NJJEC Bulletin November 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 has released a pair of 

Sustainability Toolkits, the first 

for service providers and the 

second for funding agencies. 

The Sustainability Toolkit for 

Service Providers is tailored to 

practitioners working directly 

with youth. It focuses on 

increasing and conveying 

program successes to 

stakeholders, as well as 

building up organizational 

capacity for continuing 

effective programs. The 

Sustainability Toolkit for 

Grantors outlines ways funding 

agencies can increase resources 

and work with grantees to 

ensure the long-term success of 

their programs. Each toolkit 

includes a printable checklist 

that may be useful to juvenile 

justice practitioners in 

incorporating sustainability 

into their day-to-day work.

If you are interested in hearing 

more about sustainability, 

check out NJJEC’s webinar 

December 6th entitled, 

“Sustainability: A Collaborative 

Approach.” 

NJJEC has also released a 

Performance Measure Guide

that provides basic information 

about collecting high-quality, 

useful program data. It 

includes nine characteristics of 

high-quality performance 

measures, and examples are 

provided for each 

characteristic. The Guide may 

be useful both for beginners 

and as a review for those who 

already have experience 

working with data.

Upcoming Events of 

Interest

Coordinating Council on 

Juvenile Justice and 

Delinquency Prevention 

Quarterly Meeting

December 12

The Coordinating Council on 

Juvenile Justice and 

Delinquency Prevention will 

hold its quarterly meeting at 

the Office of Justice Programs 

in Washington, DC on 

Wednesday, December 12. The 

Council’s efforts include a 

variety of juvenile justice 

issues, such as detention, 

delinquency prevention, and 

missing and exploited children. 

Registration is free and open to 

the public. The draft agenda 

and archives of past meeting 

are available online.
NJJEC Bulletin Page 2

2013 National Mentoring Summit

January 24-25

MENTOR will sponsor the 2013 National 

Mentoring Summit January 24-25 in 

Washington, DC. The meeting agenda includes 

a strong focus on evidence-based practices in 

mentoring and reviews of the most current 

mentoring research. Register online.

2013 International Conference on Child and 

Family Maltreatment

January 26- 31

The Chadwick Center for Children and Families 

at Children’s Hospital-San Diego will host the 

2013 International Conference on Child and 

Family Maltreatment in San Diego, CA. The 

conference will highlight best practices in the 

prevention of and response to child 

maltreatment. Topics include mental health, 

investigations, child welfare, and research. 

Check out the website for more information 

about the agenda and to register!

Featured Resources:

OJJDP’s NTTAC

Data Resources

We frequently receive questions about free and 

accessible data collection assistance. Many of 

you are aware of OJJDP’s National Training and 

Technical Assistance Center (OJJDP NTTAC), 

which hosts NJJEC’s webinars. You may not 

realize that OJJDP NTTAC also offers a wide 

variety of online resources beyond webinars, 

including data collections tools of interest to 

those working in the field of juvenile justice. 

One example is the Suitability of Assessment 

Instruments Webtool for practitioners working 

with delinquent girls. The OJJDP-funded 

project reviewed risk assessment and 

treatment-focused instruments for justiceinvolved youth to see if they were as effective 

for female juveniles as male. The Webtool 

provides a list of instruments and categorizes 

research about their gender-based performance 

into four categories: Favorable, Unclear, 

Unfavorable, and Unknown. This tool is useful 

for practitioners working with female youth, 

but might also be helpful for anyone interested

in juvenile risk assessment more generally.

A second example of OJJDP NTTAC’s data 

collection resources is the online DMC/RRI 

data entry system, designed to assist state 

Juvenile Justice Specialists and DMC 

Coordinators working on Disproportionate 

Minority Contact efforts. The tool includes 

responses to frequently asked questions, 

assistance generating state reports and 

exporting data into OJJDP’s Grant Management 

System (GMS), and questions about the 

Relative Rate Index (RRI). 

The OJJDP NTTAC website also provides 

resources to assist users in using data to define 

a local juvenile-justice related problem. The 

site links to the Socioeconomic Mapping and 

Resources Topography (SMART) system, a free 

resource that maps the location of crime and 

delinquency, as well as available interventions 

used to combat crimes. Juvenile justice 

practitioners might use this resource not only 

to demonstrate the level of delinquency in their 

target areas, but also to show gaps in available 

services to address delinquency. 

Evaluation Feature:

Overcoming Hurdles To 

Using Research 

While there is a strong push for state and local 

juvenile justice practitioners to incorporate 

research into their grant proposals, many 

practitioners have a difficult time locating 

relevant evaluation studies and applying them 
NJJEC Bulletin Page 3

to a specific program or policy. In many 

situations, an evaluation of the exact program 

plan implemented in the same setting with the 

same target population is simply not available. 

In addition, many high-quality juvenile justice 

evaluations are published in academic journals. 

