DOI: 10.3886/icpsr37889.v1
title: Kentucky Juvenile Justice Reform Evaluation: Assessment of Community-Based Services for Justice-Involved Youth, 2011-2019
title: Version 1

description: In 2014, Kentucky undertook a reform of the state's juvenile justice system through Senate Bill 200 (SB 200). The SB 200 legislation sought to improve systems and youth outcomes by expanding access to treatment and supervision in the community, focusing the most intensive resources on serious offenders, and enhancing data collection and oversight mechanisms to ensure that the policies work. Westat, in partnership with the American Probation and Parole Association, worked with Kentucky agencies to evaluate key reforms under SB 200. Evaluation consisted of three components. First, an implementation evaluation documented barriers and successes to implementation, with a particular focus on the Family Accountability, Intervention and Response (FAIR) teams and the impacts of system-wide sociopolitical context, allocation of resources, agency leadership and organizational culture on the reform. Second, using geographic information systems (GIS), researchers assessed the availability of community-based services for youth referred to the juvenile justice system in Kentucky and also identified gaps in service areas and potential disparities in access to services. Third, researchers conducted an outcome evaluation to assess the effect of SB 200 on youth dispositional outcomes and racial and ethnic disparities among referred, diverted, and adjudicated youth.
description: The purpose of this study was to evaluate key reforms under Kentucky Senate Bill 200 using a multi-part approach that assessed barriers and successes to implementation of the law, the availability of community-based services for youth referred to the juvenile justice system in Kentucky, and an outcome evaluation to assess the effect of SB 200 on youth dispositional outcomes and racial and ethnic disparities among referred, diverted, and adjudicated youth.
description: Response Rates: Response rate only applies to qualitative data: Seventy one out of the 88 (81%) stakeholders invited for the interview agreed to participate.
description: Sampling approach differed by study component: <strong>1. Implementation Evaluation</strong> <em>Interviews with Stakeholders:</em> Forty-nine semi-structured telephone and in-person interviews were conducted with a total of 71 individuals. The researchers used Kentucky's Administrative Office of the Courts 12 supervision regions to sample family/district court judges, court designated specialists, and court designated workers, randomly selecting one county from each region (there are 120 counties in Kentucky) and inviting those individuals assigned to the county to participate. Additionally, the Crime and Justice Institute training and technical assistance provider and all Juvenile Justice Oversight Council members were invited to participate in individual interviews. Representatives from public defenders' offices, directors of pupil personnel (DPPs), and youth and family advocates were identified by Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) and Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) contacts and invited to participate in group interviews. The Director of Pupil Personnel (DPP) is a board of education-appointed school official responsible for monitoring and enforcement of the compulsory attendance law in a school district. <em>Observations of Family Accountability Intervention Response (FAIR) Team Meetings:</em> Twelve meeting observations were conducted during FAIR team meetings from the randomly selected counties in each of Kentucky's Administrative Office of Courts 12 supervision regions. <strong>2. Assessment of Community-Based Services</strong> <em>Documentation of Community-based Programs:</em> In October 2018, AOC provided Westat with a list of community-based programs available in each county in Kentucky (a total of 120 MS Word-formatted documents). The resource guides were last updated between September 2017 and October 2018. <em>Court Designated Worker Case Management System (CDWCMS):</em> The CDWCMS is a statewide electronic case management and information system maintained by the Department of Family and Juvenile Services of the AOC. It collects information on youth referrals, including, but not limited to, youth race/ethnicity, most recent zip code, age at referral, date of referral, referral charge, and diversion status. As described above, the documentation of community-based services received from Kentucky agencies was last updated between 2017 and 2018. To provide an accurate description of the clientele of youth that community-based programs serve as accurately as possible, the researchers restricted their sample of youth to those who were referred to the justice system during the time period October 2017 to September 2018. Because the CDWCMS data included a record for every single referral that a youth received (i.e., a youth may have multiple referrals), data were deduplicated by selecting the most recent referral on record for every individual youth between October 1, 2017 and September 30, 2018. <strong>3. Outcome Evaluation</strong> This included closed cases from January 2011 through December 2019. Two primary types of analysis files were created for the outcome evaluation: files with one observation per month from January 2011 through December 2019 (for a total of 108 time points) used for population-level interrupted time series (ITS) analyses, and a youth-level file tracking youth over time used for survival analysis. The population-level and individual-level data files were created by first de-duplicating the CDWCMS and Juvenile Offender Resource Information (JORI) Legal History and Placement History administrative data files.
description: Datasets: DS0: Study-Level Files DS1: Kentucky Juvenile Justice Reform Evaluation, 2011-2019 Geospatial Data DS2: Youth-Level Data DS3: Monthly Case Referrals DS4: Monthly Adjudicated and Dispositions Cases DS5: Monthly Out-of-Home Placement Cases DS6: Qualitative Coded Data
description: Kentucky justice-involved youth and Kentucky state and local agency officials. Smallest Geographic Unit: ZIP code
description: coded on-site observation; face-to-face interview; mixed mode; telephone interviewFor additional information on the Kentucky Juvenile Justice Reform Evaluation, final reports and appendices can be found at Westat's Kentucky Juvenile Justice Reform website or at the OJJDP website.