NJJEC Bulletin January 2015

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, email 

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?

Please check out NJJEC’s 

tutorial on conducting a 

meaningful evaluation of 

juvenile justice programs. 

We just updated the tutorial 

with a new interface and 

added an online interactive 

quiz. 

Do you have a suggestion

for a new webinar topic or 

resource? Email

njjec@jrsa.org! 

Upcoming Events 

of Interest

National Mentoring 

Summit

January 28 – 30th, 2015

The Mentoring Partnership

will hold its annual National 

Mentoring Summit in 

Washington DC on January 

28th– 30th. More details and 

registration information are 

available online. 

Webinar: Implementing 

Risk Assessment Tools and 

Measuring Outcomes

February 19th, 

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm (EST)

NJJEC, in collaboration with 

OJJDP, will host a webinar 

focused on the implementation of risk assessment 

tools within juvenile probation departments to guide 

dispositional recommendations and case planning. 

Presenters will be Dr. Gina 

Vincent, from the National 

Youth Screening and 

Assessment Partners, and 

Kelly Clement, from the 

Office of Juvenile Justice in 

Louisiana. More details and 

registration information are 

available online.

National Conference on 

Health and Domestic 

Violence

March 19 - 21, 2015

Futures Without Violence

will host the National 

Conference on Health and 

Domestic Violence in 

Washington, DC. One of the 

aims of the conference is to 

improve the health system’s 

response to domestic 

violence survivors. Sessions 

will also include 

presentations addressing 

children’s exposure to 

violence and the Defending 

Childhood Initiative. More 

details and registration 

information are available 

online. 
NJJEC Bulletin Page 2

31st International Symposium on Child 

Abuse

March 23 - 26, 2015

The 31st International Symposium on Child 

Abuse will be held in Huntsville, Alabama. 

The conference will include more than 130 

workshops on a broad range of issues in the 

child maltreatment field. More details and 

registration information can be found 

online.

Featured Resources:

Publications

The Status Offense Reform Center, a project 

of the Center on Youth Justice at the Vera 

Institute, has just completed the 4th module 

in its Toolkit for Status Offense System 

Reform. This 4th module is a Brief entitled 

Monitoring and Sustaining System Change. 

It outlines three strategies for monitoring 

and sustaining system change efforts in the 

treatment of status offenders: performance 

measurement, process evaluations, and 

outcome evaluations. The toolkit’s three 

previous modules on status offense system 

reform focus on engaging stakeholders,

using data to guide system change efforts,

and planning and implementing system 

change. 

The National Council of Juvenile and Family 

Court Judges (NCJFCJ) recently released

School Pathways to the Juvenile Justice 

System Project: A Practice Guide, to assist in 

efforts to reduce the number of discipline

referrals to the juvenile justice system. The 

guide is aimed at juvenile and family court 

judges in 16 demonstration sites chosen by 

the NCJFCJ. Judicial leadership in each 

demonstration site is engaged in 

court/school partnerships meant to address 

the unintended consequences of zero 

tolerance school discipline policies. The 

guide provides a framework for facilitating 

a strategic planning process, in which a 

shared vision, measurable goals, and 

ongoing monitoring processes are 

implemented. 

A new Brief has been released by The 

Discipline Disparities Research to Practice 

Collaborative entitled You Can’t Fix What 

You Don’t Look At: Acknowledging Race in 

Addressing Racial Discipline Disparities.

The collaborative consists of researchers, 

practitioners, and advocates who are 

working to increase the level of knowledge 

on evidence-based interventions to reduce 

disparities in school discipline practices. 

Their most recent brief, Acknowledging 

Race, highlights the importance of 

educators and administrators engaging in 

discussions about race in discipline 

disparities, disaggregating discipline data 

by race, and developing race-conscious 

intervention and evaluation strategies. 

Previous briefs provide an overview of 

discipline disparities by describing the 

empirical evidence demonstrating 

discipline disparities, as well as describing 

interventions and policies for reducing 

discipline disparities. 

The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) has 

released a new report, Sticker Shock: 

Calculating the Full Price Tag for Youth 

Incarceration, which documents the stateby-state costs to incarcerate youth. 

According to the report, 33 U.S. states and 

jurisdictions spend $100,000 or more 

annually to incarcerate each young person. 

