This article examines how youth deflection differs from traditional diversion, and how behavioral health leaders are using deflection programs to de-escalate trauma and keep adolescents out of the justice system.
Communities increasingly seek preventive alternatives to juvenile detention. Seven in 10 justice-involved youths meet the criteria for a mental health disorder (Dierkhising et al., 2013). For these young people, juvenile detention centers too often act as traumatic accelerants rather than places of rehabilitation.
Behavioral health professionals and justice system administrators must understand the critical difference between diversion and deflection — and why the latter is essential for de-escalating youth trauma.
- Traditional Diversion: Occurs after the formal filing of charges and, in the case of youth, after the filing of a petition. It provides an alternative to incarceration, but still subjects a young person to an arrest and the initial stages of the legal process.
- Youth Deflection: Occurs before charges are filed. It is an intervention designed for situations where an arrest might have otherwise occurred, allowing the youth to bypass booking, processing, and an arrest record entirely. In deflection, an arrest might occur, but no charges or court petition are filed. The act of arrest itself, while not required for deflection, does not prevent Deflection from occurring.
By intervening earlier, we can connect youth to clinical services without waiting for the court process, preventing them from reaching a crisis point or bearing the collateral damage of an arrest record.
The Traumatic Toll of the Justice System
Exposure to arrest, detention, and processing inherently adds trauma to a young person’s life. For adolescents with underlying behavioral health conditions, being handcuffed and placed in a carceral setting — even temporarily — can cause severe anxiety, trigger manic episodes, and exacerbate existing symptomatology.
Deflection actively preserves mental well-being by engaging individuals in the community and de-escalating situations that might otherwise result in substance use or worsening mental health.
The evidence supporting this approach is compelling. For example, an R Street Institute policy paper (Seacrest, 2024) noted that even a short period of juvenile detention is associated with a 31% decrease in high school graduation rates and a 25% increase in adult arrests. Deflecting young people away from these encounters drastically increases their odds of stability and success.
“Deep End” Systems: Coordinating Cross-System Youth Care
Adults often struggle within the baseline adult deflection handoff from law enforcement to a clinic. For minors, this framework is simply inappropriate. Legally or clinically, youths cannot be treated in isolation. Family dynamics are complex. Often, a young person is simultaneously involved with criminal courts, dependency courts such as the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), and the school system. They may also be facing housing instability.
Youths are suddenly submerged in these “deep end” systems and must stay above water. Typically, none of these systems is connected. Success in youth deflection requires the cooperation, support, and buy-in of parents or guardians, as well as the broader “village” of adults in their world, such as coaches, choir instructors, and school personnel.
Deflection case managers must work among siloed institutions. Through clear written policies, memoranda of understanding (MOUs), and consent-for-release forms, we ensure that every entity that impacts a youth’s life is informed and coordinated.
The Power of Relentless Engagement
Because participation in deflection is voluntary, keeping youth and families engaged requires a mindset we call relentless engagement. We offer our support as many times as it takes for a person to say yes. Even if they initially decline, we return to discuss the virtues of deflection and the risks of unaddressed behaviors before they result in a formal sanction. The goal of relentless engagement is to meet them where they are but not leave them there.
Relentless engagement starts with meeting people as strangers and building deep trust and rapport with both the youth and their guardians. From there, our focus is on:
- Finding the right clinical provider for the individual’s specific needs and personality at that time.
- Eliminating barriers to care, such as a lack of transportation, so there are no excuses for non-engagement.
- Connecting youth to community supports like a Boys and Girls Club or YMCA, allowing them to express themselves through sports or classes outside of a clinical setting.
- Introducing therapies, restorative justice models, and peer groups to help youth define past trauma and develop positive coping mechanisms for high-risk behaviors.
Crucially, we also work closely with schools. With appropriate consent, providers can share relevant information with school teams and help families request accommodations through an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or Section 504 process. Coordination with schools helps counselors understand whether the student is utilizing community resources. Instead of a knee-jerk reaction like in-school or out-of-school suspensions, students get a supportive educational pathway.
