juvenile justice systems diverged. However, the two 

systems continued to share some of the same attitudes 

toward children and their families. 

Juvenile Justice

The first juvenile court in the United States was authorized 

by the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899 and was founded 

in Chicago. Other states soon followed and created 

juvenile courts of their own. Rather than seeing children 

as little adults (as was common throughout the eighteenth 

and into the nineteenth centuries), pioneers in the new 
8 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

fields of psychology and child development introduced 

modern ideas about the child as a person who is 

developing. Though novel at the time, these ideas became 

the overarching doctrine that gave the state the power to 

serve as guardian to those with legal disabilities, in this 

case juveniles (Shoemaker, 2009). 

Juvenile court judges were asked to take on a parental 

role when facing juvenile offenders, rather than a strictly 

legal authority role. The actual parents of the offender 

were seemingly unneeded or considered unimportant to 

the process. Judges routinely spoke harshly to parents in 

the courtroom, blaming them for their child’s behavior and 

essentially banishing them from participating in the court 

proceedings. Family members faced humiliation when 

seeking support and assistance—not only from judges, 

but from prosecutors and the defense bar as well. Once 

youths were institutionalized, parents and loved ones 

were not included in their children’s incarceration plans or 

plans to return home. This reinforced a peripheral role for 

parents in their children’s future. 

Juvenile court judges were asked to take on a parental 

role when facing juvenile offenders, rather than a 

strictly legal authority role. The actual parents of the 

offender were seemingly unneeded or considered 

unimportant to the process. 

This view continued until the mid-twentieth century when 

several U.S. Supreme Court decisions recognized the rights 

of youth and their families in juvenile delinquency matters. 

One of these cases was the historic In re Gault case. 

Fifteen-year-old Gerald Gault was taken into custody by law 

enforcement after allegedly making an obscene phone call. 

Among other things, the court ruled that youth, and their 

parents, need to be notified of arrest, charges, the right to 

counsel, and the right to remain silent—none of which had 

been afforded to Gault or his parents. This ruling marked 

a shift in how the courts saw the involvement, however 

minimal, of parents in their child’s delinquency cases.

Over time, correctional staff and community supervision 

officers became more informed about the potential long-term 

role that could be played by family and social networks, and 

new ideas about the value of family engagement—broadly 

defined to include extended family, friends, clergy, and 

community-based organizations—were planted. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, several leading organizations, 

including the American Bar Association (ABA) and the National 

Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, recognized the 

importance of placing a youth within the ecological context of 

a family by recommending the use of unified family courts for 

all matters related to families, such as juvenile delinquency, 

child welfare, and divorce. In 1980, the American Bar 

Association endorsed jurisdiction for unified family courts 

that included “Juvenile law violations; cases of abuse and 

neglect; cases involving the need for emergency medical 

treatment; appointing legal guardians for juveniles; intrafamily 

offenses (including domestic violence) . . . and support of 

juveniles” (Institute of Judicial Administration/American Bar 

Association, 1980). In 1990, the National Council of Juvenile 

and Family Court Judges strengthened the ABA’s definition, 

recommending that unified courts contain within their “ambit 

all matters affecting families and children, . . . children and 

other persons in need of services, delinquency, and other 

juvenile offenses (truancy, incorrigibility)” (Ross, 1998). To 

address the increasing inadequacies of the court system 

that families faced, such as system navigation, judicial 

indifference, and duplication of services, the ABA adopted 

a policy in 1994 on unified family courts that called for 

“Provision and/or integration of comprehensive services and 

other assistance, as appropriate, for children and families in 

the courts” (Ross, 1998). In spite of these advances, family 

engagement practices were not proposed or highlighted as 

intrinsic to accomplishing the court’s mission.

Child Welfare

The establishment of juvenile courts across the country in 

the early twentieth century created a structure for hearing 

evidence and making judicially sanctioned dispositions 

for dependent children in addition to delinquent children. 

Although the court served both dependent and delinquent 

children, the public policy response for these two populations 

began to diverge. In contrast to the juvenile justice system’s 

steadily increasing—although insufficient—focus on family 

engagement, the twentieth century marked several shifts in 

the way families were viewed in the child welfare system. 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 9

The establishment of juvenile courts across the country 

in the early twentieth century created a structure for 

hearing evidence and making judicially sanctioned 

dispositions for dependent children in addition to 

delinquent children.

During the early part of the twentieth century, the care 

of dependent children remained in the private sector, 

through voluntary sectarian agencies. Over time, states 

and localities began to establish government programs for 

child protection and placement. A presidential conference 

in 1909 sparked national discussion on the needs of 

dependent children.

As previously discussed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth 

centuries, parents of delinquent and dependent children 

alike were viewed as contributors to their child’s status. 

In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt convened the first 

White House Conference on Children. Expert deliberations 

produced a set of principles to govern the care of 

America’s dependent children (White House Conference 

on the Care of Dependent Children, 1909). The following 

ideas were particularly relevant to parents:

•	Children should be kept with their parents and not 

be deprived of their families except for urgent and 

compelling reasons.

•	Families should not be broken up for reasons of poverty 

alone.

•	Children who must be removed from their families 

should be cared for in family settings whenever 

practicable.

Additionally, the principles endorsed the importance of 

providing assistance to families to meet the needs of 

their children and called for parents to provide a “suitable 

home” for the rearing of children. 

Despite these principles affirming the centrality of families 

to children’s lives, the focus of child welfare intervention 

remained on the placement of children at risk, and even 

by the middle of the twentieth century, practitioners had 

few incentives to actively engage families. Risks included 

not only physical danger, but also problems associated 

with an immoral or unsuitable home.

However, during the second half of the twentieth century, 

a number of studies documenting the experience of 

children in foster care led to improved engagement of 

parents and relatives in the child welfare services. The 

focus on risks was augmented by a number of studies 

that looked at the psychological effects of the foster care 

system on children. Maas and Engler (1959) documented 

the experience of children who were languishing in foster 

care. Described as “orphans of the living” and “children 

adrift,” these were children who did not belong to their 

parents and who were without alternative families they 

could call their own (Williams, 1980). Other studies 

documented the psychological impact of drifting in foster 

care, the importance of parental involvement and visitation 

in the timely return of children to their families, and the 

time frames in which return was most likely (Williams, 

1980). Studies found that early and assertive services 

to parents, structured by individualized case plans and 

clear time frames for decision making, increased the 

likelihood of a child’s return to the parent(s) or successful 

adoption (Pike et al., 1977; Stein and Gambrill, 1977). 

Work in this area called for a reexamination of the role of 

juvenile courts in making key decisions related not only 

to placement but also to reunification and termination of 

parental rights (Wald, 1976). In addition to stopping abuse, 

finding permanency or a stable family in which to grow up 

emerged as another goal of child welfare services. 

The treatment of tribal children became part of the shift 

in focus. In the mid-twentieth century, tribal children had 

often been placed in boarding schools or other out-ofhome care arrangements, with a majority in non-Indian 

settings (Unger, 1977). In response, Congress passed 

the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which affirmed 

the jurisdiction of tribes as sovereign nations over their 

children and required placement preference for extended 

family, members of the child’s tribe, and other Indian 

families. The law required that “active efforts” be made to 

maintain and reunify families. 

These advances continued when Congress passed 

sweeping legislation to address the problem of children 

adrift and required agencies to actively involve parents in 

resolving their children’s permanency status. The Adoption 

Assistance and Child Welfare Amendments of 1980 (P.L. 

96-272) created the Title IV-E entitlement program for 

poor children in foster care, which allowed federal cost 
10 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

sharing for administrative and placement costs. The 

legislation established a set of procedural requirements 

that underscored the importance of parental involvement 

and also the need to make long-term permanency 

decisions on behalf of children in foster care. The law 

required state agencies that receive federal funds to make 

“reasonable efforts” to maintain children in their families 

and to reunify children with their parents. To foster the 

timely engagement of parents, the act required case plans 

along with judicial reviews and permanency hearings at 

which decisions for children’s long-term stability were to 

be made. To foster alternative arrangements for children 

who could not return home, a subsidized adoption 

provision was enacted. This legislation clearly established 

the principle of a child’s right to a permanent nurturing 

family—in other words, stability.

The law required state agencies that receive federal 

funds to make “reasonable efforts” to maintain children 

in their families and to reunify children with their 

parents.

As time went on, policymakers continued to embrace 

the child welfare framework enacted in 1980. Additional 

legislative changes strengthened the policy. In 1993, 

additional funds to provide family support and intensive 

family preservation services were made available to states 

and tribes through the Family Preservation and Support 

Act, now called the Safe and Stable Families Act. This 

act facilitated the development of community-based, inhome services needed to meet the “reasonable efforts” 

requirements and elevated the focus on families. 

The direction toward strengthening family connections 

was further supported by changes in the living 

arrangements of children and adolescents in the late 

twentieth century, with more youth living with relative 

caregivers, especially grandparents (U.S. Department of 

Health and Human Services, 2000). In fact, by the time of 

the Great Recession in 2008, the number of grandparents 

serving as primary caregivers had spiked, especially 

among Whites (Livingston and Parker, 2009). There was 

also a growing acknowledgment in the child welfare field 

that while in some instances placement with biological 

parents may not be appropriate, placement with kin may 

be. Kinship care is a means of maintaining children’s 

connections to their families, schools, and communities, 

so important for a child’s emotional and behavioral health 

(Pecora et al., 2009) and cultural identity. Parents are 

more likely to feel welcomed, to visit their children, and to 

trust that their children are in a loving home when they are 

cared for by kin (Gleeson and Seryak, 2010). However, one 

of the challenges of moving in this direction is ensuring 

that relatives are adequately prepared for and supported 

in their caregiving responsibilities. In an effort to meet 

this need, policies and practices were adopted in the 

1980s and 1990s to support kinship caregivers, including 

subsidized guardianship (Berrick, 1998).

Outside of kinship care, the changes described above did not 

initially impact African American children and families to the 

same degree as others. From the Civil War until well into the 

twentieth century, African American children were protected 

through “child keeping” networks of extended family and 

friends when parents were not able to provide care. When 

these children entered care, they usually entered segregated 

institutions sponsored by religious groups or philanthropists 

(Billingsley and Giovannoni, 1972; Stack, 1997). As recently 

as the 1950s, there were very few African American children 

in state systems. Since that time not only have African 

American children been accepted for services, they have 

become overrepresented in care. Moreover, as Billingsley 

and Giovannoni (1972) suggested in the 1970s, the child 

welfare system treated African American children as if 

they had no families or communities.1 

As the number of children in care continued to grow and 

child fatalities occurred that were attributed to a preference 

for the reunification of families over the safety needs of 

children, the pendulum shifted once again. Additional 

legislative changes strengthened the focus on safety 

and the ability of states and tribes to make decisions for 

children who were languishing in care. The Adoption and 

Safe Families Act of 1997 affirmed the primacy of safety in 

1

 It is important to note that the issue of race and placement has been 

controversial for African American children. To find families for children 

who could not return to their families, many states developed placement 

preferences based on race and timelines for making efforts to place children within their own racial communities. These efforts were overturned 

by the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act and Inter-Ethnic Placement Provisions, 

which prohibited the use of race as a factor in the selection of foster and 

adoptive placements. The law also required states to make diligent effort 

to seek families in the communities from which children came.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 11

decision making, reduced the time frames for service and 

decision making, and mandated that termination of parental 

rights be initiated after fifteen months of placement. The 

law also required agencies to make “reasonable efforts” to 

find a permanent adoptive home when children were unable 

to return to their birth families. 

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 affirmed 

the primacy of safety in decision making, reduced 

the time frames for service and decision making, 

and mandated that termination of parental rights be 

initiated after fifteen months of placement. The law also 

required agencies to make “reasonable efforts” to find 

a permanent adoptive home when children were unable 

to return to their birth families.

Despite these efforts, tens of thousands of youth 

emancipate from child welfare each year (U.S. Department 

of Health and Human Services, 2010). The child welfare 

system has not provided them with the family stability 

needed to secure their well-being. As a result, policy, such 

as the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-

169), has been enacted to provide resources to prepare 

young people for a successful transition from foster 

care. This funding, in combination with the creativity of 

practitioners in the states, has resulted in the development 

of family finding strategies, such as the use of electronic 

resources to locate persons in a youth’s family network who 

may assume a supportive role during and after the transition 

to adulthood, and other innovative efforts to smooth the 

transition to adulthood. Although these initiatives are 

commendable efforts to remedy the situation for the older 

foster child, it is important to recognize that if earlier efforts 

to maintain the connections to family and community had 

been made, the number of children exiting care unattached 

to meaningful social networks could have been reduced.

Recent Developments

The slowly increasing acknowledgment of the importance 

of families in serving delinquent youth, the shifting views 

of families of dependent youth over time, and more recent 

juvenile justice and child welfare policies reflect a growing 

commitment to family engagement. For example, through 

the Second Chance Act of 2007 and the support of the Office 

of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, reentry 

initiatives are cognizant of the need for family engagement 

and other ecological approaches. The Second Chance Act 

has underscored the role of family engagement in a youth’s 

transition home from a juvenile justice facility and is funding 

family and community collaborative strategies. 

In addition to the Second Chance Act, the Juvenile Justice 

and Delinquency Prevention Act emphasizes the importance 

of building community capacity to serve children in their 

own families. Moreover, recommendations, such as 

those espoused in the recent New York Governor’s Task 

Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, underscore 

the importance of family connections (Governor David 

Paterson’s Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, 

2008). Furthermore, according to the National Reentry 

Resource Center (2010), suggestions have been put forth to 

ensure better contact and access between family members 

and incarcerated youth, such as increased telephone 

contact, use of video conference technology, and more 

frequent family visits. Despite these being programmatic 

components rather than statutory mandates, they still 

illustrate the current shift to a more family-focused 

paradigm for serving juvenile justice–involved youth. This 

change in how family involvement with incarcerated youth 

is viewed—both while in custody and during reentry to 

their homes and communities—is further reflected in the 

additional resources being invested in this area of work. 

Policies and practices are being reshaped at the state level 

to better support family engagement, including use of the 

approaches noted above (Shepherd, 2011).

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act 

emphasizes the importance of building community 

capacity to serve children in their own families.

Similar shifts have taken place in the child welfare field. 

In part building upon the increased focus on kinship care 

noted earlier, the most recent child welfare legislation, 

Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing 

Adoptions Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-3512), further encourages 

and financially supports connections of children to their 

relative caregivers, the placement of siblings together so 

affiliations can be maintained, and educational stability. 

