NJJEC Bulletin March 2012

The NJJEC Bulletin

NJJEC is a project of the 

Justice Research and 

Statistics Association 

funded by the Office of 

Juvenile Justice and 

Delinquency Prevention 

(OJJDP). NJJEC’s purpose 

is to improve the 

evaluation capacity of 

states, localities, and tribes 

and facilitate the use of 

evidence-based programs 

and practices in juvenile 

justice. The NJJEC Bulletin 

is disseminated directly to 

subscribers and posted on 

the NJJEC website, and 

provides information 

related to juvenile justice 

evaluation that is of 

interest to state, local, and 

tribal juvenile justice 

professionals. 

We welcome your 

participation! If you would 

like to submit an article, 

suggest a news item for 

the Bulletin, or ask a 

question about evaluation, 

e-mail njjec@jrsa.org. For 

more information about 

the resources available 

through the National 

Juvenile Justice Evaluation 

Center, visit the NJJEC 

website. 

What’s Going On at

NJJEC?

NJJEC recently presented a 

series of webinars in conjunction 

with OJJDP. The Assessing 

Project Performance: Building 

Blocks of Evaluation and 

Performance Measurement

webinars covered a variety of 

topics including evaluation, 

performance measurement, 

program logic, and logic 

modeling. The first webinar,

Basics of Performance 

Measurement and Evaluation 

was attended by 645 state, local, 

and tribal juvenile justice 

professionals on January 19, 

while nearly 500 attendees 

tuned in for the Introduction 

and Advanced Program Logic 

webinars February 22 and 23. 

Slides, audio, and other 

materials are available on the 

NTTAC website as well as on the 

NJJEC website. Thank you to 

everyone who participated! 

The final webinar of the series, 

Data Collection and Analysis, 

will be held March 22, 2012 at 

2:00 p.m. Topics include 

techniques for collecting 

accurate, high quality data, best 

practices for recording and 

storing data, techniques for 

using data and sharing results, 

and the use of data collection 

and analysis for program 

development and 

sustainability. Register for this 

session on the NTTAC website.

Upcoming Events of 

Interest

Blueprints Conference

April 2012

The Center for the Study and 

Prevention of Violence at the 

University of Colorado will be 

hosting the Blueprints for 

Violence Prevention Conference

in San Antonio, Texas April 11-

13. The conference will focus 

on the use of evidence-based 

programs and practices in 

youth violence prevention. 

Check the Blueprints 

Conference page for more 

information and to register.

Adolescent Treatment 

Effectiveness Meeting

April 2012

The Joint Meeting on 

Adolescent Treatment 

Effectiveness (JMATE) will be 

held April 10-12 in Washington, 

DC. Researchers and 

practitioners will collaborate to 

promote effective practices in 

adolescent substance abuse 

treatment. Check the JMATE 

site for more information and 

to register.
NJJEC Bulletin Page 2

Featured Resources: Recidivism in 

Juvenile Justice

OJJDP recently updated the agency’s Statistical 

Briefing Book with a variety of juvenile justice 

data, including juvenile populations, offenses, 

juvenile offenders in residential placement, and 

juvenile court data. National-, state-, and 

county-level data are available for examination 

and analysis, making this a great tool for 

juvenile justice professionals seeking to define a 

local problem, describe the context in which a 

juvenile justice program or initiative is 

operating, and make comparisons about 

juvenile offending across states or jurisdictions. 

One type of data that you won’t find in this 

great resource is recidivism data. 

While juvenile justice professionals frequently 

want to know how their recidivism rates stack 

up against other programs, localities, or states, 

this can be a difficult phenomenon to quantify 

and compare. 

Recidivism is a complex topic, particularly in 

juvenile justice. Definitional differences across 

state and local systems make comparison of 

recidivism rates a difficult task. Practitioners 

and researchers use a variety of definitions of 

recidivism: reoffending, rearrest resulting from 

a new criminal offense, reoffending by 

committing the same type of offense, rearrest 

resulting from a new offense or technical 

violation of community supervision.... And the 

list goes on.

Juvenile recidivism rate comparisons are 

particularly difficult if not impossible, because 

state systems have different laws defining 

juvenile offenders, offenses, and adjudication 

processes. For example consider a 14-year-old 

offender whose second interaction with law 

enforcement occurs after his 18th birthday, or a 

17-year-0ld offender adjudicated delinquent 

who commits his next offense after release from 

a correctional facility at age 21. Further 

muddying the waters, some states publish 

success rates rather than failure rates, and may 

include a host of factors in computing either 

success or failure. 

Despite the complexities, practitioners 

continue to explore this topic by examining

other successes of youth beyond a lack of 

rearrest, including education, employment, 

mental health, and substance abuse. As many 

of these programs and treatments are multidimensional and seek to improve areas of 

juveniles’ lives outside of abstaining from 

crime, only examining rearrest or incarceration 

as an outcome measure is insufficient. 

One example of these initiatives is the Council 

of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (CJCA) 

Positive Youth Outcomes (PYO) project. The 

goal of this project is to increase the ability of 

juvenile correctional agencies to collect and 

analyze positive youth outcomes data by 

reaching a consensus on the types of data 

needed for this endeavor as well as the best way 

to collect these data.

Corrections Today published an article by 

Collette S. Peters and Shannon Myrick of the 

Oregon Youth Authority discussing this effort, 

Read “Juvenile Recidivism—Measuring Success 

or Failure: Is There a Difference?” for more 

information.

