Considering the Upstream Factors Posted on January 20, 2009 Prevention is the future of juvenile justice intervention, suggests Hortensia Amaro (bio).

The current focus is still very much on the juvenile justice population. And that's very important, and there are certain things that need to be done there and I think a lot that can be improved.

But I also want to say that in addition to intervening once these kids are in trouble and are in that system and understanding more from a research perspective what really happens and what's helpful and what isn't, that we really need to look at prevention way before that.

To do that we really need to look a lot more at the context, the neighborhoods that kids are living in and their families are living in, and the economic conditions that are causing such high stress in these families.

One of the issues that we hear a lot is the problem of unsupervised youth, often because parents are working two or three jobs. When you combine the problem of lack of parental supervision, especially if you're talking about immigrant families already, or even families that have been here, but lack of parental supervision because parents are working multiple jobs.

At the same time you have communities that are really marginalized and have very few resources in terms of community organizations, churches that can really help to hold families together and really help to protect kids in the absence of their parents.

And you add to that lack of programs for youth, you just have a recipe for trouble. So if we don't want to just keep dealing with the problem downstream once the kids are into the juvenile justice system, we really have to look at upstream. Speaking from a public health perspective, looking upstream, what are the basic causes of these problems, especially in minority communities and in the Latino communities we've been hearing at this conference?

We really have to look at the lack of infrastructure and resources and social capital in our communities. We have to look at all of the budget cuts and how they're impacting youth programs if we really want to start doing some prevention.

We really have a failure of systems to be able to respond to the needs of the kids, but also of the families, because most of the time kids get into trouble, it's a good indicator that their families are in trouble. And so we really need to think of it in terms of intervening with the kids, with the family, and then we need to look at what's going on in the communities because those families live within a community that also increases their risk.

The young men that we work with have problems in all those areas, the HIV risk, the trauma from childhood not only in terms of physical and sexual abuse, but from their time when they were serving in jail and in prisons, street violence. A lot of times they're for example afraid to come into the treatment facility because they have to go through territory that belongs to another gang. So they have a problem with mobility across the city, and that limits their ability for jobs.

So unless you deal with that, you can provide a lot of individual-based interventions, but you're really putting a Band-Aid on the issue. We need to look at the upstream factors as well.