The act seeks to promote family group conferencing and 
12 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

to support permanent kinship care arrangements. The 

Fostering Connections Act recognizes the limitations of 

current policy in securing well-being and permanency 

and adds federal support for guardianship arrangements, 

including direct Title IV-E funding to tribes to support child 

welfare programs, the provision of independent living 

services to children in the care of relatives and/or legal 

guardians, and incentives for the adoption of older children 

(Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2009). 

These newer initiatives, while not yet evaluated, show great 

promise in propelling family engagement and leadership 

to its intuitive and appropriate status. Though indications 

of progress in terms of family engagement are clear, more 

work needs to be done to ensure that assessments of needs, 

interventions, and decision making are conducted with the 

full engagement of families and youth and the support of the 

child’s community. A look at the recent history of how the 

mental health system made the transition to family-focused 

services can provide some insight into how the juvenile 

justice and child welfare systems can do the same.

Lessons from the Mental 

Health System

During the periods of time noted above, when the child 

welfare and juvenile justice systems were expanding and 

receiving federal attention, families and service providers 

identified that the mental health needs of children and 

youth were not being met. There was also recognition 

that many of the children served by child welfare, juvenile 

justice, or both systems had mental health issues. Policy 

studies documented that approaches then in vogue for 

serving seriously disturbed children were limited by the 

use of the most restrictive settings; a services array 

limited to inpatient, outpatient, and residential treatment 

with few intermediate and community-based options; 

and poor coordination among child-serving agencies. In 

addition, families were often blamed for their children’s 

conditions, and little effort was made to address cultural 

and linguistic issues in the diverse communities served 

(Stroul and Blau, 2008).

These systemic problems led to the development of the Child 

and Adolescent Service System Program by the National 

Institutes of Health in 1984. The goals of the program were 

to promote systems change in states and communities; 

develop comprehensive systems of community-based care; 

and encourage collaboration among policymakers, advocates, 

parents, and providers. The work over the last twenty-five 

years has resulted in the development of a framework, 

structures, and greater capacity to meet the needs of youth 

through committed resources, staff, and a systematic 

approach to building service capacity. The following core 

values have shaped this initiative:

•	Service should be child centered and family focused. 

•	The system of care should be community based.

•	The system of care should be culturally and 

linguistically competent and responsive to the cultural, 

racial, and ethnic differences of the populations served. 

Among the guiding principles are the need for access to 

a comprehensive array of individualized services, least 

restrictive intervention, families as full participants in 

service, integrated service provision across child-serving 

agencies, and protection of children’s rights. An essential 

characteristic of behavioral health systems of care is 

the primacy it places on the participation of people with 

mental illness or in recovery and their families in all 

aspects of the process. Consumer-led organizations such 

as the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National 

Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, and 

Mental Health America push both state and national policy 

venues to mirror their devotion to family support and 

engagement (Morris and Stuart, 2002).

Emerging out of this work was the System of Care (SOC) 

approach to children’s mental health as administered by the 

Center for Mental Health Services at the Substance Abuse 

and Mental Health Services Administration (see appendix 

A). SOC is grounded in a philosophy that recognizes that 

children with mental health problems show up in all childserving systems and that these systems need to be linked 

to one another and work together in close collaboration. 

The values that drive the SOC efforts include individualized, 

strength-based care; interagency collaboration; child, 

youth, and family involvement; cultural competence; and 

community-based services (U.S. Department of Health and 

Human Services, 2008). This approach has taken hold in 

more than a hundred communities nationwide and has 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 13

become a $100 million per year funding source (Winters 

and Metz, 2009). These advances in SOC have been 

extended to child welfare systems in several communities to 

achieve the goals of safety, permanency, and well-being. 

These values and principles, along with a commitment to 

research, evaluation, and reform, have resulted in a move 

away from the view that parents are the cause of serious 

emotional disturbance to a recognition that parents are 

critical partners in addressing the needs of their children. 

As a result, the children’s mental health system has made 

a commitment to “family-driven care.”

There is much that juvenile justice and child welfare can 

gain from understanding the SOC framework and the 

strategies that flow from it. The challenge is to incorporate 

this approach into the context of coercive systems (such as 

the child welfare and juvenile justice systems), which by 

statute are expected to limit the scope and length of their 

involvement. Integrating restorative justice and systems 

of care approaches is a means of building in the needed 

supports for youths and their families while attending to 

the protection of youths and the public. Even though this 

change will be difficult, the time for it to happen is ripe.

A Time for Change

Given the historical context, this paper comes at an opportune 

time for meaningful, enduring enhancement of the juvenile 

justice and child welfare systems. The combination of 

poor outcomes for youths and budget deficits has pushed 

policymakers to consider alternatives to foster care, group 

settings, detention, and psychiatric institutionalization. 

Policymakers are increasingly recognizing that family and 

community connections can provide long-lasting and costeffective supports when most formal systems cannot. They 

are seeking improved ways to engage kin and the community 

and to learn about the types of supports that families and 

neighborhoods might need to succeed. Due to this confluence 

of factors, policymakers are more open to improving the 

juvenile justice, child welfare, mental health, and behavioral 

health systems by systematically reducing silos, integrating 

asset-based family and community approaches, and drawing 

on evidence-informed and promising initiatives.

Family and community connections can provide longlasting and cost-effective supports when most formal 

systems cannot. The combination of poor outcomes 

and state budget deficits has pushed policymakers to 

consider alternatives to foster care, group settings, 

detention, and psychiatric institutionalization.

The nation’s changing demographics also push for 

change. The youths and families served today are diverse. 

To increase effectiveness, the youth- and family-serving 

system has to be flexible and willing to learn who the 

family is and what family members need and want, and 

to respond accordingly. For example, immigrant families 

may find the culture and child-rearing practices of their 

new country alien and in conflict with their values (Hassan 

and Rousseau, 2009). But if practitioners lack exposure 

to a culture, see themselves as unable to effectively 

communicate with and relate to the families they serve, 

and view the local community as having limited resources, 

they are more likely to remove children from their parents 

(Baumann et al., 2011). To better serve immigrant 

families, agencies are identifying that their staffs need to 

come to know the families and their cultural communities, 

engage them in planning, and link them to resources that 

respond to their needs in a holistic way. The group that is 

most familiar with a family’s culture is the family group. 

Engaging them in planning is a vehicle for increasing 

understanding of and becoming more responsive to the 

cultures of families.

Likewise, the upswing in returning military personnel 

compels reconsideration of ways to strengthen family 

connections. There is a significant association between 

the frequency and intensity of combat experience and 

the severity of post-traumatic stress disorder, major 

depression, and misuse of alcohol among returning activeduty military. These repercussions negatively affect the 

capacity of veterans to reconnect emotionally with their 

partners and their children (Galovski and Lyons, 2004). 

These heightened family stresses, coinciding with the 

Afghanistan and Iraq wars, are reflected in increased 

substantiated cases of child neglect among military 

families, as well as in higher rates of divorce and intimate 

partner violence (Gibbs et al., 2007; Rentz et al., 2007). 
14 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Family engagement may be a crucial tool to address the 

unique problems faced by military families. 

Returning military personnel and their families may need 

assistance in reestablishing relationships affected by 

multiple deployments. Engaging the family group may be a 

way to build in necessary and ongoing supports.

In addition, public opinion is moving away from punitive 

to rehabilitative approaches to juvenile offending, further 

supporting the shift in policy and practice. In the 1990s, 

the focus was on punitive responses to youth gangs, 

gun violence, and illegal drugs in African American as 

well as Latino and other immigrant communities rather 

than on preventive measures (U.S. Subcommittee on 

Criminal Justice, 2006). A 2007 survey conducted by 

the Center for Children’s Law and Policy (Soler, 2007; 

see also Piquero and Steinberg, 2010), however, found 

that respondents overwhelmingly agreed that youths 

committing crimes have the potential to change and 

would benefit more from treatment and services than 

from incarceration. In the case of nonviolent juveniles, 

the public favored keeping them in small residential 

settings in their communities rather than sending them 

away to large institutions at a distance. Moreover, 

respondents felt that the juvenile justice system was not 

equitable in its treatment of youths from low-income and 

minority populations, and they wanted government funds 

redirected from incarceration to treatment. 

This shift in all likelihood reflects a growing understanding 

of the high volume and high costs of youth incarceration 

with little gain. In 2008, the United States arrested youths 

at a greater rate than any other country—more than 2 

million arrests of young people occurred that year, yet 

only 96,000 of those arrests were for violent offenses 

(OJJDP, 2008). Estimates of the cost of incarcerating a 

single youth for a single year range from $35,000 to more 

than $200,000 (Caster, 2010; Schiraldi and Mattingly, 

2010), and yet outcomes have been disappointing. 

Recidivism rates, which measure the likelihood that a 

convicted offender will recommit upon reentry from a 

placement facility, average more than 50 percent for 

juveniles nationwide (OJJDP, 2006). Additionally, research 

on adolescent brain development and on the impact of 

childhood trauma and exposure to violence is influencing 

perceptions of youth crime (Scott and Steinberg, 2008; 

Vazsonyi, Trejos-Castillo, and Huang, 2007). 

The possibility of reform is strengthened by growing 

public support for rehabilitative rather than punitive 

approaches to juvenile offending and by greater 

awareness of the impact of adolescent brain 

development and exposure to childhood trauma on 

youthful offending. Public support also makes reform 

more feasible politically.

These various trends can serve to accelerate the current 

shift in how the child welfare and juvenile justice systems 

engage families. The challenge to taking advantage of this 

opportunity is determining how to engage families within 

the context of coercive systems that require compliance. 

Systems of care and restorative justice perspectives 

provide some guidance on how to productively engage 

youth and their family groups and community members. 

The remainder of this paper will explore how this can 

be accomplished. Using the context presented in this 

section, the following sections will explore first what 

family engagement means and then present the family 

engagement policies and practices that can be used to 

move past the historically hostile and compliance-driven 

view of families to ultimately better serve youth.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 15

III. Family Engagement: What It Means

Family engagement means that agencies involve youths 

and their families in decision making. The capacity of 

child welfare and juvenile justice to adopt participatory 

processes is affected by how these systems view the youths 

who come to their attention. Youths who cross over the 

child welfare and juvenile justice systems can be seen as 

victims, offenders, or both. Elevated levels of mental health 

issues and school disciplinary infractions among these 

youths further emphasize their needs and their misconduct. 

Alternatively, crossover youths can be seen in terms of their 

capacity, with guidance and support, to direct their lives, to 

participate responsibly in decision making, and to become 

contributing members of society (Bandura, 2002, 2006). 

Similarly for their families, agencies can shift the emphasis 

from compliance to engagement in decision making by 

fostering hope, trust, a positive working relationship, and 

investment in change efforts (Yatchmenoff, 2005). Such 

engagement in planning needs to occur from the outset 

to overcome barriers to service utilization and to focus on 

issues of concern to youths and their families, given their 

high stresses and their differing cultural backgrounds 

(McKay et al., 2004). This shift in attitude refocuses 

attention on how to collaborate with youths, their families, 

and communities—including the victims of crime—in 

finding and implementing solutions. The question then 

becomes not how systems can change youths and their 

families and communities, but instead what systems can do 

to build productive collaboration.

Youths who cross over child welfare and juvenile 

justice can be viewed as victims or offenders and 

their families as inadequate. Alternatively, we can 

refocus on supporting youths, their families, and 

their communities, including the victims of crime, as 

collaborators in implementing solutions.

Building partnerships among youths, families, child 

welfare, and juvenile justice, however, poses major 

challenges. The two systems are coercive institutions that 

employ the power of the state to intervene in the lives 

of families and/or individuals when certain standards or 

expectations are violated. In the juvenile justice system, 

youth commit criminal violations that place them and 

the community at risk and bring them to the attention 

of law enforcement and the courts. The mandate of the 

child welfare system is to intervene when families do 

not meet the minimum community standards of care for 

children, resulting in physical and sexual abuse; medical, 

educational, or other neglect; and/or exploitation. Both 

systems rely on the doctrine of parens patriae—that is, 

the authority of the state to protect and socialize children 

and youth when families have failed to do so. 

Moving to a family engagement approach poses major 

challenges. Child welfare and juvenile justice are 

coercive institutions based on a historical foundation 

of separating children from parents who are viewed 

as inadequate or immoral and substituting the state 

as the parent.

The nature and authority of the interventions involve 

intrusion into the private lives of families and exercise of 

the state’s power over parents and their children. At the 

direct-service level, this power is applied to families and 

youths to stop or remedy the problematic behaviors and 

actions. For crossover cases, direct services may include 

a mix of casework, probation, parent education, family or 

residential placement, adoption, and short- or long-term 

detention. One of the challenges of providing services 

in this context is creating opportunities for families and 

youths to actively participate in, shape, and own the 

intervention process in a way that promotes change. To do 

this, agencies must address the power imbalance that is 

implicit in providing their services.

The conventional model of child welfare has been 

professionally driven and based on the assumption 

that well-trained professionals could direct families to 

the solutions for their children’s problems. Families 

were the providers of information for the assessment 

and planning processes. With involuntary services, 

families were expected to follow directives and comply 
16 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

with expectations, even in situations where there were 

disconnects between the plan and the client’s realities. 

Failure to comply had significant ramifications, including 

extended lengths of separation of parents from their 

children, higher levels of care for children, termination of 

parental rights, and adoption, as well as the psycho-social 

consequence of family disruption and multiple placements.

Likewise the conventional model for juvenile justice has 

also placed the state in the role of parent over juvenile 

offenders. Additionally, the justice system in general has 

marginalized the victims of crime, who may be called 

upon as witnesses rather than as partners in developing 

measures to resolve the issues, help them heal, and 

prevent future delinquent acts. Nor does this approach 

redress the harms experienced by others, whether they 

are the family members shamed by the youths’ actions 

and considered financially liable or the “bystanders” 

intimidated in the school, neighborhood, or workplace. 

In other words, the state, rather than citizens, owned 

conflicts and managed how they would be handled 

(Christie, 1977). Not only the youths but also their families, 

the direct victims, and community members need safety, 

fairness, and stability.

A top-down system of regulation fails to tap into the 

caring, knowledge, and strategies of the family group 

and community. It starts with punitive measures rather 

than responsive and restorative ones that engage the 

key stakeholders in ways that make sense to them 

emotionally and pragmatically (Braithwaite, 2002). For 

crossover youth, systems of care and restorative justice 

frameworks encourage agencies to realign their methods 

for engaging with youths, families, and communities. 

