Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center (MJTC) is a juvenile psychiatric facility of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, located in the Lorenz Hall Annex on the grounds of the Mendota Mental Health Institute (MMHI) in Madison, Wisconsin. It has space for 29 patients. The inmates at Mendota usually have anti-social personality disorders who do not feel empathy, guilt, nor remorse. It uses the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center Program.
The impetus for the facility's creation was an increase in violent crime perpetrated by minors. It was established in 1995 by two psychologists, Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek. It was deliberately staffed with psychologists instead of regular prison guards; while most facilities for delinquent and criminal youth are operated by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, MJTC is under the health services department instead.
Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center Program (MJTC) is an intensive mental health intervention for violent and treatment resistant youth in juvenile detention.
Summary
The MJTC treatment program was developed for and implemented in the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in 1995. The Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center is a secured correctional facility located on the grounds of the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. It is operated as a secured correctional facility through the department of corrections, but housed on the grounds of a State mental health facility. Youth who are transferred to MJTC are selected by the staff of juvenile corrections institutions due to their failure to respond to the traditional rehabilitative programming provided in correctional institutions, nearly always because of their excessively violent and/or disruptive behavior. While MJTC was not designed to treat psychopathy per se ((cite web https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/07/can_psychopaths_be_cured.html )), many of the youth in the original treatment sample do have high levels of psychopathic traits.
Treatment features
The MJTC program is based on the theory of defiance and the social control theory. The theory of defiance can be used to describe a subgroup of offenders who react to punishments for crimes by increasing the frequency or seriousness of violent or other criminal behavior. Further punishment becomes cyclical as the youth's behavior continues to worsen in reaction to increasingly severe punishments. The cycle further isolates the youth from conventional goals and values and he/she becomes "compressed" or "trapped" into an increasingly defiant behavior pattern. The social control theory posits that when the social bonds that connect the youth to conventional society are strained, delinquency arises. For delinquent youth, barriers have developed that restrict the youth's ability and desire to form conventional and productive social bonds, which in turn facilitates increased antisocial behavior. These patterns of antisocial behavior, even in the face of punishment, and have prevented this subgroup of antisocial youth from engaging in traditional rehabilitative programs in the juvenile correctional system.
MJTC uses a variation of the decompression treatment model and aggression replacement cognitive-behavioral treatment. Primary themes of the program include helping youth accept responsibility for their behavior, resolving mental health issues, and helping to build positive relationships with families. The MJTC program focuses on helping youth develop appropriate social skills, and to help youth replace delinquent associations and behaviors with pro-social relationships and activities. In so doing, the aim of MJTC is to break the compression cycle of increasing antagonistic, violent and antisocial defiance of authority and to replace it with appropriate pro-social bonds.
MJTC also uses a behavioral point system called the Today-Tomorrow Program. The point system closely monitors and is highly responsive to changes in the youth's behavior. Through the point system, youth earn privileges for periods of positive behavior https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/07/can_psychopaths_be_cured.html . Youth receive points at the end of the day based on their behavior and engagement in the treatment, and these points determine privileges for the following day. In addition to daily privileges, youth can earn additional, increasing privileges such as computer game time, snacks or private music, for accumulating points over several days. The Today-Tomorrow program incentivizes treatment compliance and appropriate behavior by rewarding pro-social behavior with increasingly desirable privileges.