The report also estimates the indirect costs 

of confinement, such as the costs of 

recidivism to victims, and loss of 

educational opportunities and its 

implications for youths’ ability to work and 

pay taxes. 
NJJEC Bulletin Page 3

Featured Evaluation:

MST with Ethnic Minority Youth

Although research has supported Multisystemic Therapy (MST) as an evidence-based 

practice, there have still been concerns that 

studies have not had a substantial number of 

ethnic minority youth. In 2014, a study of MST 

in Los Angeles County was published in 

OJJDP’s Journal of Juvenile Justice. This study 

investigated the effectiveness of MST with 

ethnic minority youth, focusing in particular 

on Hispanic youth. The following is a 

summary of this published study, which was 

conducted over an 8-year period and examined 

justice-related outcomes for justice-involved 

youth in Los Angeles County. 

In this study, the researchers were not able to 

use an experimental design in which they 

randomly assign eligible youth to either an 

MST treatment group or a control (no MST 

treatment) group. However, they were able to 

use a quasi-experimental design in which a 

comparison group was matched with the MST 

treatment group on demographic variables and 

criminal history. The comparison group 

consisted of youth who were eligible for MST 

but unable to enroll for various reasons (e.g. , 

they lacked Medicaid coverage). Participants 

in the study consisted of 757 youth who were 

accepted into the county’s MST program (77% 

Latino, 17% Black and 4% white) and 380 

youth (69% Latino, 24% Black, 5% white) who 

met the eligibility criteria for MST but who did 

not enroll. 

Outcomes for individual participants were 

analyzed at six months after completion of the 

program. Overall, youth in the MST treatment 

group and youth in the comparison group did 

not demonstrate significant differences in 

regard to arrests, completing probation, or 

completing restitution. However, youth in 

the MST treatment group did have 

significantly lower incarceration rates and 

higher rates of completing community 

service. 

When examining outcomes specifically for 

Latino youth, the study found that youth in 

the MST treatment group had significantly 

lower rates of arrest and incarceration, and 

higher rates of probation completion than 

youth in the comparison group. For Black 

youth, the only significant differences were 

for arrests, with youth in the MST treatment 

group arrested at higher rates after the 

follow-up period than youth in the 

comparison group. 

Baseline and follow-up assessments differed 

significantly with regard to overall 

functioning of youth. Specifically, youth in 

the MST treatment group demonstrated 

significantly higher scores on parenting skills, 

family relations, network of social supports, 

educational/ vocational success, and 

involvement with prosocial peers than those 

in the comparison group. 

The study was not without limitations. In 

particular, it is unclear whether the reasons 

youth in the comparison group did not enroll 

in MST distinguished them from youth in the 

MST treatment group in a way that 

significantly influenced outcomes. Also, the

six-month follow-up period was relatively 

short. Despite these limitations, the study 

does suggest that MST is an effective 

treatment for Latino youth. More studies on 

African American youth are needed, however, 

to better determine the effectiveness of MST 

with this cohort. 
`

Local Spotlight:

Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana

The Office of Juvenile Justice Services (OJJS) 

in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana has recently 

been recognized for its data-driven approach 

to improving its juvenile justice system. In 

November 2014, the National Center on 

Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) released a report 

reviewing the lessons learned by the Calcasieu 

Parish OJJS’s efforts to become more datadriven. The report explains that the Calcasieu 

Parish work is embedded in their longstanding commitment to system reform 

efforts as demonstrated by their involvement 

in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile 

Detention Alternatives Initiative and the 

McArthur Foundation’s, Models for Change

initiative. 

One of the key efforts discussed in the report 

is Calcasieu Parish’s work to build their 

internal capacity to manage and use data 

more effectively. According to NCJJ’s report, 

the Parish prioritized “good data,” updated 

and improved their automated data system, 

and realigned resources to create a full-time 

data management analyst position. 

Fortunately, they were able to find among 

their own ranks a probation officer who also 

had IT experience, and he was able to 

eventually take on data management tasks 

full time. 

Another theme discussed in the report is 

OJJS’s efforts to integrate data into decisionmaking. OJJS established regular weekly data 

reviews with supervisors and managers. At 

these meetings the data manager provided 

aggregated data reports that would allow 

staff to drill down to case level details. The 

NCJJ report emphasized that having both 

aggregate and case-level data was central to 

OJJS developing strategies to address critical 

system issues. Also, the improved data 

system was able to automatically generate a 

number of “push” and “dashboard” data 

reports that helped staff at every level 

monitor key areas in the system. For 

example, automated reports related to 

detention helped staff more closely monitor 

detained youth and the reasons for keeping 

them detained. 

A number of other themes and lessons 

learned are highlighted in the NCJJ report as 

well. The report concludes by noting that 

while a number of sites within Louisiana have 

become more data-driven due to their 

involvement in system reform efforts, 

Calcasieu Parish has made substantial 

improvements in their data system and use of 

data, with marginal additional costs. 

NJJEC Bulletin Page 4

The 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/

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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.