These practice frameworks support each other while 

reflecting their different origins—i.e., child mental health 

versus criminal justice. As mentioned above, the Child 

and Adolescent Service System Program set forth six 

core principles of system of care—child centered, family 

focused, community based, multisystem, culturally 

competent, and least restrictive/intrusive settings—for 

children with serious emotional disorders and their 

families (Stroul and Friedman, 1986, pp. 16–24). These 

core principles have guided reforms not only in child 

mental health, but also in other child-serving agencies 

such as child welfare and disabilities. These six principles 

converge with but are not identical to the goals of 

restorative justice. In juvenile justice, a restorative 

approach is guided by the seven goals of diversion from 

the courts to community-based sanctions, accountability 

of those offending, involvement of victims in decision 

making, inclusion and strengthening of the offender’s 

family, use of consensual decision making, adaptation of 

processes to participants’ cultures, and due process to 

respect the rights of offenders (MacRae and Zehr, 2004, 

pp. 18–19). Restorative justice has influenced practice 

beyond the justice system, to the schools, for example, 

to address issues such as bullying (Morrison, 2007). 

Both frameworks emphasize partnership and cultural 

respect; encompass levels of work from the family to 

the community to the agency; and have implications for 

practice, policy, and evaluation.

Principles of System Goals of Restorative 

of Care Justice 

Child centered Diversion 

Family focused Accountability

Community based Involvement of the victim

Multisystem Inclusion and 

 strengthening of the 

 offender’s family

Culturally competent Consensus decision 

 making

Least restrictive/intrusive Cultural appropriateness

settings

 Due process

Family engagement: Any role or activity that enables 

families to have direct and meaningful input into and 

influence on systems, policies, programs, or practices 

affecting services for children and families.

For crossover youths, family engagement means involving 

the youths, their family groups, the victims and their 

supports, community members, and service providers 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 17

in decision making at the practice, program, and policy 

levels. For the youth, family, and community, engagement 

is about having meaningful influence in the design, 

delivery, and evaluation of services. The process of 

inclusion adds important stakeholders to those to whom 

the agency should be accountable. Engagement requires 

agency personnel to be open to hearing the concerns of 

those they serve and removing obstacles to services (Child 

Welfare Information Gateway, 2009). 

Agencies must create environments that welcome youth, 

family, and local leadership and partnership. Creating an 

organization where these stakeholders are looked to for 

advice and guidance requires building an organizational 

culture and processes that assure involvement. Multiple 

elements must come together to institutionalize family 

engagement:

•	Mission, values, and philosophy that require 

engagement

•	Interventions that empower youths, families, victims, 

and other key stakeholders to participate actively

•	Opportunities for voice and involvement at every level 

of the organization

•	Policies and practices that support engagement

•	Collaborations founded on respect for family and 

community experiences

•	Capacity building of youths, families, communities, and 

agencies to partner

•	Services designed to meet the expressed needs of 

youths, families, and other key constituencies (adapted 

from Chovil, 2009)

Family engagement requires a shift from imposing 

conventional approaches to helping in a number of areas. 

The focus of intervention shifts from the problem youth, 

event, or behavior to the family as a unit in the context of 

the community. Engagement is nurtured by emphasizing 

the strengths of the youths, families, and community 

members and the resources they bring rather than 

exclusively on the problems. Instead of being directive, 

agencies encourage families to become involved as active 

and influential partners in defining their problems, goals, 

and plans of action. They are supported in making choices 

about their course of action and in identifying and receiving 

the resources that will make change possible. In addition, 

they can be provided the support of other families as peer 

mentors—families that have experience with the child 

welfare and juvenile justice systems and can help navigate 

them (Luckenbill and Yeager, 2009).

Family engagement also requires that youths, families, and 

community members become involved in the governance 

of the organization. Similar to the practice shifts noted 

above, there must be opportunities to allow the experience 

of families, in both the agency and the community, to 

inform the operation of the child welfare and juvenile justice 

programs and systems. Representatives of the client groups 

advise administrators, contribute to policy development, 

provide systematic feedback on agency performance, and 

shape and participate in staff development and program 

evaluation. Here, systematic ways to involve youth and 

family partners in monitoring services and hiring and 

training staff can be especially helpful (Allen-Eckard, Latz, 

and Coppedge, 2010; Nixon, 2007).

Family engagement requires that youths, families, 

and community members become involved in the 

governance of the organization. Systematic ways to 

involve youth and family partners in monitoring services 

and hiring and training staff can be especially helpful.

The ability of an organization to actively include 

parents and youths in its governance is enhanced by 

the development of productive relationships with the 

communities from which children, youth, and families 

come. Communities—with their formal and informal 

institutions—have networks of social and material 

resources that are often invisible to or not acknowledged 

by public institutions. Though concerned about the wellbeing of their children and youth, people in communities 

are often unaware of the extent of delinquency and 

maltreatment problems in their midst and therefore 

are less effective than they otherwise could be at 

addressing these issues. To better engage families and 

youth, agencies must reach out to community leaders 

by sharing information and building partnerships to 

support change (James et al., 2008; Seymour, 2007). 

Some agencies have identified the neighborhoods from 
18 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

which the children and youth are coming and have 

organized community agencies into networks of services 

that are able to respond in a holistic and coordinated 

manner (Administration for Children’s Services, 2001; 

Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Council, 2010). 

These networks are able to connect with faith, social, and 

charitable institutions to enhance the supports to families.

To better engage families and youth, agencies must 

reach out to community leaders by sharing information 

and building partnerships to support change. 

The commitment of a single agency to family engagement 

is not adequate to create an environment in which families 

can be actively involved in changing their circumstances. 

The experience of the systems of care and restorative 

justice initiatives has demonstrated the importance of 

additional elements. Collaboration among all child-serving 

agencies and the courts is necessary to ensure that services 

are coordinated and directed toward shared goals. This 

collaboration may include the pooling of resources to 

fund a unique service plan. Families, in conjunction with 

service providers, should be able to tailor an individualized 

service plan that utilizes the strengths of the youth and his 

or her family along with the most responsive formal and 

informal supports. The latter includes families, friends, faith 

communities, and community-based support and treatment 

programs. Family engagement works best when a network 

of community-based services provides alternatives to 

placement and is accessible both psychologically and 

geographically. Finally, there needs to be a clear framework 

to ensure accountability among all of the collaborators, 

including the family (U.S. Department of Health and Human 

Services, 2008). The family group members can be 

especially effective in holding themselves accountable.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 19

IV. Practice Strategies: Putting Family 

Engagement into Action

Family engagement in resolving issues is not an 

innovation. Traditionally, peoples around the world have 

worked out issues on their own. In modern societies, 

the question is: How can public agencies respectfully 

help people to make, implement, and improve plans to 

address concerns? The paper now examines strategies 

of family engagement in child welfare and juvenile justice 

and relates them to approaches in child mental health 

and schools. The focus is on the practice level, including 

decision-making strategies, because this is where much 

of the research has been conducted.

Family engagement is not an innovation. Traditionally, 

peoples around the globe have worked out issues on 

their own. In modern societies, the question is: How 

can agencies respectfully engage and support people 

in addressing their issues?

As noted previously, families here are broadly defined 

to refer to immediate family members and their kin and 

other close supports such as friends and neighbors. To 

encompass this informal network, the authors draw upon 

the term “family group,” which was incorporated into 

New Zealand’s 1989 Children, Young Persons, and Their 

Families Act. This legislation was passed after protests by 

the Maori, indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, 

against Euro-centric approaches in child welfare and 

juvenile justice that undermined their family groups and 

tribes (Rangihau, 1986). For all cultural groups, the act 

mandated family group conferencing in the most serious 

situations of child maltreatment and youth offending, 

other than homicide (Crampton and Pennell, 2009; 

Maxwell, 2007b). The legislation was based on principles 

of children’s rights, family group responsibility, cultural 

respect, and government-community partnership (Hassall, 

1996). It came at a time in which the public strongly 

questioned government and professional interference in 

the lives of families (Doolan and Phillips, 2000). 

Encouraging Family Group 

Leadership

In general, strategies for family group engagement involve 

the children, youths, and their family groups, and in the 

case of juvenile justice, the victims and their supports, in 

making a plan to address the issues of concern. Before 

going into effect, the action steps must be approved by 

the involved authorities. To encourage the leadership of 

the family group, different methods are employed, and 

particular models vary on which they incorporate. For 

the New Zealand model of family group conferencing, 

methods include the following:

•	Designating noncase-carrying staff to coordinate and 

facilitate the process 

•	Clarifying and agreeing on the purpose of the meeting

•	Inviting rather than compelling participation

•	Preparing family, community, and agency participants

•	Assessing safety and putting protective and supportive 

measures in place

•	Making arrangements such as child care, 

transportation, and interpretation

•	Opening and later closing the meeting in a way that fits 

the customs of the family group

•	Agreeing on guidelines for safe and effective 

participation

•	Encouraging the participation of children and youths 

and ensuring needed supports

•	Offering information on the situation, its impact, and 

possible resources to assist with plan development

•	Providing private time for family group members to 

generate their own plan without service providers 

present
20 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

•	Reaching a consensus on the plan that includes the 

views of the young people, families, and in juvenile 

offending cases, the victims

•	Monitoring and evaluating implementation of the plan 

•	Reconvening when major revisions to the plan are 

required (American Humane Association, 2010; 

MacRae and Zehr, 2004; Maxwell, 2007b; Pennell and 

Anderson, 2005)

Although these practices have been favorably received by 

families and workers, they should not be rigidly applied. 

Family engagement practices need to respond to the 

family group’s culture, the organizational mandate, and 

the national context. For this reason, service models have 

encouraged practitioners to examine their work in terms 

of adhering to guiding principles rather than conforming 

to specific steps (Burford, Pennell, and Edwards, in 

press; Henggeler et al., 1998). Appendix B presents one 

instrument, referred to as the Achievement of Family 

Group Conferencing Objectives, which was developed 

in North Carolina to measure fidelity to family group 

conferencing principles and their associated practices 

(Pennell, 2004, 2006b) and applied across Pennsylvania 

(Rauktis, Huefner, and Cahalane, in press).

Child Welfare

Internationally, child welfare systems tend to use the 

term family group conferencing, while in the United 

States, various terms are employed (Burford et al., 2010). 

Models adopted in the United States include family group 

decision making, family unity, team decision making, 

family team conferencing, and family team meetings 

(Crea and Berzin, 2009; Center for the Study of Social 

Policy, 2002). These models are often part of general child 

welfare initiatives such as Family to Family (Usher et al., 

2010) and Community Partnerships for Protecting Children 

(Rosewater, 2006). The intent is to involve families in 

decision making so as to better safeguard children, 

youths, and adults. 

There is much convergence in the practices of the models. 

Nevertheless, significant divergences pertain to neutrality 

on the part of the meeting organizer (i.e., as a result of 

either being based outside of the agency or, if inside the 

agency, not having responsibility for the case); the extent to 

which preparations are carried out with family and service 

providers; and the provision of private time for families to 

deliberate (Crampton and Pennell, 2009; Merkel-Holguin 

and Wilmot, 2005). There is increasing recognition among 

researchers and practitioners that no one model fits all 

situations (Rideout, Merkel-Holguin, and Anderson, 2010). 

Agencies may select models based on the stage of the 

work with the youth and family, the necessity of rapidly 

convening the meeting, the need to locate family members 

with significant or potentially significant relationships to the 

youths, and the nature of the historic relationship between 

the agency and cultural community.

Child welfare agencies may select specific family 

engagement models based on the stage of the work, 

the need to convene rapidly or to locate family, and 

the nature of the relationship between the agency and 

the community.

Juvenile Justice

In different countries, juvenile justice systems have 

adopted various restorative approaches, often as part 

of larger court and system reforms, to engage youths, 

families, victims, and communities (Johnstone and Van 

Ness, 2007; Sullivan and Tifft, 2006; Walgrave, 2008). 

The focus is on transforming relations, healing from harm, 

and addressing underlying causes to prevent further 

wrongdoing (Zehr, 2002). Juveniles who acknowledge 

their offending and agree to participate in restorative 

processes are typically diverted from the courts to 

community-based programs. Restorative processes may 

also be applied at time of discharge from detention to 

facilitate reintegration into the community. 

Juvenile justice systems have used restorative justice 

approaches at different points to divert youths from court 

into community programming and to reintegrate them into 

their communities on discharge from detention.

The numerous restorative models can generally be organized 

under three broad categories: mediation, conferencing, and 

circles (McCold, 2006). Initiated in the 1970s in Canada, the 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 21

United Kingdom, and the United States, mediation involves 

an impartial facilitator who encourages dialogue between the 

offender and victim so that they can reach a solution. Faithbased approaches emphasize forgiveness and reconciliation; 

secular approaches emphasize restitution and settlements. 

Current practices are to enlarge the number of participants 

beyond the two parties and to focus on healing (Raye and 

Roberts, 2007). Similar to mediation, conferencing, first 

legislated in 1989 in New Zealand, encourages consensus 

building; however, it tends to centralize family and culture to a 

greater extent than mediation. During the 1990s, circles grew 

out of the traditions of First Nations in Canada (Bushie, 1997). 

The focus is on healing and peacemaking (Pranis, Stuart, 

and Wedge, 2003). Circles are generally the most inclusive 

of the models since any community member can elect to 

take part (Raye and Roberts, 2007). All three models have 

been introduced around the globe and now share practices 

as practitioners learn from the experiences of others.

Recently, there has been a trend to incorporate some 

of the practices used primarily in child welfare into the 

juvenile justice system. These practices include the use 

of family group decision making, particularly for cases 

involving crossover youth (Lewis, 2005). For juvenile 

justice workers to build upon the child welfare practices, 

they need training that will help them to understand and 

use the plans developed in child welfare and incorporate 

child welfare planning processes into their own work. This 

training for juvenile justice workers must develop skills 

to conduct family group meetings and instill a belief in 

a family-centered and strength-based approach to case 

management. A number of jurisdictions have initiated 

training on motivational interviewing as a skill that will 

help caseworkers improve their ability to communicate 

with parents and support them in their work to prevent 

delinquent behavior and achieve other positive outcomes, 

such as greater school success, for their youth (Connell et 

al., 2007). Practitioners have also extended use of these 

approaches into their work with youth and their families 

during periods of incarceration, calling team decision 

meetings to address problems that arise while in custody 

and to plan for reentry. This change in the valuing of 

families in the core work of the juvenile justice system 

has been, along with the move to more community-based 

services, one of the more fundamental changes in that 

system in the past decade. 

These efforts have been supported by the incorporation 

of tools that help caseworkers in juvenile justice better 

understand the relationship the youth has with his or her 

family members. One example is the Juvenile Relational 

Inquiry Tool (see appendix C), which assesses levels of 

support and helps identify the social supports of a youth 

in care (Shanahan, 2010). Other tools that can also be 

used to better identify family and community relationships, 

which may help support improved youth outcomes, are 

the Family Case Management Flowchart, Strength-Based 

Genogram, and Family and Institutional Ecomaps (see 

appendix D).

