Measurement Plan and Analytic Strategies for Evaluating the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety

This second in a series of reports about the evaluation of the New York City Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP). This Evaluation Update: summarizes the goals and methods used to evaluate the Mayor’s Action Plan; describes the quasi-experimental design used to test the outcomes and impacts of MAP as well as the data sources assembled by the research team and how they are used; and portrays a logical framework the research team used initially to identify causal pathways through which various elements of MAP were intended to achieve their desired effect. Continue reading Measurement Plan and Analytic Strategies for Evaluating the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety

Good Questions: Building Evaluation Evidence in a Competitive Policy Environment

Policymakers and practitioners in the justice sector should consider evaluation research as a portfolio of strategic investments in knowledge development. Randomized controlled trials are merely one asset in a broader investment strategy. Continue reading Good Questions: Building Evaluation Evidence in a Competitive Policy Environment

Line Drawing

The differential response to childhood criminality is an established legal principle. Setting the operational legal boundaries between children, youth, and adults is complicated and contentious. It has been so for centuries. It is easy to agree that a specialized juvenile court is the proper forum for handling cases involving law violations by young people, but where exactly should states draw the line between juvenile and adult status? Continue reading Line Drawing

Better Research for Better Policies

Butts, Jeffrey A. and John Roman (2011). Better Research for Better Policies, in Juvenile Justice: Advancing Research, Policy, and Practice. Sherman, Francine and Francine Jacobs (Editors). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. To do their jobs effectively, policymakers, professionals, and community partners must be able to access high-quality information about the impact of policies and programs for youth. Recent years have seen an increasing, and … Continue reading Better Research for Better Policies

Varieties of Juvenile Court…

Butts, Jeffrey A., John K. Roman, and Jennifer Lynn-Whaley (2011). Varieties of Juvenile Court: Nonspecialized Courts, Teen Courts, Drug Courts, and Mental Health Courts, in The Oxford Handbook of Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice, Barry C. Feld and Donna M. Bishop (Editors). New York: Oxford University Press. This chapter addresses the growing use of specialized, problem-solving courts for delinquent juveniles. After introducing the specialized nature … Continue reading Varieties of Juvenile Court…

Evaluating Systems Change in a Juvenile Justice Reform Initiative

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 … Continue reading Evaluating Systems Change in a Juvenile Justice Reform Initiative