User's Guide to Juvenile Forecaster

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

SUMMARY

Juvenile Forecaster is an interactive planning tool designed for juvenile justice professionals and others who need to anticipate the size of future detention and corrections populations. Best used as part of a more detailed forecasting process, Juvenile Forecaster can provide quick, accessible projections of juvenile custody populations and facilitate the sharing of projection results among the members of state and local agency networks. This manual is designed to assist new users of Juvenile Forecaster as well as those would like to have a printed reference guide to the web site.

USING JUVENILE FORECASTER

Juvenile Forecaster includes two components:

• Population Modeler allows users to enter their own data about juvenile corrections populations and lengths of stay to create projections of future populations for multiple groups of offenders.
• CaseFlow Simulator is a means of simulating the effect that aggregate changes in juvenile justice processing may have on the number of juveniles entering various programs, including residential facilities, probation caseloads, etc.

Together, the two components of Juvenile Forecaster are designed to serve the needs of state and local agencies that lack either the time or the resources to obtain more elaborate and detailed projections. Incorporating the use of this tool in an agency's planning process should increase decisionmakers' understanding of and access to quantitative projection methods and improve the practical value of those projections, thereby enhancing the juvenile justice system's ability to provide effective responses for youthful offenders.

In the past, agency efforts to anticipate the future size of detention and corrections populations have often suffered from the same flaw. Usually when confronted with a crisis, researchers and analysts would analyze trends in juvenile populations, juvenile arrests, or juvenile court cases, and the results of such an analysis would be used to generate answers for policymakers—for example, because arrests have grown 50 percent, detention capacity should be increased 50 percent. Any single analysis, however, is likely to be obsolete in a relatively short time. Population projections depend on a wide range of assumptions about current and future conditions, and these conditions change constantly. Many assumptions may not be endorsed by state and local officials.

Juvenile Forecaster was designed to free agency officials from their dependence on analysts and consultants. Easy to use and always available, Juvenile Forecaster provides state and local agencies with the ability to conduct their own projections, to revisit these projections more frequently, to test the accuracy of their assumptions about future trends, and to incorporate the results of projections in their daily decisionmaking.

This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which many find convenient when printing.

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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