2026 Issues

Youth reintegrating into society following incarceration, commonly referred to as reentry youth or youth who reenter, face major challenges to achieving successful, healthy developmental trajectories when transitioning back to their families and communities. Family-based interventions focusing on family strengths and psychoeducational skills help reduce risky behaviors and assist youth who reenter transition back into their families and healthy trajectories into adulthood. Research on family-based interventions for youth who reenter and barriers to treatment engagement however, is limited. The qualitative findings reported in this paper draw from a larger randomized control trial of a family-based intervention for youth who reenter and their families. Youth who reenter and their guardians were queried about their motivation to participate in family-based interventions and their desired content for these interventions. Analyses revealed themes reflecting these families’ needs and suggested strategies for researchers and practitioners to consider that may increase families’ participation when developing and implementing family-based interventions. These findings are essential for fostering engagement in these interventions, promoting treatment adherence, and ultimately improving outcomes of youth who reenter when transitioning back to their families and communities. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

The research-to-practice gap in juvenile services is substantial, as it is in most other fields. This gap contributes to adverse psychosocial outcomes for youth that are juvenile-legal service and system-involved, such as mental health concerns. Implementation science emerged to reduce discrepancies between research and practice. This article introduces implementation science and explains how it may be harnessed to enhance youth outcomes and bring about systemic change in the juvenile-legal services sector. An overview of implementation science is provided, with a particular emphasis on accelerating the adoption of evidence based practices, like restorative justice as a diversionary tactic and graduated response as an alternative approach towards probationary youth, within the juvenile-legal system. Given the field’s focus on implementation, we emphasize opportunities for researchers and practitioners to incorporate implementation science into practice and research, and we offer helpful examples and suggestions for juvenile services practitioners looking to integrate evidence-based methods in their contexts.