Cross-Site Report: Perceptions of Changes to Juvenile Drug Court Service Matching During Reclaiming Futures Model Implementation - July 2015: Five Site Report

• NCJ Number: 249771
• Author(s): University of Arizona - Southwest Institute for Research on Women
• Date Published: December 2015
• Length: 4 pages
• Agencies: OJJDP-Sponsored

Annotation

Based on interviews with 52 team members from five sites involved in integrating the juvenile drug court (JDC) model with the Reclaiming Futures (RF) model, this report summarizes their perceived changes in juvenile drug courts’ process of matching the needs of program youth to available services, which is one of the core features of the RF model.

Abstract

The interviews reflect the observations of staff members involved in different JDC/RF subsystems at the five sites implementing the integration of the two models. The interviews were conducted annually at each site across the second, third, and fourth years of the JDC/RF grant-funded project period. Interviewees were asked to reflect on implementing RF with their JDCs, specifically whether the process of matching youth to services improved with the integration of the RF model into the JDC model. A consistent finding from the interviews across the five sites was that the RF model did not institute an entirely new approach in matching services provided to the assessed needs of youth participants. They perceived the RF focus on treatment-offender matching to be an improvement in JDC existing processes. Approximately half of the interviewees noted that service-matching had improved under the integration of the two models. The most commonly cited change reported in 40 percent of the interviews was the JDC team’s greater attention to community engagement during the implementation of the RF model, and this enhanced the number and types of services that were being matched to a youth‘s needs.