Foster care children who engage in challenging behavior are likely to receive psychotropic medication as the primary intervention to reduce their behavior. These children are more likely to receive multiple psychotropic medications from the same class or three or more medications to treat a given behavioral condition, a practice called polypharmacy. In response to this practice, federal legislation mandated states to monitor psychotropic medication prescriptions to foster care children. Consequently, the Deputy Director of the Alabama Department of Human Resources proposed the development of a behavioral health professional team, collectively known as the Alabama Psychiatric Medication Review Team (APMRT). The APMRT was tasked with developing application and safety guidelines for prescribers and determining the extent to which behavioral interventions are a cost-effective alternative for managing problem behavior. This paper briefly outlines APMRT's general strategies, describes the team members' roles, and discusses future directions.
In this article, we outline an emerging role for applied behavior analysis in juvenile justice by summarizing recent publications from our lab and discussing our procedures through the lens of coercion proposed by Goltz (
2020
). In particular, we focus on individual and group interventions that target a range of behaviors emitted by adolescents in a residential treatment facility. In general, individual interventions involve teaching adolescents to (1) respond appropriately to staff, (2) tolerate nonpreferred environmental conditions, and (3) control problematic sexual arousal. Likewise, group interventions involve low-effort manipulations that decrease disruptive behavior and increase appropriate behavior in settings with numerous adolescents. Thereafter, we describe behavioral interventions for staff working in juvenile justice. These staff-focused interventions aim to increase staff-initiated, positive interactions with students in order to change subsequent student behavior. In addition, we review our recent endeavors to assess and conceptualize other service providers’ behavioral products (i.e., prescription practices) in a juvenile facility. Lastly, we discuss future directions of behavior-analytic intervention with juvenile-justice involved adolescents.
We evaluated the extent to which a checklist increased objective note writing following simulated teaching sessions for 17 special education staff members. In general, participants improved in their description of the reinforcer earned by the child and of prompts delivered by the teacher during a session. Nevertheless, participants' correct reporting of problem behavior decreased following the training.
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