Juvenile Justice and Youth Intervention

This presentation summarizes findings from the Norms and Networks of Latino Youth project, funded by OJJDP. Youth in a small neighborhood were surveyed about their own pro-social and delinquent behaviors and their social networks. Survey respondents named 20 close contacts and answered questions about those individuals. Using social network analysis methods, we examined both personal networks and individual delinquency and the whole network (comprising all youths’ overlapping contacts), to analyze group behaviors related to co-offending and peer influence. The findings are relevant to developing appropriate interventions for delinquency and shed light on the efficacy of neighborhood-based interventions.

Collecting DNA from Juveniles examines the laws, policies, and practices related to juvenile DNA collection in the United States. States have increasingly required juveniles - mostly those adjudicated delinquent but also some arrestees - to submit DNA samples for analysis and inclusion in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the FBI-operated national database. The report describes the issues encountered during the implementation of these laws, including the coordination challenges between the state crime labs and juvenile justice agencies, and discusses the challenges that researchers and practitioners face in assessing the effects of juvenile DNA collection on public safety outcomes.

The goal of this evaluation was to understand the planning, implementation, and execution of the Put Families First program as it is administered by Functional Family Therapy (FFT) in the District of Columbia (D.C.). The primary question is whether FFT has been implemented with high fidelity and quality, and whether there are local factors or circumstances that either facilitate or interfere with its reliable implementation. The current implementation evaluation shows promise for the effective implementation of FFT for youth at risk of out-of-home placement in D.C. For those who do complete the program, implementation is generally close to program benchmarks and showing improvement.

In April 2009 the Urban Institute (Washington, D.C), in partnership with Harder+Company (Los Angeles, CA), was contracted by the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles to conduct a multi-year evaluation of the Mayor's Gang Reduction and Youth Development Program (GRYD). This is the second report of the evaluation. It builds upon the process and preliminary outcome findings reported in 2010, and extends them through April, 2011.

Innovative practices - such as the Reclaiming Futures initiative, drug courts, and Project HOPE - can be used to better serve juveniles involved with the justice system and to improve public safety, the Urban Institute's John Roman told a committee of the District of Columbia's city council.

To understand better how youth in juvenile justice are doing under alternative policies and placements, improved access to data from all relevant agencies is needed, concluded Akiva Liberman at a hearing of a District of Columbia city council committee. Liberman is a senior adviser at the D.C. Crime Policy Institute.

This report presents the results of research that examined changing trends in juvenile justice legislation and surveyed juvenile justice professionals across the nation to measure their impressions of recent juvenile justice policy reforms. Researchers learned there is considerable consensus among diverse practitioner groups, with survey respondents viewing rehabilitative programs as more effective than punitive ones - a perspective consistent with recent legislative trends. Together, these data suggest the policy pendulum is swinging toward more progressive measures after years of "get tough" reforms.

Juvenile arrests for violent crime reached an all-time high in 1994. In response, lawmakers passed a host of reforms that profoundly altered and seemingly criminalized juvenile justice practice and policy by making the juvenile justice system more like the adult system. It remains unclear, however, that this characterization holds true today. The goal of this chapter is to examine the state of juvenile justice policy nationally to investigate this claim. In particular, it explores whether juvenile justice today is uniformly punitive in its orientation or whether it reflects the founding tenets of the original juvenile court. To this end, we draw on analyses from a review of recent legislation and practice and a national survey of juvenile justice practitioners. We find evidence that juvenile justice today clearly represents a mix of punitive and rehabilitative approaches and that states vary dramatically in the extent to which they lean toward greater punitiveness or rehabilitation. The results underscore the importance of providing more balanced assessments of the state of juvenile justice by examining a broad spectrum of policies. They also underscore the importance of recognizing that juvenile justice is not monolithic—it varies greatly from state to state and even within states.