The Division of Youth Services has developed programmatic points of intervention and a comprehensive continuum of care for youth eligible to receive services, such as:

• Prevention programs, which are strategies and services designed to increase the likelihood that youth will remain free from initial involvement with the formal or informal juvenile justice system.
• Diversion programs, which offer alleged juvenile offenders an opportunity to avoid arrest and/or prosecution by providing alternatives to the formal juvenile justice system process.
• Family crisis intervention, which provides 24-hour a day, 7-day a week, crisis response services within Mercer County to children/youth and their families who are experiencing behavioral, emotional, or juvenile-family crisis needs that place a child at risk of losing his/her placement in his/her home.
• Disposition programs, where youth adjudicated delinquent are ordered by the courts to comply with specific sanctions, supervision, and services as a consequence for their delinquent behavior.
• Treatment, under which services are the following:
  • Intervention and support services that target Mercer County court-impacted children.
  • Short-term crisis intervention and long-term individual, family, and group outpatient treatment for youth who are victims of sexual, physical or emotional mistreatment due to violence or delinquent acts.
  • Shelter beds and supervision for court-involved youth in the Mercer House youth shelter.
  • Immediate but temporary shelter to runaways, displaced youth, or youth who are unable to contact a guardian.
• Juvenile detention alternatives, which provide supervision to juveniles who would otherwise be placed in a secure detention facility while awaiting final disposition of their cases.
• Reentry program, which generally refers to the period of community-based supervision and services that follow a juvenile's release from a secure facility, residential program, or other structured dispositional placement.

For more information, please contact Kayra Melvin at kmelvin@mercercounty.org or 609-278-2762 or Fior Vinajero at fvinajero@mercercounty.org or 609-989-6868.