Integrating all the systems involved with juvenile justice is critical to improving treatment outcomes but challenging. Reclaiming Futures provides a model for the juvenile justice system. to help young people in trouble with drugs, alcohol, and crime. Reclaiming Futures’ mission is to promote new opportunities and standards of care in juvenile justice. Ten sites throughout the United States are redefining the way police, courts, detention facilities, treatment providers, and the community work together to help these youth by providing more treatment, better treatment, and support beyond treatment.

The Reclaiming Futures Model is a performance-based, “system of care” model for helping communities to improve their approaches for working with youth involved in the juvenile justice and substance abuse treatment systems. The model is a tool to help communities stitch together the efforts of courts, service providers, community organizations, and individual volunteers as they cooperate to identify and intervene with justice-involved youth with substance abuse problems.

A recent evaluation of this program indicated that 12 of the 13 areas of system improvement—including resource management, agency collaboration, systems integration, and targeted treatment produced statistically significant increases.