There has also been recognition that the most successful 

juvenile justice treatment programs feature strong 

family involvement and support, particularly substance 

abuse treatment programs for juvenile justice–involved 

youth (Mulvey, Schubert, and Chassin, 2010). Though 

not the focus of this paper, programs such as MultiSystemic Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, and 

Multi-Dimensional Treatment Foster Care all incorporate 

significant family components and have proven to be 

some of the most successful juvenile justice interventions 

(Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, 2004). 

The numerous restorative models can generally be 

organized under three broad categories: mediation, 

conferencing, and circles.

Schools

Schools have drawn on the models in juvenile justice to 

resolve conflicts, increase attendance, prevent suspension 

or expulsion of students, and improve home-school 

relations (Liebman, 2007). In order to arrive at mutually 

acceptable plans, administrators invite students, their 

families, teachers, counselors, and other service providers 

to meetings. Whole-school approaches, involving wide 

participation and multiple means, are favored because 

they reinforce across the school community how to resolve 

issues together (Morrison, 2007). These approaches include 

mediation, conferencing, and circles, as well as education 

on special topics such as the effects of bullying. In addition, 

schools use joint planning processes involving families 

to create plans for students in special education or more 
22 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

generally to support students struggling academically. The 

reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education 

Act emphasizes that families should be involved in every 

crucial step in developing an Individualized Education 

Program (IEP) for their child. Further, the act requires 

schools to invite parents to participate in developing an IEP 

for their child and allows parents to challenge evaluations 

and placements or to request a revision of their child’s IEP 

(U.S. Department of Education, 2000).

School representatives are also seen as critically 

important participants in the multidisciplinary team 

meetings, family group conferences, and restorative 

justice meetings referenced in this paper. Historically, 

school officials have not had a significant role in the 

child welfare and juvenile justice case planning and 

management process (Zetlin, Weinberg, and Shea, 2006). 

This is likely due to issues ranging from time constraints 

to confidentiality provisions related to school records. 

But whatever the basis for their absence, the new focus 

on multidisciplinary and holistic approaches to case 

planning has provided an opportunity for jurisdictions to 

work through those issues and involve appropriate school 

representatives in family engagement efforts.

Mental Health

The field of child mental health also seeks to involve youths 

and their families in planning. As noted previously, family 

engagement is viewed as integral to a system of care whose 

goal is to wrap comprehensive and integrated programming 

around emotionally disturbed children and youths (Stroul and 

Friedman, 1986). System of care employs a process referred 

to as child and family teams that engages the young person, 

the family, and involved organizations in collaboratively 

making and implementing plans (Burchard and Burchard, 

2000). The aim is to have one family, one team, and one 

plan. System of care offers a common language for bringing 

all involved systems together around the youths and their 

families. In North Carolina, for example, the term “child and 

family teams” has been adopted not only by mental health 

personnel but also by child welfare organizations, juvenile 

justice agencies, the schools, and public health facilities.

The use of family engagement practices becomes especially 

important when the family group being served is involved in 

multiple systems. The strategies, models, and tools reviewed 

in this section have changed the way child-serving systems 

work with families, but to truly improve outcomes for 

children and families, these practices must be applied 

across systems. By having one family, one team, and one 

plan, systems are better able to empower the family and 

encourage family group leadership. 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 23

V. Processes and Outcomes: What Helps

There is a growing body of research and evaluation on 

the processes and outcomes of family group engagement 

in child welfare and juvenile justice as well as behavioral 

health and education. The findings are reviewed in this 

paper in the context of achieving safety, fairness, and 

stability. The focus here is on the practice rather than 

systems level because most of the studies examined 

engagement at the youth and family level. At the same time, 

this front-line work affects broader agency and interagency 

values and approaches, while system-level developments 

support and constrain practice (Crea et al., 2008). 

A large portion of the research on family group engagement 

in child welfare, juvenile justice, and schools has been 

conducted on family group conferencing because of its 

early application in multiple countries (Burford et al., 2010; 

Raye and Roberts, 2007). For the most part, the authors of 

this review have combined the results from various models 

because there is little research comparing the outcomes of 

the different models. Such comparisons would be difficult 

given the extensive overlaps in the various approaches. 

Moreover, it is often difficult to isolate the impact of a 

particular model within larger efforts such as child welfare 

initiatives, court reform, whole-school approaches, and 

system of care. Nevertheless, evaluation instruments are 

available to measure fidelity to family engagement (Burford, 

Pennell, and Edwards, in press; Pennell, 2004, 2006b).

The following research review begins by synthesizing 

the findings first in child welfare and then in juvenile 

justice. While the main focus is on studies in these two 

fields, outcomes in schools and behavioral and mental 

health are summarized. They are included here because 

youths are commonly served by multiple systems and 

an understanding of how to maximize involvement is 

essential in achieving improved outcomes in these areas. 

In reviewing the national and international literature on 

family group engagement, the questions are for specific 

groups within particular contexts: 

•	Do the processes yield safe, fair, and stable 

arrangements for decision making and implementation 

of plans? 

•	Do the outcomes provide safety, fairness, and stability 

for the youths, their families and communities, and the 

victims outside the family? 

Child Welfare

A recurring finding around the globe is high satisfaction 

with the processes of family group engagement and the 

resulting plans (Burford et al., 2010). This is notable given 

the long-standing tensions between child welfare and 

many families, especially those from marginalized groups 

(Strega, Esquao, and Carriere, 2009). Below the authors 

examine the findings concerning safety, fairness, and 

stability. Processes and outcomes are examined side by 

side because they are so often closely related.

A recurring finding around the globe is high satisfaction 

with the process of family group engagement and the 

resulting plans. This is notable given the long-standing 

tensions between child welfare and families.

Safety

During staff trainings on family engagement, typically 

one of the first questions asked is whether the process 

is safe. Child welfare workers are well aware of the 

prevalence of addictions, mental illness, and domestic 

violence among the families whom they serve and of 

how these complicating factors could jeopardize the 

safety of participants. At the same time, input from the 

family group can be most helpful in these cases precisely 

because of the uncertainty surrounding these complex 

issues. A case in point is a Michigan study of 593 referrals 

that found that social workers were more likely to refer 

families when parents used substances, and that families 

were more likely to take part in the conferences in these 

situations. Moreover, histories of mental illness and 

domestic violence did not deter workers from making 

referrals or families from accepting the invitation to 

participate (Crampton, 2006). Studies in Canada (Pennell 

and Burford, 2000) and North Carolina (Pennell, 2005b; 
24 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Pennell and Kim, 2010; Pennell and Koss, 2011) showed 

that family meetings can be carried out safely even when 

there is a history of domestic violence. For the perspective 

of survivors and shelter workers on strategies for safe 

meetings, see Pennell and Francis (2005). 

Given that workers tend to refer their more problematic 

cases to conferencing, it is notable that outcome studies 

report a positive effect or no effect on children’s safety. 

The one exception is a quasi-experiment in Sweden that 

found slightly elevated levels of substantiated child abuse 

(but not child neglect) for 97 children with a conference 

as compared to a random sample of 142 who began 

with lower levels of reports and received the usual child 

welfare services (Sundell and Vinnerljung, 2004). A 

California study using an experimental design found no 

significant difference between 209 children and their 

siblings with a conference and 119 control group children 

(Berzin, 2006). A quasi-experiment in Canada concerning 

child maltreatment and the abuse of women showed an 

increase in safety indicators for 32 conferenced families 

in contrast to 31 comparison families who showed some 

decrease in safety (Pennell and Burford, 2000). Likewise, 

positive results on safety were reported by multiyear 

studies in Arizona (Titcomb and LeCroy, 2005), Minnesota 

(Sawyer and Lohrbach, 2008), and Washington State 

(Gunderson, Cahn, and Wirth, 2003). 

Social workers tend to refer their more problematic 

cases to conferencing. Thus, it is notable that nearly 

all outcome studies report a positive effect or no 

effect on children’s safety.

Fairness

Family engagement that is fair respects diverse cultures 

and upholds the human rights of all family members. 

Given the often tense relationship that exists between 

families and child protection workers, it is notable 

that participants from many different countries and 

backgrounds are satisfied with the process of family 

group meetings and the resulting decisions (Burford et 

al., 2010). Studies in North Carolina and Canada both 

found that decisions were made by the family group 

for the most part through participatory means such as 

reaching a consensus, following a trusted leader, and 

bargaining (Pennell, 2006a). In general, family groups feel 

empowered by the process (California—Brodie, 2008; 

Texas—Sheets et al., 2009). Children and adolescents 

prefer this approach to decision making over standard 

practices (Sweden—Sundell and Vinnerljung, 2004). 

However, children and adolescents especially need 

supports if they are to feel influential in the decision 

making rather than just listened to (United Kingdom—

Holland and O’Neill, 2006). 

When workers and families reach agreement on action 

plans, court time and its associated costs are reduced 

(Hawaii—Walker, 2005), and the proceedings become 

less adversarial (Washington, D.C.—Burford, Pennell, 

and Edwards, in press). Action plan agreements lessen 

tensions between family members and child protection 

workers (First Nations in Canada—Glode and Wien, 2007; 

Ireland—Kemp, 2007). Some notable outcomes of the 

participatory process are that the resulting plans reflect 

the family group’s cultural or faith heritage more than 

conventional case plans (California—Thomas, Berzin, 

and Cohen, 2005) and that families more rapidly avail of 

services (USA—Weigensberg, Barth, and Guo, 2009).

Family engagement reduces court time and adversarial 

relationships between agencies and families.

However, unless legislation or policy mandates offering 

families a conference, attention needs to be paid to 

which families receive this intervention and if there are 

racial disparities in allocation. For example, a California 

study found that White families were overrepresented 

while African American families were underrepresented 

(Walter R. McDonald & Associates, 2000). In contrast, a 

Washington State study reported that Native Americans 

were proportionately more involved than White families 

(Shore et al., 2002). A North Carolina study found a slight 

overrepresentation of African American families and 

underrepresentation of White families (Pennell, 2005a). 

And a study of a national database reported no differences 

between White and African American children; however, 

the study did find that having an African American child 

protection worker increased the likelihood of African 

American children being referred to family group decision 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 25

making (McCrae and Fusco, 2010). This research points to 

the importance of planning programs so as to be responsive 

to minority groups (Barn, Das, and Sawyerr, 2009). 

Stability

In the lives of young people, stability encompasses 

durability both in where they call home and to whom 

they remain connected as family. Family engagement is 

a means of advancing such permanency. Conferencing, 

more than is common in child protection, mobilizes the 

family’s informal network, engages fathers and their side 

of the family, and enlarges the contributions of the family 

group (Norway—Falck, 2008; Connecticut—Horwitz, 

2008; North Carolina—Pennell, 2006a; Washington 

State—Veneski and Kemp, 2000). At the conference, 

family group members demonstrate what Williams (2004) 

refers to as an “ethic of care” (p. 4) on behalf of their 

young relatives (United Kingdom—Morris, 2007). As the 

family group exerts itself to make responsible decisions, 

this reinforces for the youths and their family group a 

sense of familial togetherness and pride in their heritage 

(United Kingdom—Holland and Rivett, 2008; Canada—

Pennell and Burford, 2000; New Zealand—Walton, 

McKenzie, and Connolly, 2005). 

One of the most persistent findings is that family groups 

strive to remain connected to their young relatives by 

keeping children with their parents or kin (Washington 

State—Gunderson, Cahn, and Wirth, 2003; Australia—

Kiely and Bussey, 2001; Arizona—Titcomb and LeCroy, 

2005; Hawaii—Walker, 2005; Nebraska—Weisz, Korpas, 

and Wingrove, 2006). Two quasi-experimental studies 

in the U.S. have shown that family meetings promoted 

familial bonds. A Texas study compared the placement 

outcomes for 468 cases in which a conference was held 

within 180 days after a removal for child maltreatment with 

those of 3,598 cases in which the family was not offered 

a conference after a removal (Sheets et al., 2009). The 

authors reported that the treatment group had successfully 

exited care to a significantly greater extent than the control 

group at the end of the study period and that this impact 

was more pronounced for Hispanic and African American 

children than for Anglo American children. 

A District of Columbia study of emergency child removals 

compared the permanency outcomes for 454 children 

whose families had a meeting prior to their court hearing 

with those of 335 children in two control groups (Pennell, 

Edwards, and Burford, 2010). The intervention group had 

significantly higher rates of being placed in kinship foster 

care, exiting care more rapidly, and being discharged 

to parents or relatives. Given that the children in the 

Washington, D.C., study were nearly all African American, 

the impact of the meetings was to reduce placement of 

children of color. The Texas and District of Columbia studies 

show that the involvement of the family group can be useful 

as a strategy for decreasing the disproportionate separation 

of children of color from their families and communities.

Family groups strive to remain connected to their young 

relatives by keeping children with their parents or kin. 

This helps to decrease the disproportionate separation 

of children of color from their families and communities.

Juvenile Justice 

In juvenile justice, the intent of family engagement is for 

those closest to the youths to call them to account while 

continuing to affirm the youths’ connections to their kinship 

networks. This serves to avoid the stigmatizing shaming 

that only demoralizes and alienates youths further, and 

instead holds them responsible, rejoins them to their circle 

of supports, and reestablishes their sense of self-respect 

(Braithwaite, 1989). The youth’s family is usually present 

at the conferences (Bazemore and Schiff, 2005). Having 

family by their side at the conference reminds youths of 

their familial norms and reminds the adults in their lives to 

reassert control and to become more actively involved in 

the lives of the youths. This process detaches youths from 

problematic peers, encourages them to make amends to 

those whom they victimized and to their family group who 

also are adversely affected by the offending, and sets them 

on a path toward healing and empowerment (Maxwell, 

2007a). Because the family group is the central decision 

maker, cultural appropriateness is built into the plans 

(MacRae and Zehr, 2004).

Family engagement becomes more complicated when 

caseworkers are dealing with crossover youth and need to 

incorporate approaches from child welfare and blend them 

with more traditional notions of restorative justice. The 
26 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

process requires that the two systems and caseworkers 

come together to conduct what will amount to a 

sequence of meetings that fall within the domain of family 

engagement approaches, e.g., multidisciplinary team 

meetings designed to complete initial case assessments, 

which should include the family, but may not include 

the victim; family group conferences or team decision 

meetings that may involve the full range of participants, 

including the victim, in order to make case dispositional 

recommendations; and similar meetings as part of ongoing 

case management that would include caseworkers, family 

members, and others determined to be of importance to 

the youth while incarcerated or on community supervision. 

As can be seen, there is a need to be flexible in applying 

the strong body of knowledge in child welfare to this 

growing area of work in juvenile justice. 

In juvenile justice, the intent of family engagement is 

for those closest to the youths to call them to account 

while continuing to affirm the youth’s connection to 

kinship networks.

