Section 3: Routine Assessment and Self-Evaluation

This section will help you understand the type of routine assessment and evaluations your agency should conduct to support your ongoing TJC initiative. You will also learn the steps needed to plan your evaluations.

What Is Routine Assessment?

Routine assessment is the process of regularly gathering, analyzing, and interpreting your data to help you and your partnering agencies improve and revise the TJC initiative and its components. An important aim is to use your data to answer key questions about your jail transition processes – e.g., who are you serving, what are the criminogenic risks and needs of those individuals, what programs and interventions are these individuals receiving and do these programs meet their identified criminogenic needs? – and to modify and strengthen the application of the TJC model in your community based on the answer to those questions. A quality assurance process uses similar data but goes beyond data analysis to include assessment of how services and programming are delivered and may also include client satisfaction measures

Here is how to begin:

Convene your TJC’s coordinating reentry council to determine the key outcomes that are of interest to partners and potential funders to show progress in achieving the TJC initiative.
Form a specific data or evaluation working group.
Jointly produce a theory of change model. This process will highlight the overall model outcomes, including immediate, intermediate, and long-term outcomes.
Develop a data collection procedure based on your consensus outcomes, ideally with different agencies helping with the data collection and analysis.
Analyze the data to answer agreed upon research questions designed to evaluate important outcomes identified by the coordinating reentry council.
Have reentry council members interpret analyses and results.
Disseminate the findings to stakeholders on a regular basis.

Feedback

We encourage you to establish mechanisms—such as forums, focus groups, routine reports from partner agencies and client satisfaction surveys—to obtain early and frequent feedback from partners and constituents.

Think of feedback as having the following components:¹

Data are used to objectively examine the TJC initiative, focusing on the model at the system and individual level.
Structured meetings are held to review the data and increase collaboration among the partners.
Use the analysis to make decisions and ensure that the TJC initiative is being implemented as expected and is improving.
Repeat the process on a routine basis.

Assessment and Evaluation Capacity

The TJC initiative recommends that at least one partnering agency has the capacity to plan and implement routine assessments and evaluations of the initiative. Building your internal capacities to make evaluation part of your agency, instead of using outside consultants or evaluators to analyze your TJC initiative, is important because it

Increases responsibility for competent data management and collection by the partnering agencies,
Decreases the likelihood that the TJC initiative and its outcomes will be opposed,
Influences organizational culture to accept data findings and resultant changes in policy or practice,
Teaches agencies to improve their TJC initiative without relying on outside help,
Allows for a system to make educated and targeted decisions on where they would like to allocate their resources, and
Builds the necessary resources to sustain long-term assessment and evaluation.

However, if you don’t have in-house research staff, you may want to partner with local research organizations or academic institution to help you with your evaluations.

Field notes from Hampden County, Massachusetts

In 2004, an Abt Associates evaluation of the Hampden County, Massachusetts, correctional public health care model documented significant improvements in health care utilization and related outcomes among program participants. The evaluation found that about two-thirds of those leaving jail with a medical appointment in the community kept their first appointment after release, and 70 percent of those with a mental health care appointment did so. Factors that contributed to health care utilization in the community included having appointments before release, being able to continue with the same health care provider in jail and in the community, and the health education provided in jail. The evaluation also found that participation in the health care intervention in jail and in the community was related to a decline in self-reported health problems after release.²

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¹ Miles, Mathew, Harvey Hornstein, Daniel Callahan, Paula Calder, and R. Steven Schiavo. 1969. “The Consequences of Survey Feedback: Theory and Evaluation.” In The Planning of Change, edited by Warren Bennis, Kenneth D. Benne, and Robert Chin (457–68). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

² Hammett, Theodore M., Cheryl Roberts, Sofia Kennedy, and William Rhodes. 2004. “Evaluation of the Hampden County Public Health Model of Correctional Care.” Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.