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The Vera Institute of Justice recently released a handbook to help a wide range of social service practitioners, in juvenile justice and beyond. The new document, "Measuring Success: A Guide to Becoming an Evidence-Based Practice," breaks the process into three steps and offers an easy-to-follow methodology to measuring performance.
Vera offers guidance in determining who qualifies as evidence-based, which can be helpful for funding. Vera's announcement continues:

Demonstrating that a program accomplishes its stated goals is increasingly important for social service organizations—funders and clients want to see the evidence of successful outcomes. Although a full-scale evaluation can be a costly and overwhelming goal, adopting the information-gathering and self-reflective approaches that lead up to an evaluation can in themselves strengthen an agency’s focus and procedural fidelity.
Vera has worked with juvenile justice system service providers in many settings as they build and monitor their programs. It produced this handbook on the basis of experience in the field, and in collaboration with the Institute for Public Health and Justice at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center.
While the guide grew out of requests from juvenile justice service providers for a roadmap toward becoming an evidence-based practice, its recommendations have applications beyond juvenile justice. “We believe the systematic approach to collecting information on goals, treatment methods, and outcomes can benefit other social service providers seeking to measure the efficacy of their interventions,” said Annie Salsich, director of Vera’s Center on Youth Justice.

The Sentencing Project recently released a report examining the history and impact of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI). The JRI is an evidence based approach to improve public safety, reduce incarcerations and reinvest savings to enhance neighborhoods. So far, it has supported 27 states in the last decade. While the JRI has made progress, the report, “Ending Mass Incarceration [PDF],” offers a note of caution:

Our analysis, described in the pages that follow, lead us to the conclusion that while JRI has played a significant role in softening the ground and moving the dial on mass incarceration reform, it is not an unmitigated success story; the picture is complex and nuanced.

It argues that the expansion of correctional control has not occurred accidentally, but as a result of deliberate policy choices that have increased the number of people entering the system and how long they stay. Although there have been some problems with the JRI since it was originally catalyzed, The Sentencing Project is enthusiastic about where it will go from here.
The report emphasizes the impact that JRI could have moving forward through four recommendations:

1. Reduce all forms of incarceration and correctional supervision (probation/parole).
2. Reinvest in high incarceration communities.
3. Involve stakeholders and non-governmental entities at the state and local levels throughout the planning, legislative, implementation and reinvestment process.
4. Create a multi-year plan and course for implementation and evaluation beyond short-term legislative or policy fixes.

Reclaiming Futures helps communities develop networks of caring adults that connect justice involved youth to a wide range of activities where they learn social skills, job skills and new behaviors that help them stay drug-free and crime-free long after they complete treatment and probation.
Are you trying to recruit mentors in your community?
Please take a moment to share Olivia's story of gratitude for her Reclaiming Futures King County mentor, Hazel Cameron. We thank Hazel, of the 4C Coalition Mentoring Program, who helped Olivia break the cycle of drugs, alcohol and crime. 

The LIFE Program (Learning Independence and Family Empowerment) began in 2005 through the partnerships of Montgomery County Juvenile Court, South Community, The Alcohol Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Montgomery County, Samaritan Behavioral Health and Reclaiming Futures. The program utilizes Functional Family Therapy, which is an empirically grounded, evidenced based practice model. It has shown high success with violence prevention with youth.
Through the hard work, dedication and continued collaboration of The LIFE Program partners, we have now provided home based family services to over 1,200 youth and families in our community and have reported very successful outcomes!
One of the gaps of service in our community continues to be effective family substance abuse treatment. The FFT-CM Model focuses on engaging ALL key family members to participate in treatment and then motivating them to change. Family behavior change activities are organized to serve as a powerful mechanism for reinforcing alternative healthy behaviors that can replace substance using behaviors in ALL family members.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• President’s Budget Proposes Spending on Youth Programs, Services (YouthToday.org)
  President Barack Obama introduced his 2014 budget proposal on Wednesday, highlighting new efforts to increase funding for education and juvenile justice.
• The Power of Poetry in Education (JJIE.org)
  April is National Poetry Month. This year, thousands of students incarcerated in juvenile detention and correctional centers around the country are participating in a nationwide poetry initiative, “Words Unlocked,” sponsored by the Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings.
• Pa. Courts Tout Improvements to Juvenile Justice (Cumberlink.com)
  A new report says Pennsylvania's juvenile courts have made dozens of rule changes in response to an internal review prompted by a court scandal in Luzerne County. Chief Justice Ronald Castille produced the eight-page report Monday at the Juvenile Justice Academy in Hershey.
• In Texas, Youth Reported with Mental Health Problems Grows Substantially (JJIE.org)
  More than half the juveniles in Texas detention facilities in 2012 had mental health issues, according to a recent Associated Press (AP) report based on figures released by the state’s justice officials in February. Over the last three years, officials state the number of juvenile detainees with “intensive need” for mental health treatment has ballooned by 113 percent.