Safety

In juvenile justice meetings, safety concerns relate 

to the victims, youths, families, and the wider public. 

Common fears are that face-to-face meetings will further 

intimidate and retraumatize victims or conversely that 

victims will treat youth too harshly, making them all the 

more defiant and less likely to return to socially normative 

behavior. Nevertheless, when victims opt to take part in 

conferencing, their participation is often to the good of 

themselves and the offenders. 

Four randomized, controlled trials—two with adults who 

had committed burglary or robbery in London (United 

Kingdom) and two with youths or young adults who 

had committed personal property or violent offenses in 

Canberra (Australia)—reported positive effects for victims 

who participated in conferencing as compared with 

their counterparts where the crime was handled through 

conventional justice proceedings (Sherman et al., 2005). 

These positive effects included that the victims were 

significantly more likely to receive an apology, to rate the 

apology as sincere, to not desire revenge on the offender, 

and to express satisfaction with the process. 

Retrospective interviews with victims of property and 

violent crimes in the United Kingdom and Australia 

further showed significant reductions in post-traumatic 

stress symptoms before and after restorative processes 

(Strang et al., 2006). The victims reported substantially 

reduced levels of fear of and anger toward their offender 

and increased levels of sympathy toward the offender. 

Particularly helpful was learning why they were targeted 

(often random), telling their story, putting a human face on 

the offender, and hearing a genuine apology. 

The response of the victims was not the only positive 

outcome of this approach. A systematic review of twentyfive studies from the United States, Canada, Australia, New 

Zealand, and the United Kingdom found that restorative 

justice programs overall had lower rates of offender 

recidivism than conventional justice (Sherman and Strang, 

2007). Restorative justice was more effective for violent 

than for property offenses and for cases where there 

was an identifiable victim. However, for highly racialized 

youths—e.g., Aboriginals in Australia and Latinos in the 

United States—who had committed property offenses, 

restorative processes had higher rates of repeat offending 

than conventional justice. These negative findings may 

relate to how police invited youths to conferences and 

whether the youths felt fairly treated at the conferences.

One of the studies reviewed by Sherman and Strang was 

the Indianapolis Restorative Justice Experiment, which used 

family group conferences for first-time juvenile offenders. 

Its results were largely positive. The findings indicated 

that youths who participated in family group conferencing 

desisted in their delinquent behavior before being rearrested 

over a twenty-four month period. Further, youths who 

participated in conferences had significantly lower incidence 

rates (McGarrell and Hipple, 2007). Given the high rates 

of reoffending among very young youths who enter the 

juvenile justice system (Loeber, Farrington, and Petechuk, 

2003; Snyder and Sickmund, 1995), these are important 

findings. Improved recidivism outcomes were also found as 

a result of maintaining family connections during a period of 

residential placement (Ryan and Yang, 2005).

Another study found that conferencing had the effect of 

reducing or delaying reoffending, as measured by subsequent 

court appearances or conferences when used as a diversion 

from court handling. Although the reduction in reoffending 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 27

was small, the effect was persistent in all of the comparisons 

performed. When the effects of other factors were controlled 

for, it was found that both the risk of reoffending and the rate 

of reappearances per year in the follow-up period were 15 

to 20 percent lower for those who had a conference than for 

those who went to court (Luke and Lind, 2002). 

Fairness

According to the United Nations (2006), involvement in 

restorative processes should always be voluntary for 

the youths and their victims, they should have sufficient 

knowledge of the process and its potential benefits so 

they can make an informed decision on whether or not 

to participate, and the resulting plans should be reached 

without coercion. The United Nations’ principles also 

emphasize that the decision to hold a restorative conference 

must take into account the safety of participants. 

To be diverted from the court system into a restorative 

program, youths need to acknowledge their wrongdoing so 

that the conference does not become the venue in which to 

resolve whether the offense took place. Even a partial denial 

of responsibility by youths at the conference exacerbates 

victims’ anger (Shapland et al., 2006). If youths reject that 

they committed an offense, then they should have the right 

to a court hearing. If the court establishes guilt, the case 

can then be referred again for conferencing. 

According to the youths, victims, their support groups, 

and justice officials involved in a Canadian program, 

what helps a conference work well is if it achieves three 

intermediate outcomes (Calhoun and Pelech, 2010). The 

first is offender accountability, which includes the youths 

assuming responsibility for their actions, empathizing with 

those they harmed, experiencing remorse for what they did, 

and acting to redress these harms. The second outcome 

is relationship repair, in which the youths feel respect for 

the victims and comprehend the impact of the harm on the 

victims. The third is closure, which refers to young people 

feeling acknowledged as moral agents and having hope 

for the future that they will be able to put this wrongdoing 

behind them. A quasi-experiment compared the pre- and 

post-test scores of youths participating in conferencing 

with those processed through standard procedures in 

the court or school systems (Calhoun and Pelech, 2010). 

This study found that youths in both groups significantly 

progressed on the three intermediate outcomes (with the 

exception of hopefulness for the future), but those involved 

with conferencing did so to a greater extent than those 

processed through standard procedures.

Achieving these intermediate outcomes is affected by who 

attends. When victims are absent, youths are less able to 

grasp the impact of their actions, and victims are less able 

to reach closure on the wrongdoing (Zernova, 2009). In 

programs that allow community volunteers to take part in the 

meetings, difficulties arise when a wide social and cultural 

gulf exists between them and the youths and the volunteers 

are ill prepared for their role (Stahlkopf, 2009). Youths 

want volunteers with whom they can identify, who listen to 

their views, and who do not coerce them into agreeing with 

action steps (Stahlkopf, 2009). As for the facilitators and 

mediators, the necessary skill set includes encouraging 

dialogue among participants, keeping the process under 

control, not taking sides, showing respect for everyone in 

attendance, and creating an environment that is sensitive 

to the needs of victims (Choi and Gilbert, 2010). All of these 

factors generate a sense of fairness among participants.

Another issue of fairness relates to distribution. In jurisdictions 

such as New Zealand, where restorative processes must 

be offered, youth of all backgrounds are included. However, 

biases emerge when programs are discretionary. A case 

in point is an Arizona program to which youth are referred 

by justice officials; here African American youths were less 

likely than White youths to be selected (Rodriquez, 2005). 

The consequence is to add to the disproportionate minority 

contact with the judicial and correctional systems.

Once again, these issues become more nuanced as they 

are applied to crossover youth and dynamics around 

maltreatment and delinquent behavior converge. A 

series of multidisciplinary team meetings, family group 

conferences, and team decision meetings should be held 

for different reasons at various points in the life of a case 

and call for the possibility of different participants. 

The use of family group conferencing in tandem with 

restorative justice principles also contributes to a sense of 

fairness on behalf of families. According to Lewis (2005), 

empowering families to create a workable plan resolves 

their concerns and taps the energy and resources of the 
28 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

family unit. By allowing families to mold the plan to ethnic, 

cultural, and religious philosophies and practices, family 

group conferencing changes the relationship between 

families and the juvenile justice professionals who seek 

to support them. This change in the power differential is a 

dramatically different experience for families in the juvenile 

justice system and contributes to family and community 

ownership of case plans. It also leads to more community 

ownership of the work of the system (Lewis, 2005). 

The use of family group conferencing in tandem with 

restorative justice principles also contributes to a sense 

of fairness on behalf of families. 

Stability

Typically, youths who take part in restorative processes 

are diverted from the court and are less likely to be 

incarcerated. A prime example is New Zealand’s 

introduction of family group conferencing in 1989. By law, 

young people ages 14 to 16 who have committed a serious 

offense are to be offered the opportunity to have their case 

diverted from the youth court to a family group conference. 

The result has been a dramatic drop in court proceedings, 

to one-third of prior rates (Maxwell, 2007b). These changes 

have been accompanied by far lower numbers of custodial 

sentencing—from 270 in 1987 to less than 50 in 2008 

(Pennell, Maxwell, and Nash, in press). 

Typically, youths who take part in restorative processes 

are diverted from the court and are less likely to be 

incarcerated.

These results show how restorative processes keep youths 

connected to their families and communities rather than 

associating with delinquent peers, whether in court or 

detention. However, for youths to continue to stay out of 

trouble, they need supports and services that promote 

positive development and strengthen the involvement of 

the family group in their lives. These include approaches 

such as multisystemic therapy or responsible fathering 

programs. Attention also needs to be paid both to schooling 

and to mental health needs. Holding conferences with 

these contexts in mind can help to sustain youths’ growth 

academically, emotionally, and behaviorally.

The use of family group conferencing as a growing 

practice in juvenile justice case planning and management 

also enhances stability for system-involved youth, 

particularly crossover youth. It allows parents to become 

more involved in the handling of their youth’s case, 

helping to develop more creative plans and stronger 

ownership of those plans, including those for reentry of 

incarcerated youth. It also results in more youths staying 

in the community, rather than being placed in institutional 

settings. This fosters a shift in the relationship between 

child welfare caseworkers, juvenile probation officers, and 

the community, helping to nurture positive relationships 

with the faith-based community and develop additional 

community-based resources (e.g., mentorship programs) 

with little to no additional cost to the formal systems 

(Umbreit, 2000; Marsh and Crow, 1998; Lewis, 2005). 

Schools

In schools, recurring findings are that students and 

their families favor a family engagement approach, see 

the process as enhancing home-school relations, and 

appreciate the plans generated (Baker, 2007, 2008; 

Cameron and Thorsborne, 2001; Crow, Marsh, and Holton, 

2004). Preliminary research in North Carolina shows that 

school-based meetings are linked to improved family 

functioning and students’ adjustment to school (Pennell, 

2008). The meetings work better in a school if they are 

supported by the school leadership, if staff receive needed 

training, and if enough time is allocated to prepare for 

and conduct the conferences (Drewery, 2007; Morrison, 

2007; Riestenberg, 2000). To the contrary, if meetings 

addressing educational matters do not include school 

personnel, their effectiveness in resolving academic issues 

is reduced (Holton and Marsh, 2007).

In schools, students and their families favor a family 

engagement approach, see the process as enhancing 

home-school relations, and appreciate the plans 

generated.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 29

Mental Health

The mental health system has encouraged partnerships 

with families through a system of care approach. As noted 

previously, incorporated into the approach are child and 

family teams. These teams are in keeping with the greater 

emphasis in mental and behavioral health on forming 

positive relationships, agreeing on goals, and collaborating 

on tasks rather than on delivering specific treatments 

(Karver et al., 2005). The results for emotionally troubled 

children and adolescents are positive. In their review of 14 

initiatives, Burns and Goldman (1999) found that system 

of care helps children and youths avoid institutionalization 

and live in the community, make a better adjustment 

in school, and commit fewer delinquent acts. A North 

Carolina study of 98 children with severe emotional 

disorders over a one-year period found that fidelity to 

system of care principles was linked to greater caregiver 

satisfaction and to reductions in the children’s internalizing 

and externalizing behaviors (Graves, 2005). 

In child mental health, fidelity to system of care 

principles is linked to greater caregiver satisfaction 

and to reductions in the children’s internalizing and 

externalizing behaviors.

In summary, family engagement in child welfare, juvenile 

justice, schools, and mental health all yield greater client 

satisfaction and, for the most part, positive outcomes. The 

process encourages youths to take responsibility for their 

actions while receiving necessary supports and protections. 

Although the families frequently have histories of domestic 

violence, addictions, mental illness, and criminal activity, the 

participatory process is carried out safely and derives plans 

that fit the family’s cultural heritage and that motivate youths 

and their kin and workers to lend their support. Youths and 

their families enhance their sense of competence and pride 

in their identity as they generate plans readily agreed to by 

their formal and informal networks. A sense of fair play and 

mutual respect improves relations among the youths and 

their families and the involved agencies and decreases time 

spent in court with its associated costs. 

Repeatedly, studies show that family engagement encourages 

alternatives to placement outside the home, whether from 

foster or group care or from detention. A preponderance of 

studies show improvements to the safety and stability of 

youths as well as their families and victims. For victims, it is 

especially beneficial to hear why the offense occurred and 

to receive a genuine apology from the youth; all this serves 

to alleviate victims’ symptoms of post-traumatic stress. 

The process is especially effective in stopping recidivism of 

violent crimes. It is least effective with highly marginalized 

youths who commit property offenses. This finding points 

to how policing practices may vary with youths of color and 

why it is important to generate trust through the process. 

Another major issue is the distribution of family engagement 

and the need to monitor that access is neither denied to 

specific populations nor imposed without consideration of 

the wishes of the youths and their victims.

The evidence from the different systems is promising. 

What is lacking are rigorous evaluations specific to 

crossover cases. Given that these youths have some 

of the more troubled histories and troubling behaviors, 

longitudinal and comparative studies are needed to assess 

the impact of family engagement on helping families and 

systems work together and on bettering youths’ lives and 

encouraging their development into responsible citizens. 
30 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 31

VI. Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child 

Welfare: Next Steps 

The paper now presents a series of recommendations for 

change based on the practices for advancing youth and 

family leadership and the evidence from evaluation studies 

of family engagement. These efforts are propelled forward 

by contemporary developments—including changing 

national demographics and budgetary constraints—that 

urge a greater reliance on family engagement. Although 

historical developments in child welfare and juvenile 

justice often ran counter to family engagement, these 

agencies are increasingly stretching themselves to reach 

out to youths and their families as essential partners, 

in many instances using the learning that has taken 

place in mental health through systems of care. These 

partnerships make it possible for systems to work 

together in supporting plans that make sense to all the key 

stakeholders. This repositions how juvenile justice, child 

welfare, schools, and mental health relate to each other 

and to the youths and their families and communities.

This paper has focused in large part on family 

engagement for those youth who are involved in both the 

child welfare system and the juvenile justice system. This 

can occur simultaneously or sequentially. In either event, 

these children are in need of the kind of intervention that 

will promote their development and improve their life 

chances. The problems these youngsters present are 

complex and affect their behavior at home, in school, and 

in the community. 

Vision and Principles

The future we envision is one where most children and 

youth will be served in their homes and communities 

with better outcomes and at less cost. Families will be 

viewed as assets to their children and to child-serving 

agencies and their voices will be legitimate drivers of 

change. Fragmentation of services will be minimized by 

a coordinated, comprehensive approach. Communities 

will see themselves as active partners in creating an 

environment in which children and families can heal, 

thrive, and meet their potential. Public institutions will 

support the capacity-building efforts of communities 

to better address the needs of their youth. Through 

engagement in the intervention process, families will be 

empowered to make changes in their own lives and that of 

the community.

Our vision for a realigned service approach is guided by 

the following principles:

•	Youth are served in the context of family and 

community.

•	Youth and their parents are actively engaged in 

defining the problem, developing goals, and writing an 

individualized action plan for change.

