Building on Family Strengths from the Inside Out: Enhancing Family Justice''s Tools for Juvenile Correctional Facilities and Their Community Partners

The goals of the program are to decrease rates of arrest and rearrest among youth participants; minimize the negative effects of commonly co-occurring issues'such as gang affiliation, truancy, addiction, mental illness and other chronic conditions, unstable housing, and unemployment'by engaging family members and tapping their existing strengths; reducing the harms created by inter-generational cycles of crime and victimization; shifting the approach of service providers from a pathologizing and deficit-based focus on the individual to a strength-based focus on family; and shifting the culture of juvenile correctional facilities by increasing rapport between case managers and youth; and increasing the case managers' focus on family strengths. Family Justice will build on its current work with the National Institute of Corrections and five pilot sites to tailor a Relational Inquiry Tool for youth as a complement to existing risk and needs assessments. The program plans to report the performance measures as follows: report on deliverables from the planning process; analysis of pre-training surveys from participating staff at pilot sites on current practices, attitudes, needs, and challenges related to working with youth involved in the criminal justice system and with their families; curriculum on a youth-focused component of the Bodega Model; curriculum on juvenile version of the Relational Inquiry Tool; number of staff trained; number of training sessions; number of youth who participated in focus groups for the Tool; number of youth who participated in the pretest of the Tool; number of youth and family members served; number of family case management sessions per participant; number of families with at least one parent/guardian participating in the majority of relevant services; number of parents/guardians satisfied with services provided; analysis of post-training questionnaires from participating staff at pilot sites on how the training was helpful and how to revise the curriculum; assessment of intermediate impact of training in the form of new knowledge and skills gained for serving youth involved'or at risk of involvement'in the criminal justice system; anecdotal observations from Family Justice staff on how practice at each site has changed since implementing the youth-oriented component of the Bodega Model; manual on how to implement the youth-focused component of the Bodega Model; rate of arrest/rearrest as well as indicators of risk that are unrelated to criminal justice involvement among youth involved in the program as compared to a control group from a similar program serving a similar youth population in the same neighborhood; and comparison of baseline and exit data on the program's impact on commonly co-occurring issues'such as truancy, addiction, mental illness and other chronic conditions, unemployment and unstable housing. CA/NCF