An update of the Institute of Judicial Administration (IJA)/ABA Standards for Juvenile Justice.

The American Bar Association (ABA) will inaugurate a project to review and update its national Juvenile Justice Standards and accompanying comment to incorporate significant legal developments (including seminal U.S. Supreme Court case law), key scientific advances in understanding about child and adolescent development, and important ABA juvenile justice policies that have emerged in the intervening decades since the Standards’ initial adoption thirty-five years ago. In light of these and other critical developments in the field, the National Academy of Sciences in its 2014 report, Implementing Juvenile Justice Reform: The Federal Role, called upon the ABA to revise the Juvenile Justice Standards as a force for systemic change. To that end, the ABA will convene a cross-disciplinary task force to research and analyze the effects of the current standards and ultimately develop an updated draft that has strong potential to be formally adopted by the ABA House of Delegates. OJJDP funds will be used to support the incorporation of consultants and subject matter experts, and to enable the ABA to conduct meetings in different parts of the country to ensure robust input and participation. The ABA will measure performance by the number of task force sessions held, work product created at the end of each task force meeting, and resulting improvements/edits made to the Standards. After the task force has completed its mandate and the revised Standards are formally approved, the ABA will measure the creation, sale and distribution of electronic and hard copies of the revised Juvenile Justice Standards.

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. NCA/NCF