•	The service plan for each child and family is integrated 

and holistic and reflects their cultural heritage.

•	When youths have to be removed from their families, 

every effort is made by both the child welfare and 

juvenile justice systems to reduce the length of 

separation and maintain the connection to family.

•	When child welfare removes youths from their home, 

every effort is made to keep them in their schools 

and avoid school transfers; and in juvenile justice an 

education plan is developed designed to keep youths 

connected to school while in out-of-home placement 

and as they transition back into the community.

•	Funding is redirected to structured support of familyand community-based work.

•	Accountability measures are jointly established and 

monitored at the community level.

•	Public agencies collaborate and partner to 

communicate information and provide needed services.
32 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Given this vision and principles, the following 

recommendations are made:

•	Expand the use of parent advocates and navigators 

to serve as translators and coaches to parents 

encountering the child-serving systems for the first time. 

•	Secure systematic feedback from clients on their 

experiences and concerns and use their input to 

improve services. 

•	Involve youth and family advocates as full partners on 

advisory councils and foster their civic engagement. 

•	Expand the use of youth and family mentors who have 

received services to guide parents and youths through 

the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. 

•	Enact provisions that establish a bill of rights 

for parents—including those who have been 

incarcerated—whose children have been removed or 

whose children are at risk of removal. 

•	Develop new initiatives to support youth aging out 

of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems to 

include networks of care and support based on family 

engagement and system of care principles. 

•	Expand the use of strength-based engagement and 

assessment protocols by creating an incentive structure. 

•	Utilize family meetings at each critical decision point in 

a child and their families. 

•	Develop an agency assessment protocol that will allow 

a self-assessment of the level of family engagement 

that is provided. 

•	Provide leadership institutes for agency leaders in both 

the public and private sectors on creating organizations 

that use family and community engagement strategies.

•	Enhance staff development and supervise staff so that 

they build the capacity to conduct strength-based, 

family-engaged services, including family group 

conferencing, ecological mapping, and using the 

Juvenile Relational Inquiry Tool. 

•	Maintain staff development teams that include youth 

and family partners in curricular development, delivery, 

and evaluation. 

•	Develop an approach to conduct conversations about 

the nature and use of power in juvenile justice and 

child welfare, and create a climate of mutuality that 

includes discussion of race, class, gender, and culture. 

•	Incentivize the creation of unified family courts using 

existing model court and court improvement funds so 

that a single judicial officer hears all matters related 

to a specific family and facilitates the development 

of a single case plan for children served by multiple 

agencies. 

•	Promote judicial education that increases 

understanding of the critical role of the family in the 

psychological life of the child and that fosters a critical 

review of the inclusion of the voice of families and 

youth in service planning and decision making. 

•	Change federal policy so that it incentivizes family 

engagement practices. 

•	Provide federal leadership to support family 

involvement through the combined collaborative efforts 

of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services 

Administration, the Department of Justice, and the 

Administration for Children and Families. 

•	Alter Medicaid regulations so that family-focused 

mental health treatment is fundable. 

•	Tap into emerging funded juvenile justice reintegration 

initiatives at the federal level to promote the inclusion 

of family and community to improve and sustain child 

well-being and family and community safety. 

•	Encourage jurisdictions to pool funding for youth served 

by both child welfare and juvenile justice, and allow the 

funds to be used flexibly to meet the needs of children 

and families.

•	Redistribute funding to expand the system of care 

approach within juvenile justice and child welfare, and 

strengthen their collaboration with the schools and 

mental health and public health agencies.

•	Create a means to fund the collaborative development 

of child and family outcome measures that can be used 

by all agencies serving a youth and family. 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 33

Commentary

Through a Family Lens

This commentary offers a family perspective on the nature 

of family engagement and what it takes to both engage with 

an individual family and to have authentic family voice in 

changing how systems and programs operate and cooperate.

I first want to thank Shay Bilchik and the staff of the 

Center for Juvenile Justice Reform for including families 

in the process of designing the symposium at which the 

center’s paper on family engagement will be released 

and for creating an environment that keeps families 

engaged in the discussions. Next, I want to congratulate 

the authors of Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning 

Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families 

and Communities for writing a truthful account of the 

history of family engagement in juvenile justice and child 

welfare, for presenting a research base supporting family 

engagement in making decisions about children, and for 

stressing the importance of cross-system collaboration. 

The authors are equally clear about where they see 

indications of progress and where more work needs 

to be done to achieve the full engagement of families. 

Furthermore, the authors acknowledge that the child 

welfare and juvenile justice systems have not been 

able to sufficiently institutionalize family engagement 

strategies in order to bring about changes in families, 

communities, and child-serving systems.

Families know what works for them. Therefore, it makes 

sense that they drive service delivery decisions. Their 

experience is holistic. In other words, they do not have 

a mental health part, a child welfare part, a juvenile 

justice part, and so forth. Families focus on the concrete 

challenges that they face all day, every day. Families also 

know their strengths and their limitations. Families know 

the difficulties they face. Families can see change in how 

they or their child are doing on a daily basis. They know 

how a program, agency, or system works—or doesn’t 

work—for them. Most importantly, without family comfort 

and buy-in, children and youth will not participate in 

services. Also, family voices are listened to by politicians 

and public officials. Families’ passion and persistence are 

necessary to transform mental health services.1 

Families use their voice and experience to engage with 

others by telling stories, drawing pictures, singing songs, 

dancing, using analogies and mythologies, and describing 

events. These are the tools they use to convert their 

individually lived and collectively learned experience into 

positive action for better outcomes. Efforts to engage 

families in any system or activity must make the best use 

of these tools and skills. This commentary will use lens 

and gear metaphors to illustrate this point.

Lenses and Perspectives

The lens through which I have written this commentary 

is that of an elder in the family movement for children’s 

mental health. Let’s start with what a lens is and does.

Lens: A piece of curved and polished glass or other 

transparent material that forms an image by refracting 

and focusing light passing through it.2 

Optics: A system of two or more lenses that is used in 

an optical instrument such as a telescope or camera.3

The characteristics of the lenses being used and their 

condition result in different images of the same object. 

The image can be sharp or blurry. It can be narrowly 

focused on a small part of the object or it can dwarf the 

object in the surrounding scenery. Photographers choose 

a lens and adjust it to get the desired image. To capture 

an expansive scene or to get a lot of detail, several images 

1

 Osher, T., Blau, G., and Osher, D. (2006), Need for a definition of familydriven care, Family Ties: A Statewide Publication of Wisconsin Family 

Ties, 20(6), 3–5, Madison, WI; Osher, T., and Osher, D. (2007), Families 

matter, in T. P. Gullotta and G. Blau (Eds.), Family influences on childhood 

behavior and development: Evidence-based prevention and treatment 

approaches (pp. 3-61), New York: Routledge.

2

 Encarta Dictionary: English North America.

3

 Encarta Dictionary: English North America.
34 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

may be taken with different lenses and from different 

angles. Different perspectives produce different images 

of the same object. However, no matter how the object 

is viewed, it is still the same. Its characteristics are not 

changed by the lens or perspective. The only thing that 

changes is how the object appears—what it looks like, not 

what it is.

Each person reading this paper sees family engagement 

in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems through 

a different lens. We typically acquire our lenses through 

rigorous professional training programs. Work and life 

experience hones our skills and refines our focus. In 

addition, each system has its own set of optics finely 

tuned by policies and practices. A systems lens focuses 

on its specific mission or mandate. Each family also has 

an image—actually a set of images from each family 

member’s perspective. In addition, our individual and 

organizational cultures function as filters over our lenses 

that further refine what we see. Finding what is common 

and understanding what is different about all these 

perspectives are the keys to family engagement and 

cross-system collaboration.

Finding Common Ground

The view through a family’s lens reveals the whole child 

and does not make the finer distinctions between the 

separate parts the different systems focus on. Systems 

have to make the effort to see and understand the family’s 

point of view. They also need to honestly and respectfully 

share what their lens reveals with the family. It then 

becomes possible to engage the family in creating a 

composite picture that comes closer to reality and from 

which a viable service plan can be developed. Some 

skeptics might say this seems like a dream or fantasy, but 

I don’t think so.

I have asked families around this country and around the 

world what they want their children to be like when they 

are grown up. Universally families hope their children will 

complete their education, be safe and happy in their families 

and communities, be successful working at something they 

value, be a good citizen, stay connected with their culture, 

and contribute back to society. I was delighted to see the 

paper opening with a statement of the conditions necessary 

for youth to grow into responsible and productive adults 

that very closely aligns with these family goals. Among the 

conditions listed by the authors are: safe homes, schools, 

and communities; fair treatment so youth know their social, 

educational, and legal rights; and connections to families, 

communities, and cultural heritage.

Common ground can be found at the system level too. As 

the authors point out, both juvenile justice and child welfare 

are concerned with safety and protection—the former 

for the community and the latter for children and youth. 

Families want their children and communities to be safe too. 

Here is very firm common ground. The first task of engaging 

with families is to look through their lenses to learn what 

they think it will take to keep their children, their family, and 

their community safe. From this base, all interested parties 

can engage with families to devise a plan that delivers 

services that work and ensure that a solution in one system 

does not create a problem in another.

Conditions and Capacities that 

Support Family Engagement

Engage: To involve somebody in an activity, or become 

involved or take part in an activity, to occupy the attention 

or efforts of a person, to become interlocked with.4

 

Engaging families requires active interaction—physical, 

intellectual, emotional—that is bi-directional. Strategies 

that focus only on engaging families are coming at the 

issue from only one direction. The system and the people 

working in it must actively engage with families as well. 

The authors identify family conferencing as an approach 

that engages families, and provide evidence from a variety 

of sources that it gets better outcomes for youth. To build 

upon this area of focus, I would add to the discussion the 

things the system and the workforce do that support family 

engagement. What is the relationship like between the 

system, the workforce, and the family? How is it different 

from practice as usual? The mechanisms that support 

family engagement are very complex. They cannot be 

reduced to a simple set of things the family does such as 

return phone calls or attend a treatment meeting. That only 

4

 Encarta Dictionary: English North America, and American College 

Dictionary.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 35

focuses on behavioral engagement. Family involvement 

results from the intersection of the competencies or 

capacities of all the participants as well as the conditions in 

which the interaction occurs. We do not necessarily need 

family engagement programs that are manualized. We need 

to enhance the capacities of staff and families and improve 

the conditions in which they work together.

Conditions: Something that must exist for something 

else to happen, e.g., to bring a situation about.5

Capacities: Mental or physical ability to do something.6

There is interaction between the conditions and capacities 

as well. For example, families are more likely to have the 

capacity to interact when the conditions of the physical 

environment are welcoming, safe, and respectful. They 

are more likely to demonstrate their capacity to trust with 

personnel who demonstrate by words and deeds they too 

have the capacity to be honest and reliable. Personnel are 

more likely to be honest and reliable when exhibiting these 

behaviors is a condition of their employment and supervisors 

reward their use. Furthermore, for any family or staff member 

to exhibit any behavior(s) desired by a program or system, 

he or she must have the skill to perform it, the resources and 

supports necessary to accomplish it, and permission to do it, 

either from relevant authorities such as an officer of the court 

or others involved in the interaction such as a family elder.

The most important condition for family engagement is 

safety—feeling physically and emotionally safe, and feeling 

safe from retribution or sanctions resulting from engaging 

honestly. It makes a difference if a family member is 

present because that person is compelled to be there (will 

suffer a serious consequence for not appearing) or because 

that family member is an active and persistent advocate 

for the child. Even if families are compelled, it makes a 

difference if family members are greeted warmly and 

treated with respect rather than being considered the root 

cause of their child’s situation and treated with distain. It 

matters if professionals value the family’s input and make 

that evident as they interact with family members.

The conditions under which children and youth come 

to the attention of child welfare and juvenile justice add 

blame and shame, fear, anger, and stress to the context. 

Under these conditions, the capacity of family members 

to understand the situation and manage the resulting 

emotions could affect their degree of engagement. A 

family member who has been traumatized by previously 

living under a military dictator might be very distrustful 

of authorities and be reluctant to take part in the 

shared decision-making process even when given the 

opportunity. If the same family member was coached by 

a supportive, trained peer mentor who had successfully 

navigated the system, that family member would be better 

prepared to participate and might believe that a positive 

outcome was possible.

The authors offer the mental health systems of care 

program as an example of how engagement with families 

results in better outcomes for children and youth in juvenile 

justice and child welfare. Family engagement in the 

systems of care program is grounded in the 12th Working 

Definition of Family-Driven Care, which states “Families 

have a primary decision-making role in the care of their own 

children as well as the policies and procedures governing 

care for all children in their community, state, tribe, territory, 

and nation, including: choosing culturally and linguistically 

competent supports, services, and providers; setting 

goals; designing, implementing, and evaluating programs; 

monitoring outcomes; and partnering in funding decisions.”7 

The juvenile justice and child welfare systems would be well 

advised to use this definition. The ten guiding principles for 

implementing the definition identify the conditions that are 

necessary for meaningful and effective bi-directional family 

engagement (see sidebar). To fully make the paradigm 

shift, the juvenile justice and child welfare systems will 

need to work on developing the capacities of families, 

the workforce, and those responsible for system policy to 

operate under the conditions described in these principles.

I offer, as an example, just a few of the family, workforce, 

and system capacities that would operationalize the 

second guiding principle, which says “families and 

youth are given accurate, understandable, and complete 

information necessary to set goals and to make informed 

decisions and choices about the right services and 

supports for individual children and their families.” Families 

would have the capacity to read and understand reports 

5

 Encarta Dictionary: English North America.

6

 Encarta Dictionary: English North America.

7

 Retrieved from http://www.ffcmh.org/r2/publications2/family-drivendefined.
36 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

and documents, ask questions about them, and discuss 

these with advisors and experts they choose and trust. The 

workforce would have the capacity to explain reports and 

documents in terms the family can understand and in the 

preferred language. The workforce would also encourage 

families to ask questions and to provide honest reactions 

to reports and documents. The systems would have the 

capacity to deliver reports and documents to families in their 

own language and in a timely manner. The systems would 

also have the capacity to provide communication skills 

training to the workforce and follow up with supervision to 

ensure that sensitive information is shared in a respectful 

and culturally appropriate manner. Families would 

identify their goals and have the capacity to understand 

all the options before them as well as the benefits and 

consequences of each option. The workforce would have 

the capacity to offer options that address the family’s goals 

and explain in detail both what each offers and requires of 

the family. The system would have the capacity to create 

a service network that meets the needs identified by the 

population being served and that is monitored to ensure 

both safety and high-quality outcomes.