Access to these journals can be cost-prohibitive, 

creating an additional barrier to the use of this 

research in real-world settings. 

Despite these hurdles, it is almost always 

possible to work research and evaluation into a 

grant proposal. There is a substantial amount 

of juvenile justice-related research that is free 

and accessible from federal agencies such as the 

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 

Prevention (OJJDP) and the National Criminal 

Justice Reference Service (NCJRS); non-profit 

organizations such as the National Center for 

Juvenile Justice (NCJJ); and state agencies such 

as Statistical Analysis Centers and departments 

of juvenile justice. Studies relevant to some 

aspect of your program can be used to provide 

grounding for your plan of action and support 

the likelihood that your program or policy will 

be a success, even if the research does not 

evaluate the exact policy or program plan you 

intend to implement.

Relevant research can be used to support the 

selection of program activities, the degree of 

change you expect to observe, the amount of 

time it will take for program activities to affect 

program youth, and the measures you will use 

to collect program data. It is also possible (and 

important!) to incorporate findings from the 

field for a program that is not yet considered an 

evidence-based practice, in order to explain and 

justify program logic. 

For example, OJJDP’s Pathways to Desistance 

Publication Series provides research of interest 

to juvenile justice practitioners on a range of 

topics. The Pathways to Desistance data are

longitudinal, meaning they measure the same 

variables over time, and were collected in two 

locations: Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania 

and Maricopa County, Arizona. 

The purpose of this research was to collect 

information on adjudicated youth and follow 

their transitions into adulthood. Research 

conducted using these data covers a variety of 

juvenile justice-related issues, including mental 

health, substance abuse, recidivism, and 

juvenile incarceration. A juvenile justice 

practitioner whose work focuses on any of 

these issues might gain useful information from

analyses of the Pathways to Desistance data.

The OJJDP Juvenile Justice Bulletin Substance 

Use and Delinquent Behavior Among Serious 

Adolescent Offenders outlines key findings 

from Pathways to Desistance data analysis in a 

plain-language summary. One of the key 

findings is that substance use and serious 

offending change in the same way over time, 

suggesting that they are related. The bulletin 

explicitly notes that no causal relationship was 

established in this study. In other words, the 

finding could be used to support the need for 

substance abuse treatment among serious 

adolescent offenders, but does not support the 

idea that addressing substance abuse prevents 

delinquency. This finding could be used to 

support programs that offer substance abuse 

treatment for serious offenders, but could not 

be used to support the use of substance abuse 

treatment to prevent serious offending.

The Pathways to Desistance website also offers 

a codebook for the data, so anyone working 

with youth can see what types of measures were 

collected on a given topic. For example, under 

the topic Offense History, the codebook 

provides measures such as the number of times 

a youth has been arrested in his or her lifetime, 
the age the first time he or she was arrested, 

whether or not the youth received a court 

summons, etc. The codebook also describes the 

method and frequency of data collection. In the 

case of Offense History, the data are self-reported

by the youth at baseline, meaning each youth 

provided this information at the point he or she 

entered the study. Practitioners might use this 

information, along with codebooks from other 

similar studies, to support their data collection 

choices. 

It is important to note how the research you use 

in your proposal relates to your specific situation, 

and also to acknowledge the caveats. For 

example, youth included in the Pathways to 

Desistance data were at least 14 years old at the 

time they entered the study, and all were 

adjudicated for a serious offense. Findings from 

this study may not apply to juveniles under the 

age of 14, or youth who commit less serious 

offenses. 

Local Spotlight: Cleveland, OH

With support from the City of Cleveland’s 

Department of Economic Development and 

Cuyahoga County’s Department of Workforce 

Development, the Cleveland Treatment Center 

(CTC) in Cleveland, Ohio has been operating the 

Let It Ride● Game Ready 4 Life program since 

1993. The purpose of the program is to offset risk 

factors that affect socioeconomically 

disadvantaged youth. Participants are 

identified through Cuyahoga county’s juvenile 

service agencies and correctional facility.

Let It Ride● Game Ready 4 Life addresses 

career planning, family and community 

contributions of youth, and deterrence from 

barriers to success including substance use, 

teen pregnancy, risk behaviors, and violence. 

At-risk youth ages 14 to 18 participate in a workbased learning and occupational skills program 

that includes a summer internship. 

Occupational training focuses on such indemand positions as camp counseling, park 

management, creative and business writing, 

conservation, and graphic design. Program 

staff collect performance measure data on 

program participation levels, number of youth 

with occupational skills training, and outcome 

data such as the number of youth with paid and 

unpaid work experience. 

Let It Ride● Game Ready 4 Life has a number 

of community partners, including the Ohio 

Department of Natural Resources, Cleveland 

Metroparks, the Ohio Department of Alcohol 

and Drug Addiction Services, Beck Center of 

the Arts, and Titan Sports. The program is able 

to expose participating youth to college 

curricula through its partnership with 

Cleveland State University. 

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.