NJJEC Bulletin March 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?

On February 19th, NJJEC and 

OJJDP’s National Training 

and Technical Assistance 

Center (NTTAC) hosted a 

webinar titled, Implementing 

Risk Assessment Tools and 

Measuring Outcomes. Dr. 

Gina Vincent of the National 

Youth Screening and 

Assessment Partners (NYSAP) 

gave a broad overview of risk

assessment tools and 

highlighted key principles to 

facilitate successful 

implementation of such tools. 

Kelly Clement of Louisiana’s

Office of Juvenile Justice 

presented on the steps 

Louisiana took to implement 

a risk assessment tool statewide at the dispositional 

stage, and explained how 

they use data to inform risk 

assessment practices and 

policies. The recorded 

webinar will be available on 

the NJJEC and the NTTAC 

website in the next few 

weeks.

Do you have a suggestion

for a new webinar topic or 

resource? Email

njjec@jrsa.org! 

Upcoming Events 

of Interest

Juvenile Services Training 

Institute – 2015

Monday, May 4th– 6

th, 2015. 

The National Partnership for 

Juvenile Services will be 

hosting a Juvenile Services 

Training Institute to be held 

in Portland, Oregon. 

Workshops include such 

topics as trauma-responsive 

custody, adolescent brain 

research, positive youth 

development strategies, and 

behavior management 

techniques. More details and 

registration information are 

available online. 

Coalition on Juvenile 

Justice Annual Conference

June 10th– 13th, 2015

Coalition on Juvenile Justice 

(CJJ) will hold its annual 

conference in Washington 

DC, June 1oth– 13th. This 

year’s conference is titled “At 

the Forefront: Emerging 

Challenges and Solutions to 

Reforming Juvenile Justice”. 

More details and registration 

information are available 

online. 

2015 Juvenile Justice Youth 

Summit July 23rd– 24th, 2015

CJJ and OJJDP will co-host 
NJJEC Bulletin Page 2

the 2015 Juvenile Justice Youth Summit 

titled: The Time is Now: Creating Change 

with Young Emerging Leaders. More details 

and registration information are available 

online. 

Juvenile Probation Reform Academy for 

Probation and Parole Professionals

July 13th– 15th, 2015

The American Probation and Parole 

Association (APPA), the Council of State 

Governments (CSG) Justice Center, and the 

Robert F. Kennedy National Resource 

Center for Juvenile Justice have partnered to 

establish a Juvenile Probation Reform 

Academy for juvenile probation and parole 

leaders and managers. The program will be 

held at the 40th annual APPA training 

institute in Los Angeles. More details and 

registration information are available online.

Featured Resources:

Publications

A recent publication, SAMHSA’s Concept of 

Trauma and Guidance for a TraumaInformed Approach, has important 

implications for practitioners and policymakers interested in implementing a 

trauma-informed approach to juvenile 

justice. Pulling from several years of 

research in the field of trauma the SAMHSA 

guide highlights six key principles of a 

trauma-informed approach which include: 1) 

safety; 2) trustworthiness and transparency;

3) peer support; 4) collaboration and 

mutuality; 5)empowerment, voice and 

choice; 6) cultural, historical and gender 

issues. The guide also recommends ten 

domains of organizational change in which 

to integrate the six key principles of a 

trauma informed approach. The domains 

include screening, assessment and 

treatment services, as well as domains of 

leadership, policy, quality assurance, 

evaluation, training and workforce 

development. The SAMHSA guide

presents a useful framework for 

incorporating a trauma-informed approach 

into organizational structure and culture. 

The International Association of Chiefs of 

Police (IACP) in collaboration with OJJDP

has released an online brief, The Effects of 

Adolescent Development on Policing. 

This brief provides an overview of the 

science of adolescent development in order 

to help law enforcement better understand 

the characteristics of adolescent thinking 

and behavior. Most importantly, the brief 

uses the developmental knowledge to 

highlight strategies to improve law 

enforcement interactions with youth, 

which can be integrated into routine 

practices and procedures. 

Pathways to Desistance is a large 

longitudinal study of serious adolescent 

offenders as they transition into young 

adulthood. Several Issue Briefs have 

recently been published that summarize 

many of the Pathway study’s key findings. 

Not only do these briefs translate the 

science into language more accessible to a 

lay audience, but they also highlight the 

significance of their findings for 

practitioners and policymakers. These

briefs underscore the importance of: 1) 

institutional environments; 2) positive 

youth development opportunities; 3)

substance abuse treatment; 4) aftercare 

service; 5) ongoing risk and needs 

assessments 6) natural desistance 

processes. Click here for access to all the 

Pathways to Desistance Issue Briefs. 
NJJEC Bulletin Page 3

Featured Resources: 

Online

Juvenile Justice Geography, Policy, Practice & 

Statistics is a website that has been recently 

developed to track juvenile justice system 

reform. In the past few weeks the website 

added a section on Juvenile Justice Services. 