Gearing Up to Shift the Power

The authors point out that child welfare and juvenile justice 

are two systems that “are coercive institutions that employ 

the power of the state to intervene in the lives of families 

and/or individuals when certain standards or expectations 

are violated.” The use of power is at the root of all efforts 

to engage families and to work collaboratively across the 

various systems that service children, youth, and families. 

The way power is distributed has to change. As in a 

transmission, a disengaged gear is not part of the power 

train. We need a new transmission that engages families 

with juvenile justice and child welfare. The gears in a 

transmission connect an engine (power source) to the 

wheels, adjust the speed, and change the direction in 

which a vehicle goes. A child or youth in some kind of 

difficulty is the engine that is the power source for both 

the systems. If all children and youth were well cared 

for and behaving responsibly, we would not need these 

systems. All the gears have to be “in synch” for the 

transmission to work smoothly. The systems providing 

service to the child or youth and family are all gears in 

Guiding Principles of Family-Driven Care

•	Families and youth, providers and administrators 

embrace the concept of sharing decision making and 

responsibility for outcomes. 

•	Families and youth are given accurate, understandable, 

and complete information necessary to set goals and to 

make informed decisions and choices about the right 

services and supports for individual children and their 

families. 

•	All children, youth, and families have a biological, 

adoptive, foster, or surrogate family voice advocating 

on their behalf and may appoint them as substitute 

decision makers at any time. 

•	Families and family-run organizations engage in peer 

support activities to reduce isolation, gather and 

disseminate accurate information, and strengthen the 

family voice. 

•	Families and family-run organizations provide direction 

for decisions that impact funding for services, 

treatments, and supports and advocate for families and 

youth to have choices. 

•	Providers take the initiative to change policy and 

practice from provider-driven to family-driven. 

•	Administrators allocate staff, training, support, and 

resources to make family-driven practice work at the 

point where services and supports are delivered to 

children, youth, and families and where family- and 

youth-run organizations are funded and sustained. 

•	Community attitude change efforts focus on removing 

barriers and discrimination created by stigma. 

•	Communities and private agencies embrace, value, and 

celebrate the diverse cultures of their children, youth, and 

families and work to eliminate mental health disparities. 

•	Everyone who connects with children, youth, and 

families continually advances his or her own cultural 

and linguistic responsiveness as the population served 

changes so that the needs of diverse populations are 

appropriately addressed. 

Source: Retrieved from http://www.ffcmh.org/r2/publications2/familydriven-defined.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 37

the transmission, contributing their share of energy to 

making the vehicle move in the right direction and at the 

right speed. Individual system gears can engage and 

disengage as they are needed along a journey. The family 

gear, however, is always in play. The family’s perspective 

is considered when making all decisions, including course 

corrections, along the way.8 

Sharing decision-making power with families does not 

mean giving it up, but it does require careful attention 

to work. Along with decision-making power come the 

responsibilities of making decisions wisely and following 

through on commitments. When power is shared, the 

playing field is leveled, the environment is safer. Family 

members are encouraged to talk about their goals 

and concerns and can react to what others have said 

without fear of recrimination. Families that have been 

disempowered need support, mentoring, and training to 

relearn how to do this. Family-run organizations have been 

the best source of this kind of information, training, and 

support. The National Federation of Families for Children’s 

Mental Health is developing a credentialing program for 

Parent Support Providers that will ensure that people 

employed in any state in this field meet consistent and 

high standards of performance. The juvenile justice and 

child welfare systems would be well advised to align their 

plans and expectations for peer support with this national 

initiative, whose collaborators include the Center for 

Mental Health Services and Magellan Behavioral Health.

There is no doubt that outcomes are better when families 

are engaged. A lot of work, therefore, has been done to 

devise strategies to engage families with systems. This is 

only half of what is required. The systems must engage 

with families as well. Future work on family engagement 

must focus on developing the capacity of the workforce 

to engage with families and share power with them, 

simultaneously creating the conditions that will allow this 

new relationship to flourish. 

Trina W. Osher, President

Huff Osher Consulting, Inc.

8 Osher, T., and Osher, D. (2002), The paradigm shift to true collaboration 

with families, Journal of Child and Family Studies, 11(1).
38 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 39

Commentary

Creating a Legacy of Empowering 

Engagement of Youth and Families: 

A Personal and Professional 

Perspective

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on a body of 

work that contributes meaningful strategies for improving 

day-to-day practices within the juvenile justice and child 

welfare systems. First and foremost, thank you to Shay 

Bilchik, founder and director of the Georgetown University 

Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, for continued 

leadership in the effort to align these two systems that 

have had the ability to greatly affect the lives of children, 

youth, and families. The work and collaboration of CJJR 

has been an example of an organization that is working 

hard to move theory and research into practice, in part 

by sponsoring the exploration of issues such as family 

engagement from new perspectives. 

My commentary on Safety, Fairness, Stability: 

Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to 

Engage Families and Communities stems from both 

personal and professional experience—in that order. 

Having descended from two generations of relatives 

whose lives were enveloped by the foster care, mental 

health, and criminal justice systems, I know that my family 

is reflective of the same statistical outcomes we know 

to be true of youth involved in these systems. Could my 

aunt, who lived in ten foster homes, or my mother, who 

was ravaged by mental illness, have been better served by 

systems that were more supportive of family engagement? 

I believe that the answer is, unequivocally, yes. Having 

served as a direct service worker and youth advocate 

in various capacities, and having had personal—often 

negative—experiences with the foster care system in my 

childhood and adolescence, I believe passionately in the 

need to reform these systems and to create a stronger, 

more respectful approach for youth and families who are 

in these systems of care. 

In reading the authors’ work, I was most impacted by 

their analysis of the history of the child welfare and 

juvenile justice systems, and in particular, how certain 

biased assumptions and beliefs have shaped policy 

and services to youth and families over the years. I will 

focus my commentary on the following related issues 

raised by the authors: the historical lack of engagement 

of families and communities in the child welfare and 

juvenile justice systems; the overrepresentation of certain 

ethnic groups within the systems; the need for genuine 

parent and youth engagement; and the importance of 

changing organizational culture, systems, and training to 

embrace family engagement strategies. Taken together, 

these changes should result in the cultivation of an 

environment in which youth and families are empowered 

to play a greater role in mapping out their futures—a role 

they are quite capable of fulfilling, but are not asked to 

consistently assume.

The child welfare and juvenile justice systems were 

designed in response to children and youth being in 

environments that, due to a host of reasons, did not 

facilitate positive development in a consistent way. The 

lack of family and community engagement in planning for 

and providing services to youth within these systems is 

largely due to historically patronizing attitudes of social 

workers, who viewed themselves as “child savers.” Child 

welfare systems were built on a Euro-centric premise that 

service providers were more knowledgeable about and 

more capable of offering the proper environments and 

strategies that lead to positive youth development than the 

families of the youth themselves. 

Sadly, this patronizing view persists today, resulting in 

a disproportionate representation of certain racial and 

ethnic groups in our current systems. In particular, African 

American and Native American youth are removed from 

their families in higher numbers than other ethnic groups, 

and their family members are offered little opportunity to 

get involved in their children’s care plans in ways that are 

significant, culturally relevant, and logistically feasible. 
40 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

The feeling of disempowerment that African Americans 

have more broadly experienced in the U.S. due to racist 

attitudes and systemic injustices is present in the child 

welfare and juvenile justice systems to an even greater 

degree—exacerbating a feeling of helplessness and 

disconnectedness in the African American community. To 

offset this, there is a real need for meaningful family and 

community engagement that is consistent and respectful 

of the culture of the youth’s origin. 

In the last decade, advocacy and reform efforts have 

acknowledged the need for integrated systems of 

support that engage families and communities in a more 

significant and pivotal way. Systemic change is at its 

strongest when it includes a comprehensive approach. 

We have learned that an overwhelming number of youth 

who are not reunified with their families while in the 

child welfare system, return to those same families and 

communities from which they were initially removed after 

aging out. While this pattern may seem self-evident to 

those of us with roots in marginalized communities, it is 

still a relatively recent phenomenon for some, and as a 

result, certain regions of the country are not yet committed 

to discussing and identifying ways in which to engage 

families and communities in planning for this return and 

the cross-system supports that the youth will need as they 

reengage their families.

So how do we engage the families and communities of 

these youths in a meaningful way, and what are some 

of the challenges? To successfully involve families as 

partners, we must continue to challenge traditional deficitbased perceptions of the families of youth in care—a point 

emphasized by the authors. We must be open to exploring 

assumptions that are rooted in socioeconomic status and bias 

linked to ethnic and racial identity. As we make progress on 

these challenging issues, we cannot afford to focus only on 

scattered examples of success. Instead we must seek broadbased change that overcomes the biased personal values 

of many who work in the system, values that too often are 

allowed to slow the process of systemic change.

It is important to note that what is being discovered in 

the world of academia (evidenced-based research, best 

practice models) and increasingly discussed across the 

country has only been implemented in practice on a small 

scale. Strategies discussed in theory or in small applications 

have not yet been embedded in national systems-wide 

reform efforts. There is a significant time lag between what 

is being taught in academia to emerging social workers and 

the real-life applications of the recommendations made by 

scholars. Perhaps more resources are needed to put ideas 

into practice more efficiently, or perhaps we need to push 

our policymakers more strongly to bring about needed 

changes. Whatever the case may be, the longer it takes to 

bring about systems reform, the more our children, youth, 

and families will suffer. 

Much of the research that has looked at how to implement 

family and community engagement promotes the idea 

that training must inspire compassion in direct service 

workers. New social workers and probation officers 

are moving into the field yearly, and these providers 

must understand the historical context of families of 

color—the distrust of the very systems in which they 

are overrepresented—in order to fully understand the 

historical context for new policies and practices designed 

to correct previous injustices. Additionally, it is imperative 

that parent and guardian partners receive similarly 

intensive training in order to work in concert with service 

providers and to be effective advocates for their children. 

Although this paper is focused on family engagement, 

we must not forget the importance of youth engagement 

in developing and delivering child welfare services. The 

paper’s authors focused on the benefits of family and 

community engagement—and of parent partners in 

particular. Although this is a great strategy, we need to 

also involve youth in helping to design the systems that 

serve them. While parents, community agencies, and care 

workers are constructing a path for collaboration, a young 

person in care—juvenile justice or child welfare—is living 

“inside” the system, in a foster home, a group home, or 

in juvenile detention. Youth are often locked out of the 

care planning process, having to live and adapt to an 

environment that is managed by a system of care that falls 

outside of the young person’s sphere of influence. Service 

providers must find ways to engage youth in their own 

care planning process, yet not lose sight of the potentially 

derailing power dynamic that could be present when the 

youth in care are at the table with her or his parents or 

guardians. This may lead youth to feel powerless and at the 
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 41

mercy of adults. Given this, an additional layer of support 

and transparency is needed to effectuate a process by 

which we more effectively engage both family and youth. 

Finally, it is important to understand the history and 

background of both systems, as they continue to evolve 

within our society. Creating a sustainable culture of 

engagement for those who work in the system, as well 

as for those who are personally experiencing the impact 

of those systems, is the foundation of empowerment. 

Empowerment is not something that is given by those 

who professionally represent systems of care to youth 

and families. It is a realization that comes from having a 

genuine place at the table. The authors have presented 

some tangible examples and tools. We must now make 

engagement an unmovable expectation, driven by our 

values and by a common set of expectations about how 

we do this life-changing work across the country. 

Kordnie Jamillia Lee

Pathway to College Program
42 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 43

Appendix A: Systems of Core Values and Principles 

Systems of care is a framework used to support children 

and families with complex needs through a multidisciplinary 

approach. The following core values and principles 

for systems of care are adapted from the children’s 

mental health field, which also utilizes a systems of care 

framework. 

Core Values 

The system of care should be: 

1. Child centered and family focused, with the needs of 

the child and family dictating the types and the mix of 

services provided. 

2. Community based, with the services, as well as 

management and decision-making responsibility, at 

the community level. 

3. Culturally and linguistically competent, with agencies, 

programs, and services that are responsive to 

the cultural, racial, and ethnic differences of the 

populations being served. 

Guiding Principles 

1. Children and families should have access to a 

comprehensive array of services that address their 

physical, emotional, social, and educational needs. 

2. Children and families should receive individualized 

services in accordance with the unique needs and 

potentials of each child or parent and guided by an 

individualized service plan. 

3. Children and families should receive services within 

the least restrictive, most normative environment that 

is clinically appropriate and safe. 

4. The families and surrogate families of children should 

be full participants in all aspects of the planning and 

delivery of services. 

5. Children and families should receive services that 

are integrated, with linkages between child-serving 

agencies and programs and with mechanisms for 

planning, developing, and coordinating services. 

6. Children and families should be provided with case 

management or similar mechanisms to ensure that 

multiple services are delivered in a coordinated 

and therapeutic manner and that everyone in the 

family can move through the system of services in 

accordance with their changing needs. 

7. Early identification and intervention should be 

promoted by the system of care in order to enhance 

the likelihood of positive outcomes. 

8. Children and youth should be ensured smooth 

transitions to the adult service system as they reach 

maturity. 

9. The rights of children should be protected, and 

effective advocacy efforts should be promoted. 

10. Children and families should receive services without 

regard to race, religion, national origin, sex, physical 

disability, or other characteristics, and services should 

be sensitive and responsive to cultural differences and 

special needs.

For more information on systems of care, visit www.

childwelfare.gov/management/reform/soc/.

From Children’s Bureau, Office on Child Abuse and Neglect. (2010). 

Community partnerships: Improving the response to child maltreatment 

(Appendix Q). Retrieved from http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/

usermanuals/partners/appendq.cfm.
44 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 45

Appendix B: Achievement of FGC Objectives

(pre-conference and conference)

Objectives Strongly Disagree Agree Strongly Don’t Not

 Disagree Agree Know Applicable

1. Each service provider was clear about their role (ex., 1 2 3 4 7 8 child protection, counseling).

2. The FGC coordinator was respectful of the family group. 1 2 3 4 7 8

3. The only job of the FGC coordinator was to organize the 

conference. He/she did not have other jobs to do with 1 2 3 4 7 8

the family.

4. The family group understood the reasons for holding 1 2 3 4 7 8 the conference.

5. The conference was held in a place that felt right to the 1 2 3 4 7 8 family group.

6. The conference was held in a way that felt right to the 1 2 3 4 7 8 family group (ex., the right food, right time of day).

7. More family group than service providers were invited 1 2 3 4 7 8 to the conference.

8. Different sides of the family were invited to the 

conference (ex., father and mother’s sides of the 1 2 3 4 7 8

family).

9. People at the conference were relatives and also people 1 2 3 4 7 8 who feel “like family” (ex., old friends, good neighbors).

10. The family group was prepared for the conference 

(ex., got enough information on what happens at a 1 2 3 4 7 8

conference).

