North Carolina Comprehensive Statewide Juvenile Reentry Systems Reform Implementation: Improving the Successful Reintegration of Juveniles into the Community

OJJDP's Juvenile Justice System Improvement Grants program was established to provide grants and cooperative agreements to organizations that provide programs and services critical to the mission of OJJDP, and organizations that OJJDP has selected for funds in prior years. This program will be authorized by an Act appropriating funds for the Department of Justice.

The North Carolina Department of Public Safety and its partners will work together to implement juvenile reentry reforms statewide:

• Research Triangle Institute (RTI) will be responsible for the performance evaluation component of the project. RTI will be responsible for executing a process and outcome evaluation to include a process study of the reentry reform initiative and coordinating with North Carolina Government Data Analytics Center (GDAC) on the execution of the baseline outcome study, and collaborating with GDAC on the synthesis of the process and outcome study findings.
• Funding will support enhancing the reliable use of re-normed risk and needs assessment instruments. The contracted expert, Katherine Dudley, will be responsible for developing a training curriculum for the risk and needs assessment instruments; participating in the service planning, risk and needs assessment, and servicing matching training initiative for court services; developing a web-based testing process to establish that staff are using the risk and needs assessment instruments reliably; and developing a standard case review process to be used by supervisors in the field.
• The North Carolina Government Data Analytics Center (GDAC) will be playing a key role in the refinement of the electronic service planning tool as well as in assisting in the application of analytics to produce service matching algorithms. In addition, they will be responsible for program outcome metrics, including establishing the baseline statistics (using historical data) as a foundation for project outcome analyses. The GDAC has legislative authority to access databases from the multiple state agencies (allowing access to employment data, child welfare, school records, criminal justice data, state health records, etc.) needed for predictive analytics. Funding to GDAC will support the three interrelated components of North Carolina’s reentry system reform: service plan enhancements; service matching tools and algorithm; and establishing a baseline against which subsequent outcome data analyses can be measured.

NCA/NCF