Through an interactive map the site now 

provides practitioners and policymakers with

an overview on how each state structures their 

juvenile justice services, and the extent to 

which evidence-based practices are a required 

part of the continuum of services provided to 

youth in the juvenile justice system. Other 

sections of the site are devoted to an overview 

of jurisdictional boundaries and juvenile 

defense issues by state, and an overview of the 

level of integration between child welfare and 

juvenile justice systems in each state. Sections 

of the website that are still in development 

pertain to racial/ethnic fairness and status 

offense issues. An overview of these topics by 

state is anticipated to come online in the late

spring of 2015. 

A new section has just been added to the 

Juvenile Justice Resource Hub, an online 

resource for the latest policies and practices 

developed to promote juvenile justice system 

reform. In March, the Resource Hub was 

updated to include a section on Re-Entry and 

Aftercare. This new section includes 

information on the latest research and best 

practices, as well as models for the provision of 

re-entry and aftercare services for justiceinvolved youth. The Resource Hub has other 

sections devoted to such topics as evidencebased practices, community-based 

alternatives, juvenile indigent defense, mental 

health and substance abuse, racial/ethnic 

fairness. 

Featured Evaluation:

Closer to Home: An analysis of the 

State and Local Impact of the Texas 

Juvenile Justice Reforms

The Council of State Governments, Justice 

Center, in collaboration with the Texas A & M 

University, Public Policy Research Institute, 

recently released a report on a study designed 

to evaluate the impact of juvenile justice 

reform legislation enacted between 2007 and 

2011 in the state of Texas. (An executive 

summary of the report is also available 

online.) 

In response to several scandals related to the 

abuse of youth held in Texas’s state-run 

juvenile correctional facilities, state leaders 

implemented several policy reforms intended 

to decrease the number of youth in state-run 

facilities. Among those reforms was 

legislation passed in 2007 prohibiting youth 

who committed misdemeanors from being 

committed to state-run facilities. The state 

also lowered its age of jurisdiction over youth 

in state-run facilities from 21 years old to 19 

years old. Additionally, the legislature 

provided individual counties with financial 

incentives in the form of grants to encourage 

local probation departments to retain young 

offenders locally on community supervision. 

State leaders made concrete efforts to both 

decrease commitments to state-run facilities 

and reallocate funds back to individual 

counties. 

In order to determine the impact of Texas’s 

juvenile justice policy reforms, researchers 

constructed a large dataset of individual 

records merged from 3 state agencies. The 

dataset consisted of youth who were disposed 

between 2005 and 2012, and included 

information about youth’s criminal offense 

history, treatment needs, admissions to state-
`

run facilities and program participation while 

in state-run correctional facilities, as well as 

on probation or parole. Recidivism was 

defined as a re-arrest or re-incarceration for a 

misdemeanor or felony, in a juvenile or adult 

state-run correctional facility or jail. 

Multiple findings were reported, but only a 

few are highlighted here. Between 2007 and 

2012 researchers reported a 66% decline in 

juvenile incarceration. Through an analysis 

of pre and post-reform trends in admissions 

to state-run correctional facilities, researchers 

could not pinpoint the 66% decline as being 

“caused” by the policy reforms. However, they 

suggest that the reforms were likely a 

contributing factor in the declining rate of 

juvenile incarceration in Texas. Additionally, 

researchers did not find evidence that 

declining incarceration rates negatively 

impacted public safety. Subsequent analyses 

revealed a 33% decline in arrest rates from 

2007 to 2012. 

Another important finding centered on a 

comparison of youth who were sent to staterun facilities and those youth who were 

eligible for commitment, but remained under 

community supervision. Controlling for 

several factors, including age, offense history 

and treatment needs, researchers found that 

those youth released from state-run facilities 

were 21% more likely to be rearrested than 

youth who remained under community 

supervision with their local probation 

departments. Based on such findings, 

researchers suggests that the state is not only 

saving money by maintaining youth under 

local probation supervision, but also seeing 

better outcomes for youth. 

One final finding that is of particular interest 

is that for those youth under the supervision 

of their local probation departments, no 

significant differences were found in rearrest 

rates based on the type of treatment 

program. Controlling for several variables, 

rearrest rates did not significantly vary for 

those youth who were in residential 

treatment programs in comparison to those 

youth who were in non-residential treatment, 

skill-based, and /or surveillance programs. 

Based on these results, researchers suggest 

that local juvenile probation departments 

should invest in improving the quality of 

programming in local communities. 

In summary, the report on the impact of 

juvenile justice policy reforms in Texas 

provides important information not only for 

Texas policy-makers, but for policy-makers 

nationally. As juvenile incarcerations decline 

across the nation, this study provides 

valuable insight to policy-makers seeking to 

understand such trends. 

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.