11. The service providers were prepared for the 

conference (ex., got enough information on what 1 2 3 4 7 8

happens at a conference).

12. The conference had enough supports and protections 1 2 3 4 7 8 (ex., support persons).

13. Service providers shared their knowledge but they did 1 2 3 4 7 8 not tell the family group how to solve the problems.

14. The family group had private time to make their plan. 1 2 3 4 7 8

15. The plan included ways that the family group will 1 2 3 4 7 8 help out.

16. The plan included steps to evaluate if the plan is 

working and to get the family group back together 1 2 3 4 7 8

again if needed.

17. Social Services approved the plans without 1 2 3 4 7 8 unnecessary delays.

Permission is granted to reproduce and use the “Achievement of FGC Objectives (pre-conference and conference)” as long as they are kept 

in their complete form and their authorship is acknowledged as follows:

Pennell, J. (2003). Achievement of objectives, pre and during conference. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State University, Department of Social Work.
46 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Achievement of FGC Objectives (continued)

Cultural Safety: Conference held in the right way for family group.

____ 5. The conference was held in a place that felt right to the family group.

____ 6. The conference was held in a way that felt right to the family group (ex., the right food, right time of day).

____ 9. People at the conference were relatives and also people who feel “like family” (ex., old friends, good neighbors).

____12. The conference had enough supports and protections (ex., support persons).

____ Subtotal divided by 4 (or number of scored items) =

Community Partnerships: Family group and service providers clear about what doing.

____ 1. Each service provider was clear about their role (ex., child protection, counseling).

____ 4. The family group understood the reasons for holding the conference.

____10. The family group was prepared for the conference (ex., got enough information on what happens at a conference).

____11. The service providers were prepared for the conference (ex., got enough information on what happens at a 

conference).

____ Subtotal divided by 4 (or number of scored items) =

Family Leadership: Family group empowered to make a plan.

____ 2. The FGC coordinator was respectful of the family group.

____ 3. The only job of the FGC coordinator was to organize the conference. He/she did not have other jobs to do with the 

family.

____ 7. More family group than service providers were invited to the conference.

____ 13. Service providers shared their knowledge but they did not tell the family group how to solve the problems.

____ 14. The family group had private time to make their plan.

____ Subtotal divided by 5 (or number of scored items) =

Inclusive Planning: Diverse family participants involved, and continued family-community-state 

planning supported.

____ 8. Different sides of the family were invited to the conference (ex., father and mother’s sides of the family).

____ 15. The plan included ways that the family group will help out.

____ 16 The plan included steps to evaluate if the plan is working and to get the family group back together again if needed.

____ 17. Social Services approved the plans without unnecessary delays.

____ Subtotal divided by 4 (or number of scored items) =
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 47

Appendix C: Juvenile Relational Inquiry Tool 

Background

The Juvenile Relational Inquiry Tool (JRIT) is a series 

of questions that help juvenile justice staff identify the 

social supports of young people in their care. The goals 

of the JRIT are to help staff build rapport with youth and 

identify people who can provide support to the youth 

while they are incarcerated and when they return to the 

community. This tool was developed with support from 

the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 

and in partnership with juvenile justice departments in 

Arizona, Michigan, and Ohio. The tool is modeled after 

an instrument for adult corrections called the Relational 

Inquiry Tool.1 

Structure

The JRIT has eight questions with additional follow-up 

questions. The questions elicit discussion about the 

support available to youth and give them an opportunity 

to think about their transition back into the community. 

For example, “If you were to build a team of people who 

support you, who would be on that team?” or “Who 

is most proud of you? Who are you most proud of?” 

The JRIT, which is completed in an average of thirteen 

minutes, starts and ends with a script to help staff 

introduce it to youth. The JRIT is appropriate for staff in 

facilities, group homes, and other juvenile justice settings. 

Promising Results

Youth and staff alike have responded positively to the 

tool. Youth from the W.J. Maxey Boys Training School in 

Michigan reported that families and other social supports 

are important to their success. They said the JRIT 

conversation was different from other conversations with 

staff about family because it focused on the strengths 

instead of challenges. The youth concluded that the tool 

could help staff learn about them and help them learn 

about themselves (Shanahan, 2010).2

In 2010, with support from the Public Welfare Foundation, 

the Vera Institute of Justice began working with the Ohio 

Department of Youth Services to help staff implement the 

JRIT. The implementation is part of a more comprehensive 

agencywide improvement effort that is heavily focused 

on family. Youth specialists (the staff assigned to ensure 

the safety and security of the facility, staff, and youth) are 

administering the JRIT and incorporating the information 

they learn into the monthly treatment team meetings. Staff 

are reacting positively to the JRIT and report being surprised 

at how much they learn in such a short amount of time. 

Facility staff are also sharing the information with parole 

officers so that all staff are aware of youth’s social support 

and are finding ways to incorporate that knowledge into 

their direct work with youth and their families. 

For more information on the JRIT, contact Ryan Shanahan, 

Senior Program Associate, at rshanahan@vera.org or 

(212) 376–3071.

1

 diZerega, M., and Villalobos Agudelo, S. (2011). Piloting a tool for 

reentry: A promising approach to engaging family members. New York: 

Vera Institute of Justice.

2

 Shanahan, R. (2010, Spring). Integrating family-focused approaches 

in juvenile justice reform. The Link: A publication of the Child Welfare 

League of America, 8(1), 1–6.
48 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 49

Appendix D: Tools for Identifying Family 

and Community Relationships

Family Case Management 

Flowchart 

La Bodega de la Familia developed and tested a set of tools 

that, in different versions, were common to family therapy.1 

The aim was to facilitate the inclusion of family and their 

social networks, to document strengths and challenges, 

and to provide a visual means to engage families involved 

with the juvenile and criminal justice systems and/or child 

welfare system. These tools were subsequently adopted by 

social service and government agencies. La Bodega was 

groundbreaking in developing a family case management 

(FCM) system and was unique in its mission to engage not 

only families but the surrounding neighborhood as well. The 

Vera Institute of Justice, through its Family Justice Program, 

provides training and technical assistance to government 

and social service agencies interested in adapting and 

applying these tools to achieve better outcomes for 

individuals and for their families. 

Family Case Management Flowchart

The Bodega Model views family case management as an inclusive process that engages individuals who are involved with the 

justice system; members of the family, broadly defined; and practitioners such as corrections officers and treatment providers. 

Together, they identify and tap the family’s inherent strengths and available resources, building a network of healthy relationships. 

 Goals and Results Activities Anticipated Outcomes

 Initial Contact •	Engage with FCM staff

•	Provide information or other short-term 

support

•	Connect with other community based 

organizations and government partners 

as appropriate

•	Assess for crisis

•	Determine eligibility for FCM

•	Review and sign confidentiality 

agreements

•	Immediate family priorities 

ascertained

•	Connection to resources

•	Family members treated with 

respect

 Phase One:

 Engagement 

 and

 Assessment

Develop working relationship among FCM 

and family members:

•	Identify strengths and areas of conflict

•	Identify resources to which family 

members are already connected

•	Consider family, broadly defined; 

understand family’s internal 

relationships

•	Conduct initial home visit(s)

•	Explain the Bodega Model®

•	Look at family photos and 

review family stories to begin 

identifying resources

•	Develop genogram and ecomap

•	Assess areas where family is 

functioning well, where family 

could benefit from services

•	Family strengths and 

resources evident to family 

members

•	Family members engaged to 

support person under justice 

supervision

•	Government and other CBOs 

engaged to support person 

under justice supervision

1

 Minuchin, P., Colapinto, J., and Minuchin, S. (2007). Working with families of the poor, 2nd ed. New York: Guilford.
50 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

 Goals and Results Activities Anticipated Outcomes

 Phase Two:

 Create and 

 Implement 

 Family Action 

 Plan

•	Support relationships of family members

•	Reinforce positive family interventions and 

supports 

•	Respond to family needs for services

•	Improve treatment and other related 

outcomes

•	Determine continuing transition issues 

with family and community-supervision 

partner

•	Involve family members

•	Support family problemsolving

•	Set behavior goals

•	Engage and connect 

to government and 

community partners

•	Continue home 

visits

•	Increased likelihood that 

family members remain 

safely in the community

•	Reduction in new crime

•	Family health improved

•	Coordination of services 

improved

•	Family well-being 

strengthened

 Phase Three:

 Transition from 

 Family Case 

 Management

•	Acknowledge areas where family is 

functioning well

•	Determine continuing transition issues with 

family and supervision partner

•	Families use goal setting and goal analysis 

to make decisions

•	Families contact each other to seek and 

provide support

Family mentoring:

•	Conduct skillsreinforcement training

•	Provide platform for 

families to interact 

and support one 

another 

•	Reduced reliance on 

government and FCM staff

•	Demonstrated family 

problem-solving

•	Increased collective 

efficiency in community
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 51

Strength-Based Genogram

A tool that can assist in family and community 

engagement is the strength-based genogram. A genogram 

is a diagram of an individual’s family and social network; 

a strength-based genogram includes examples of 

inherent social capital such as who attends school, has 

graduated, is employed, or takes care of children or 

seniors. It is a visual mapping tool that accomplishes 

a number of matters simultaneously: It provides basic 

demographics such as age, gender, histories of drug use, 

criminal justice involvement, and chronic illness such as 

HIV/AIDS; it allows participants to talk about the nature 

of relationships; and it provides an opportunity for law 

enforcement officers or social service providers to engage 

families in a visual, respectful, and participatory way. 

(Vera Institute of Justice, n.d.) 

Source: Vera Institute of Justice. (n.d.) Sample genogram. Retrieved from http://www.vera.org/files/u9/genogram-key-2010.gif.

Like a family tree, a genogram can be used to identify 

particular lineages that may help to explain the behavioral 

problems of a certain juvenile as well as that person’s 

potential strengths. The genogram can also assist 

professionals in identifying who within a child’s family 

may be able to provide the most consistent and positive 

support in assisting a loved one to succeed in community 

supervision and stay out of secure detention. The tool is 

also useful in assisting those working with parents or kin 

to regain custody of children by noting supportive systems. 

It is vital that the genogram depict not only the negative 

influences within a family and social structure, but also 

the positive assets, which can in turn provide beneficial 

networks and patterns that strengthen family relationships. 
52 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Family and Institutional Ecomaps

Another tool being used to engage families in the juvenile 

justice and child welfare systems is an ecomap. By 

organizing and displaying both formal and informal 

government and community connections in a manner that 

is simple and easy to construct, the ecomap serves two 

purposes. First, the ecomap illustrates the nature of the 

relationships—be they strong, neutral, or in conflict—

between family members and institutions; and second, 

by organizing the family’s institutional affiliations and 

marking their functional relationship, the ecomap allows 

a level of insight into ways that communication can be 

facilitated and service coordination can be improved.

Many families that have a juvenile who is either involved 

or at risk of becoming involved in the juvenile justice 

system are also involved with child protective services, 

public housing, probation or parole, Medicaid, and 

Social Security Insurance—all of which have their own 

requirements for receipt of services. Most families 

also have positive affiliations, with a clinic, faith 

organization, sports activity, employment, or godparent. 

The ecomap can be used to enhance the use of existing 

connections—connections that may have gone unnoticed 

if not mapped—as well as to depict where there may 

be conflicting goals and demands among the different 

agencies, and more often than not, highlight the need for 

interagency collaboration and coordination.

The ecomap can be adapted to diagram institutional 

connections with a cluster of families. Called an 

institutional ecomap, it is a tool that policymakers 

and government officials can use to illustrate funding 

and authority streams for families involved in juvenile 

justice and/or child welfare. Its function is to improve 

coordination and collaboration among public agencies 

with responsibility for child well-being and safety. 

Governors and mayors may use this mapping technique 

as they strategize ways to improve strength-based family 

engagement processes.

Family Ecomap

 

 

Source: Vera Institute of Justice, Family Justice Program. (n.d.) Tools and 

methods used by the family justice program. Retrieved from http://www.

vera.org/content/tools-methods-family-justice-program.

Institutional Ecomap

Source: Vera Institute of Justice, Family Justice Program.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 53

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About the Authors

Joan Pennell

Dr. Joan Pennell is director of the Center for Family and 

Community Engagement and professor of social work at 

North Carolina State University. She has directed projects 

on family engagement in child welfare, juvenile justice, 

schools, domestic violence, and systems of care and is part 

of an international team studying the evidence for family 

engagement in child welfare. She has presented on familyled meetings across Canada and the United States as well 

as in Australia, England, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

Carol Shapiro

For more than thirty years, Carol Shapiro has been an 

innovator in the fields of criminal and social justice. Prior to 

joining Columbia University, Ms. Shapiro was the founder 

and president of Family Justice, a nonprofit organization 

that taps the strengths of families and their social networks 

to break the cycle of victimization and justice system 

involvement. Much of her training, technical assistance, 

and professional presentations center on improving family 

well-being and public safety through the integration of 

a strength-based, family-focused approach within the 

overlapping law enforcement, public health, public housing, 

and child welfare systems in the United States and other 

countries. Carol is an Ashoka Fellow and a recipient of an 

Innovation in American Government award.

Carol Wilson Spigner

Carol W. Spigner, D.S.W., retired from the University 

of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice in 

June 2010 after having served as associate professor/

clinician educator for a decade. There, Dr. Spigner directed 

the social policy program and taught policy and macro 

practice. Prior to her arrival at Penn, Dr. Spigner was 

associate commissioner of the Children’s Bureau at the U.S. 

Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration 

for Children and Families, where she was responsible for 

the administration of federal child welfare programs. Her 

interests have focused on leadership, disproportionality, and 

reform of child welfare systems.

About the Commentators

Kordnie Jamillia Lee

For over a decade, Kordnie jamillia Lee has been 

advocating for the needs of youth involved in the foster 

care, juvenile justice, and mental health systems. 

Originally from Fresno County, California, and now residing 

in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kordnie started out as a 

peer youth advocate with California Youth Connection 

while still in care. She has direct service experience as 

a social services aide, case worker, life skills trainer, 

leadership mentor, and counselor to youth.

Trina Osher

Trina W. Osher is President of Huff Osher Consulting, 

Inc. She speaks with a family voice working to build 

collaborative alliances between families, policy makers, 

and providers in the mental health, education, child 

welfare, and juvenile justice communities. She also 

collaborates with the research community in studies that 

will result in information that can improve the quality of life 

for children, youth, and families. 
66 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities 67
68 Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities

Center for Juvenile Justice Reform

Georgetown Public Policy Institute

Georgetown University

Box 571444

3300 Whitehaven Street, NW, Suite 5000 http://cjjr.georgetown.edu

Washington, D.C. 20057 jjreform@georgetown.edu