Do you want to learn how the Reclaiming Futures model is uniting juvenile courts, probation, adolescent substance abuse treatment, and the community for cost effective juvenile justice reform?

Please register for a free webinar on Tuesday, April 30 at 10 a.m. (PDT)/1 p.m. (EDT)
What you'll learn:

• Communities have a compelling need to break the cycle of drugs, alchohol and crime 
• Reclaiming Futures is connecting young people to caring adults 
• The six-step model is pointing to better outcomes for youth

About the presenters:

Susan Richardson is national executive director for Reclaiming Futures. Formerly, she was a senior program officer in the health care division of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust in North Carolina, where she led a three-year effort involving the state's juvenile justice and treatment leaders to adopt the Reclaiming Futures model by juvenile courts in six North Carolina counties. She received her B.S. in Public Health, Health Policy and Administration, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Margaret Soukup is the project director for Seattle-King County Reclaiming Futures, in Seattle, Wash., where she serves as Science to Service/Workforce Development Coordinator Project/Program Manager III, Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division (MHCADSD). Margaret has a master's degree in psychology from Antioch University Seattle and a bachelor's degree in applied science, social sciences from Washington State University. 

In 2012, 8 million children were living in high-poverty communities—a 25 percent increase since 2000, reported a data snapshot (PDF) from the Annie E. Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT data center.
Areas of concentrated poverty are census tracts in which 30 percent or more residents live below the poverty threshold ($22,314 per year for a family of four). Research shows that even when family income is held constant, living in these communities holds serious consequences:

• Families are more likely to face food hardship, have trouble paying their housing costs, and lack health insurance.
• Children are more likely to experience harmful levels of stress and severe behavioral and emotional problems, as well as drop out of school and fall down the income ladder as an adult.

The amount of children living in these neighborhoods is on the rise, up 1.6 million since 2000. Some states have experienced explosive growth in the proportion of kids in concentrated poverty over this period, including Alaska: 400 percent increase, Colorado: 360 percent increase, Oregon: 200 percent increase, and North Carolina: 179 percent increase.
These sobering numbers prompt us to consider: how are our communities addressing poverty, and what can we do to help? As the data shows, poverty in a community has clear consequences for our youth. Given the connection, with creative thinking, we can improve the outlooks of both.

Thanks to the teamwork of Hocking County Reclaiming Futures, many teens in Southeast Ohio are receiving the support they need to break the cycle of drugs, alcohol and crime.
Learn how this team creates healthy activities for young people. In a story, published by the Logan Daily News on April 1, they:

• Hiked trails with a soil & water conservation education specialist,
• Created art from recycled and reclaimed items, and 
• Learned to identify trees and shrubs in the Hocking Hills

Reclaiming Futures teens are learning to give back too. By donating art objects for programming at the Bishop Educational Gardens, they are creating goodwill in the community. 
Kudos to Hocking County Reclaiming Futures for building educational partnerships for court-involved young people. Together, they are connecting teens to positive activities and caring adults.

A recent NPR story explores the new relationship between Goldman Sachs and teens in the New York City prison system. Via the story:

In the New York City prison system, the outlook for juvenile offenders is bleak. They're falling through the cracks, being arrested repeatedly, and being re-released onto the same streets only to be picked up again.
The criminal justice system is failing these 16- and 17-year-olds, says Dora Schriro, the commissioners of the city's Department of Corrections.
"Just about half of them are going to return to jail in less than a year of their release from our system," she says. "And so that means right now one out of two is failing. They're being rearrested, charged with new crimes, and coming back."
So last year, the New York City Department of Corrections did something no other city in America has ever done — it asked for private, corporate investors. Goldman Sachs opted to invest $9.6 million in the Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience program, a new curriculum that seeks to bring down the number of youth offenders going back to prison.