“It makes me sad to see that some of the issues we identified ten years ago are still hindering the effectiveness of the place,” said Jeffrey Butts, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who conducted the earlier evaluation.
Youth justice systems can rely on positive outcomes rather than recidivism to measure their effectiveness.
CBS report included excerpts of an interview with Jeffrey Butts.
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.
According to data compiled by the National Center for Juvenile Justice and disseminated by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the court processing of juvenile delinquency cases has reflected persistent racial disparities since the 1980s.
The U.S. juvenile arrest rate for homicide rate grew 4 percent between 2014 and 2015 but remained 70 percent lower than the 1990s peak.
