Expanding the Use of DMC Data: Analysis of Patterns to Identify Best Practices

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.

The overall goals of this research are to conduct a national analysis of OJJDP's Disproportionate Minority Contact Relative Rate Index (RRI) data to identify jurisdictions that have shown a consistent positive movement in the RRI values over 3 consecutive years, to obtain detailed information on the approaches used by these jurisdictions, and to produce detailed case studies that can be replicated by other jurisdictions. The study will yield data on disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in localities, in States, and across the Nation at the nine contact points in the juvenile justice system. An assessment of the longitudinal RRI data and State plans will identify promising and best practices in DMC. The research design encompasses three phases. Phase 1 includes a review of empirical DMC research and the identification of available raw data and their input into the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) DMC Web-Based Data Entry System. Phase 2 includes a longitudinal analysis of the RRI database to identify jurisdictions with consistent positive movement in the RRI values over a minimum of 3 consecutive years. Phase 3 entails the identification and write-up of best practices through interviews and site visits.

CA/NCF