Framework for the Youth Competency Assessment

TThe juvenile justice system has made much progress over the past 100 years, yet much room for improve-ment remains. One of the most pressing rehabilitative challenges facing the field is developing a method and tools to identify youth strengths (based on commonly accepted youth development principles) as well as the more uniformly accepted process of tracking risks and problems across the population. Without an abil-ity to identify and subsequently mobilize the strengths of youths in its charge, the juvenile justice system risks wasting one of the most important forms of fuel for change: youths ’ assets, talents, skills, and potential. Positing that activation of strengths is among important keys to building delinquency-free identity and perma-nent exit from the juvenile justice system, the authors believed that this critical gap needed to be addressed. In order to more fully examine the role of strengths in reclaiming youths, a tool was needed to assist practitioners in improving focus on this important ele-ment of a youth’s identity. This article presents a conceptual and theoreti-cal framework for strength-based assessment and prac-tice with juvenile offenders. The framework has evolved into an assessment tool that three communities in the Pacific Northwest piloted in the last three years. Much development of the approach is yet to come, but the pilot offers important lessons regarding the process and impact of introducing such a tool into the juvenile justice environment, and the direc-tion such a tool might take in its next phases. Overview At just past the juvenile court’s 100th birthday, the court’s founders would likely find much to celebrate and much yet to accomplish. The twentieth century made important progress in building effective juvenile justice interventions and related systems. Breakthroughs in ris