State Spotlight

Kentucky

With funding from an OJJDP Juvenile 

Accountability Block Grant (JABG), the 

Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice 

recently conducted a needs assessment of the 

training academy attended by the state’s 

juvenile justice youth workers. The purpose of 

the needs assessment was to examine the 

effectiveness of current training, and identify 
NJJEC Bulletin Page 3

training elements that could be added or 

improved upon so that staff are able to provide 

effective treatment and intervention services to 

youth in the Kentucky juvenile justice system. 

Staff training is an important component in 

operating effective juvenile justice programs 

and interventions, and a frequently 

unexamined element of program 

implementation. The needs assessment 

examined the tasks performed by juvenile 

justice workers, the curriculum taught at the 

training academy, and the methods by which 

this curriculum is delivered. Read the full press 

release in the Recent News section of KYDJJ’s 

website or read the Executive Summary of the 

report.

Ohio

The Family Justice Program of the Vera 

Institute of Justice recently released a research 

brief on the Families as Partners project that 

was implemented in the Ohio Department of 

Youth Services. The Ohio DYS and Vera 

developed and implemented the Juvenile 

Relational Inquiry Tool (JRIT) to facilitate 

understanding about the importance of 

communication between incarcerated youth 

and their families, and to encourage this 

interaction via institutional policy. 

Featured Evaluation

Implementation Evaluation of the District 

of Columbia Put Families First Program

Joshua Markman, Akiva Liberman, and 

Jocelyn Fontaine

The Urban Institute Justice Policy Center

November 2011

As we discussed in the January edition of the 

NJJEC Bulletin, implementation analysis 

examines whether or not a program’s activities 

follow the program plan rather than focusing 

on program outcomes. Implementation 

analysis is a critical but often overlooked 

component of effective operation of evidencebased programs and practices (EBP). Once a 

considerable amount of solid research indicates 

a program is effective (i.e., it qualifies as an 

EBP), the focus should turn to implementation 

fidelity, or adherence to the program model, as 

programmers can be reasonably certain of the 

program’s effectiveness if fidelity to the model 

exists. 

The Urban Institute’s implementation 

evaluation of the District of Columbia’s Put 

Families First program provides a 

comprehensive examination of the 

implementation process. The Put Families First 

program is based on Functional Family Therapy 

(FFT), a Blueprints for Violence Prevention

model program that reduces delinquency by 

improving communication between youth and 

family, as well as increasing protective factors 

against delinquency while reducing risk factors. 

The target population for Put Families First is 

11- to 18-year-old youth who are at risk of outof-home placement.

The evaluation examines both the internal and 

external processes that affect the delivery of 

treatment based on the FFT model. Program 

data included the number of referrals by agency 

and reason for referral, client characteristics, 

case processing, caseload per therapist, timing 

between referral and treatment, number and 

timing of therapy sessions, participant and 

therapist assessments of family functioning and 

relationship with treatment provider, and 

therapist fidelity in treatment administration. 

Sources of data included program documents 

and materials, semi-structured interviews with 

program stakeholders, and performance 

measurement data from youth, therapists, and 

referring agencies. 

The implementation evaluation examined 

factors that, according to the FFT program 
logic, impact the ability of the program to 

reduce delinquency. Internal examination of 

program operations focused on consistency in 

treatment from multiple service providers, 

a critical element for any program that involves 

multi-site intervention or treatment. Time to 

treatment was another important factor: 

treatment providers were expected to contact 

referrals within 48 hours, and initiate the first 

treatment session within one week of the 

referral time. Greater lag time between the 

referral and contact with the therapist might 

reduce the interest and effort of youth or their 

families to actively participate in the program. 

Further, the expected dosage of treatment

was 10 to 12 one-hour sessions over three to 

four months of treatment. This is also a critical 

component of treatment effectiveness, as fewer 

or shorter sessions might diminish the strength 

of this type of treatment for the youth and his 

or her family. Parental participation was also 

examined, as this element is an essential 

component of family-based treatment, as well 

as therapist turnover, in that this might affect 

the relationship between the therapist and 

treatment recipients and reduce the 

effectiveness of the therapy.

Another focus of the implementation 

evaluation was the referral process by which 

youth were recommended for or ordered into 

treatment. As referrals were made by multiple 

agencies and organizations, careful 

examination of the selection criteria for 

inclusion and exclusion from the program were 

particularly important. Even though the 

referral process is outside the scope of the 

actual treatment, it is a very important element 

in service delivery because it shapes the 

program’s target population.

Read the full text of the report on the Urban 

Institute website.

NJJEC Bulletin Page 4

NJJEC Bulletin is the newsletter of the National Juvenile Justice Evaluation Center. It provides information on NJJEC 

project activities, evaluation-related activities of OJJDP grantees, and upcoming trainings and conferences of interest.

To access NJJEC project information and resources: http://www.jrsa.org/njjec/

To subscribe: http://www.jrsa.org/njjec/newsletter.htm

To unsubscribe: e-mail njjec@jrsa.org

NJJEC is a Project of the Justice Research and Statistics Association. 

Notice of Federal Funding and Federal Disclaimer: This document was prepared under Grant Number 2010-JF-FX-0063 from the 

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view or 

opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. 

Department of Justice.