While one of the strengths of OJJDP’s CBVP model was its emphasis on adaptation to local context and needs, the variation across program sites posed serious challenges for the evaluation and made it impossible to assess and compare outcomes in each city.
Butts, Jeffrey A., Caterina Gouvis Roman, Lindsay Bostwick, and Jeremy Porter (2015). Cure Violence: A Public Health Model to Reduce Gun Violence. Annual Review of Public Health, 2015 (36): 39–53. Scholars and practitioners alike in recent years have suggested that real and lasting progress in the fight against gun violence requires changing the social norms and attitudes that perpetuate violence and the use of guns. The Cure Violence model is a public health approach to gun violence reduction that seeks to change individual and community attitudes and norms about gun violence. It considers gun violence to be analogous to a…
Butts, Jeffrey A., Caterina Roman, and Kathleen A. Tomberg (2012). Teaming up for Safer Cities. A Report from the Implementation Assessment of the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention. New York, NY: Research and Evaluation Center, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. The efforts inspired by the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention will take time to develop, but survey results from the first 15 months of implementation suggest that the initiative may be generating some important changes. In five communities, survey respondents report a number of potentially valuable improvements, and the results imply that the…
Butts, Jeffrey A., Kathleen Tomberg, Douglas Evans, Rhoda Ramdeen, Caterina Roman, and Caitlin Taylor (2012). Interim Report 1: National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention. New York, NY: Research and Evaluation Center, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. The National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention is designed to promote greater coordination and effectiveness in violence prevention efforts across community and organizational systems, including law enforcement, juvenile and criminal courts, schools, social services, mental health, and a wide variety of neighborhood and community-based organizations. The federal partners involved in the National Forum began the initiative in 2010 by…
John K. Roman, Jeffrey A. Butts, and Caterina Roman (2011). Evaluating Systems Change in a Juvenile Justice Reform Initiative. Children and Youth Services Review, 33: S41-S53. Evaluating comprehensive, inter-agency initiatives to reform human services systems presents substantial challenges to traditional research models. Outcomes are observed at the system level rather than the individual level, and the validity of study results may be challenged on a variety of dimensions, particularly small sample sizes and measurement error. We report the results of a cross-site evaluation of the first phase of Reclaiming Futures, a five-year effort to improve services and interventions for justice-involved youth…
Jeffrey A. Butts and Caterina Gouvis Roman (2010). A Community Youth Development Approach to Gang Control Programs. In Youth Gangs and Community Intervention: Research, Practice, and Evidence. Robert J. Chaskin (Editor). New York: Columbia University Press. This chapter describes a potential path to a stronger conceptual framework for youth gang prevention and early intervention that draws upon one of the most well-established gang reduction efforts to date, the Comprehensive Community Model developed by Irving Spergel at the University of Chicago, as well as two increasingly prominent perspectives in the criminal and juvenile justice system: positive youth development and the community justice approach.