Dr. Kruh serves as Discussant at Symposium on Juvenile Competency Restoration at the Annual Conference of the American Psychology-Law Society

​On March 16th, 2023, Dr. Kruh served as Discussant at the first ever AP-LS Conference symposium addressing Juvenile Competency Restoration Services. The session was entitled, “Juvenile Competency Restoration Across Jurisdictions: Seeking Clarity Amidst the Chaos.” The session included papers discussing three research studies  - one from Cook County Illinois, one from two Massachusetts counties, and one from the State of Texas. Dr. Kruh praised the studies for looking at restoration through a lens of individualized services seeking to identify “what works with which youth?” Two of the studies looked at what works with different diagnostic groups, categorizing diagnoses in finer tuned ways than past studies. Two studies also looked at finer tuned outcomes than past studies that looked at simpler distinctions between successfully restored vs. not restored youth. The studies highlighted the important role case management services can play in juvenile competency restoration services and the potential for more intensive services to be more successful than services of lower intensity. Dr. Kruh pointed out the need for juvenile restoration programs to collect finer tuned data to allow for more sophisticated treatment matching analyses. He also recommended research that takes unique approaches to the problem of small data sets most individual programs have, including qualitative studies, cross-jurisdictional studies, and experimental designs.

If you would like copies of the research papers presented at this symposium or you would like Dr. Kruh, through National Youth Screening and Assessment Partners (NYSAP), to provide your group training on the topic of juvenile competency remediation programming, please contact Dr. Kruh at [email protected].