How to Fund Youth Deflection and Establish Community Protocols
To safely pivot a youth from a disciplinary track to a therapeutic one, schools and law enforcement must establish clear protocols. School resource officers and local police are heavily trained in enforcement. Providing them and other school personnel with crisis intervention training and behavioral health screening tools is an immediate step toward better engagement. To be clear, deflection is not a crisis response. Its purpose is not to wait for, nor to need, a crisis or an arrest (with charges) before taking action.
A true “warm handoff” protocol, whether through localized community interventions or the national 988 crisis system, allows responders to seamlessly connect youth to a curated portfolio of specialized resources.
For behavioral health executives, the immediate question is how to fund youth deflection programs. These initiatives can be supported by braided funding models, including:
- Billing for recurring revenue, clinical care management, and peer crisis services under the Medicaid fee schedule.
- Utilizing Section 1115 Medicaid waivers — a federal tool that grants states the flexibility to bypass standard rules to fund non-traditional care. In this context, 1115 waivers provide the necessary authority to pay for cross-system transition services and justice-related behavioral health infrastructure.
- Tapping into grants, philanthropy, opioid abatement funds, and marijuana tax revenues.
To sustain this funding, aggregate, de-identified data is essential to prove efficacy. By utilizing MOUs acceptable to all parties, stakeholders can securely track service engagement — such as attendance in individual therapy, substance use disorder treatment, or after-school mentoring — without violating HIPAA or a minor’s privacy.
Ultimately, this data demonstrates that deflection avoids the exorbitant costs of the traditional system. Juvenile court processing for a simple misdemeanor can cost taxpayers over $1,500 per case (Washington State Institute for Public Policy, 2024), and youth detention averages $588 per day per child (Justice Policy Institute, 2020). By redirecting these funds, we preserve taxpayer dollars while keeping youth engaged in their communities.
Building Your Community’s Framework
Deflection holds immense promise for transforming public safety and behavioral health. It engages individuals in need, avoids the trauma of an arrest, ensures accountability, and helps people contribute to the community.
For clinical directors and behavioral health CEOs looking to build a youth deflection framework, the first step is to identify the gaps in your region’s law enforcement and school contacts. In our technical assistance work at TASC’s Center for Health and Justice (CHJ), we have seen firsthand that these operational structures are the linchpin of a successful program. Reach out to law enforcement to discuss how front-end engagement strategies can make their jobs easier. Identify local youth-serving resources to build a supportive ecosystem.
This coordinated approach ensures that we are not waiting for a youth to be arrested and charged or to be in crisis before taking action. Youth deflection also means that when we take action, the youth is met with a clinical response, rather than a carceral one. By choosing a named policy of deflection over detention, communities can halt the traumatic cycle of the justice system and provide our youth with the clinical care and community support they deserve.
Joel K. Johnson, M.Ed., is president and CEO of Treatment Alternatives for Stronger Communities (TASC), a Chicago health-justice integrator providing wraparound services for individuals and families navigating the criminal legal, justice, child welfare, and healthcare systems. Johnson was elected in 2021 to the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers (NAATP) board of directors. Previously, he served as executive vice president of Friend Health, a federally qualified health center, and concurrently as president of its behavioral health unit, Human Resources Development Institute (HRDI). TASC’s Center for Health and Justice (CHJ) provides system mapping, action planning, consulting, and training for youth deflection across 48 states and internationally. To contact Johnson, visit tasc.org or call (312) 738-8933.
References
Dierkhising, C. B., Ko, S. J., Woods-Jaeger, B., Briggs, E. C., Hostetter, M. E., & Amaya-Jackson, L. (2013). Trauma histories among justice-involved youth: findings from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 4. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3714673/
Seacrest, L. (2024, June 25). Intervention over Incarceration: A Limited Government Approach to Youth Violence. R Street Institute. www.rstreet.org/research/intervention-over-incarceration-a-limited-government-approach-to-youth-violence
Washington State Institute for Public Policy (2024). Diversion, no services (vs. traditional juvenile court processing). Benefit-Cost Results. www.wsipp.wa.gov/BenefitCost/Program/549
Justice Policy Institute (2020). Sticker Shock 2020: The Cost of Youth Incarceration. The Gault Center. www.defendyouthrights.org/document/sticker-shock-2020-the-cost-of-youth-incarceration/
