An impact evaluation of Three Strategies Created to Reduce Disproportionate Minority Contact and the detention population

OJJDP is releasing this solicitation to fund studies of promising and effective strategies, programs, and methods to assist states and local communities in achieving and maintaining compliance with the four core requirements of OJJDP's authorizing legislation, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act of 2002. With this solicitation, OJJDP is encouraging researchers to propose studies and evaluations to identify successful programs and strategies that will enable states and local communities to improve their compliance with one or more of the core requirements of the JJDP Act. The legislative authority for this initiative can be found in the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2009, Pub. L. 111-8.

Arizona State University proposes research to examine the effectiveness of three distinct strategies'revision of a detention index, a procedural change in review of detention decisions, and a monitoring system of detained youth'created by Maricopa County Juvenile Probation to reduce disproportionate minority contact (DMC) and the number of youth subject to detention in the County. The study objectives include the examination of: 1) the overall number of detentions among youth brought to detention on a referral, especially minority youth; 2) the effect of race and ethnicity in detention outcome and subsequent stages of processing; 3) the length in detention stays among all youth; and 4) the decision-making processes of system actors directly involved with the processing of youth in the justice system, specifically detention and probation staff. Arizona State will rely on multiple methods to execute the project including secondary data analyses of official delinquency records as well as qualitative data from interviews and focus groups conducted with court and probation officials. The partners in the project are researchers from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University and the Maricopa County Juvenile Probation Department.

CA/NCF