Quality youth justice systems (a) limit the use of confinement to cases where it is objectively necessary, (b) ensure the health and safety of all confined youth, (c) provide effective treatments and developmentally appropriate programming, and (d) continually monitor and evaluate their effectiveness. These goals apply to all forms of secure confinement regardless of financing or organizational configuration.
Good Questions: Building Evaluation Evidence in a Competitive Policy Environment
Experiments are also rarely able to reliably measure and isolate the effects of very complex justice interventions. Policymakers and practitioners in the justice sector should consider evaluation research as a portfolio of strategic investments in knowledge development. Randomized controlled trials are merely one asset in a broader investment strategy.
Critical Diversion
[I]mproving the effectiveness of diversion will require a sincere effort to leverage the best research knowledge about juvenile justice interventions. Research-based practices, however, must include interventions addressing the full range of factors that lead young people to become involved in the justice system, including not yet tested. [I]mproving the effectiveness of diversion will require a sincere effort to leverage the best research knowledge about juvenile justice interventions. Research-based practices, however, must include interventions addressing the full range of factors that lead young people to become involved in the justice system, including not yet tested.
Cure Violence: A Public Health Model to Reduce Gun Violence
The Cure Violence model is a public health approach to gun violence reduction that seeks to change individual and community attitudes and norms about gun violence. It considers gun violence to be analogous to a communicable disease that passes from person to person when left untreated.
Evaluating Systems Change in a Juvenile Justice Reform Initiative
In an evaluation of inter-agency initiatives to reform human services systems, outcomes are observed at the system level rather than the individual level. The Reclaiming Futures initiative is designed to improve services and interventions for justice-involved youth.
Practitioner Views of Priorities, Policies, and Practices in Juvenile Justice
Drawing on a national survey of juvenile court practitioners, this study investigates key questions about the effectiveness of juvenile justice and discusses the implications of the findings for research, policy, and practice.
Using Performance Monitoring to Improve the Accountability, Operations, and Effectiveness of Juvenile Justice
The juvenile justice system has been transformed in recent years with a range of policies designed to hold youth accountable, but how does society hold this system accountable?
The RWJF Reclaiming Futures Initiative
Reclaiming Futures (RF) relies on community partnerships to improve treatment quality, strengthen local leadership, expand inter-organizational collaboration, and create systems of shared performance management. The initial findings of a cross-site evaluation suggest that Reclaiming Futures is yielding important and positive change.
Reviving Juvenile Justice in a Get-tough Era
State and local jurisdictions throughout the United States enacted a wide array of new juvenile justice policies in recent years. Many of these policies were intended to make the juvenile justice system tougher, but others improved prevention, increased rehabilitation, and enhanced the restorative features of the juvenile justice system.
