Introduction

An effective juvenile justice system must implement a sound comprehensive strategy and must identify and support programs that work to further the objectives of the strategy. These objectives include holding the juvenile offender accountable; enabling the juvenile to become a capable, productive, and responsible citizen; and ensuring the safety of the community.

For juveniles who come to the attention of police, juvenile courts, or social service agencies, a strong juvenile justice system must assess the danger they pose, determine what can help put them back on the right track, deliver appropriate treatment, and stay with them when they return to the community. When necessary, a strong juvenile justice system also must appropriately identify those serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders who are beyond its reach and ensure their criminal prosecution and incapacitation.

Research has shown that what works to reduce juvenile crime and violence includes prevention programs that start with the earliest stages of life: good prenatal care, home visitation for newborns at risk of abuse and neglect, steps to strengthen parenting skills, and initiatives to prepare children for school. These programs can build the foundation for law-abiding lives for children and interrupt the cycle of violence that can turn abused or neglected children into delinquents.

Prevention programs work for older children, too: opportunities for youth after school and on weekends, such as Boys and Girls Clubs and mentoring programs, reduce juvenile alcohol and drug use, improve school performance, and prevent youth from getting involved in crime and violent behavior.

Another focal point for juvenile justice efforts is the community. Without healthy communities, young people cannot thrive. The key leaders in the community, including representatives from the juvenile justice, health and mental health, schools, law enforcement, social services, and other systems, as well as leaders from the private sector, must be jointly engaged in the planning, development, and operation of the juvenile justice system. Attempts to improve the juvenile justice system must be part of a broad, comprehensive, communitywide effort -- both at the leadership and grassroots level -- to eliminate factors that place juveniles at risk of delinquency and victimization, enhance factors that protect them from engaging in delinquent behavior, and use the full range of resources and programs within the community to meet the varying needs of juveniles. It is also important to provide increased public access to the system to ensure an appropriate role for victims, a greater understanding of how the system operates, and a higher level of system accountability to the public.

The recent decreases in all measures of juvenile violence known to law enforcement (number of arrests, arrest rates, and the percentage of violent crimes cleared by juvenile arrests) should encourage legislators, juvenile justice policy makers and practitioners, and all concerned citizens to support ongoing efforts to address juvenile crime and violence through a comprehensive approach.

Three documents published during the past five years provide the framework for a comprehensive approach to an improved, more effective juvenile justice system. OJJDP's Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (1993) and Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (1995) were followed in 1996 by the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Combating Violence and Delinquency: The National Juvenile Justice Action Plan. The first of these publications defined the elements of the comprehensive strategy. The second provided states and communities with a more detailed explanation of what would constitute the elements of a comprehensive strategy, including strategic and programmatic information on risk and protective factor-based prevention and a system of graduated sanctions. The third prioritized federal, state, and local activities and resources under eight critical objectives that are central to reducing and preventing juvenile violence, delinquency, and victimization.

The OJJDP FY 1998 Proposed Program Plan is rooted in the principles of the Comprehensive Strategy and the objectives of the Action Plan. Like the OJJDP Program Plans for FY's 1996 and 1997, the FY 1998 Proposed Program Plan supports a balanced approach to aggressively addressing juvenile delinquency and violence through establishing graduated sanctions, improving the juvenile justice system's ability to respond to juvenile offending, and preventing the onset of delinquency. The Proposed Program Plan, therefore, recognizes the need to ensure public safety and support children's development into healthy, productive citizens through a range of prevention, early intervention, and graduated sanctions programs.

Proposed new program areas were identified for FY 1998 through a process of engaging OJJDP staff, other federal agencies, and juvenile justice practitioners in an examination of existing programs, research findings, and the needs of the field. In a departure from past practice, OJJDP is presenting for public comment more proposed programs than it expects to be able to fund with the resources available. It is OJJDP's intent to stimulate discussion of the best use of its FY 1998 discretionary funding and to seek guidance from the field as to which programs, among the many described here, would most effectively advance the goals of promoting delinquency prevention and early intervention, improving the juvenile justice system, and preserving the public safety.

OJJDP is considering providing funding for a wide variety of new programs, including technical assistance to promote teen court programs, training and technical assistance coordination for the SafeFutures initiative, and training and technical assistance for the Blueprints for Violence Prevention project and for a school safety program. New proposals also involve OJJDP collaboration with other agencies to address problems such as truancy, develop arts programs directed toward at-risk youth and youth held in juvenile detention centers, support the planning and development of systems of care for Native American and Alaskan Native youth with mental health and substance abuse needs, develop and implement a teambuilding project designed to facilitate coordination and foster innovative solutions to problems facing juvenile courts, and support demonstration projects designed to intervene early with students with learning disabilities to prevent delinquency and also to prevent recidivism by those students in correctional settings.

In addition, OJJDP is considering providing funding for initial planning and implementation of a Juvenile Defender Center, coordination of youth-related volunteer services, support for programs designed to build infrastructure for programming for female juvenile offenders and teen mothers, and support for additional work in the area of disproportionate minority confinement in secure juvenile facilities and other institutions. Some of the proposed new program areas for FY 1998 are specific while others are more general, as can be seen in the program descriptions that appear later in the Proposed Program Plan.

In addition, OJJDP has identified for FY 1998 funding a range of research and evaluation projects designed to expand knowledge about juvenile offenders; the effectiveness of prevention, intervention, and treatment programs; and the operation of the juvenile justice system. New evaluation initiatives that may be undertaken include the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders; the Boys and Girls Clubs of America's TeenSupreme Career Preparation Initiative; analysis and interpretation of juvenile justice-related data from nontraditional sources; evaluation capacity building in states; and field-initiated research and evaluation. Combined with new OJJDP programs and programs being continued in FY 1998, these new demonstration and evaluation programs would form a continuum of programming that supports the objectives of the Action Plan and mirrors the foundation and framework of the Comprehensive Strategy.

OJJDP's continuation activities and the new FY 1998 programs are at the heart of OJJDP's categorical funding efforts. For example, while focusing on new areas of programming such as the Juvenile Defender Center and the role of the arts for juveniles in detention centers and for at-risk youth, continuing to offer training seminars in the Comprehensive Strategy, and looking to the SafeFutures program to implement a continuum of care system, OJJDP will be supporting programs that reduce the likelihood of juvenile involvement in hate crimes, reduce juvenile gun violence, promote positive approaches to conflict resolution, and explore the mental health needs of juveniles. Together, these and other activities provide a comprehensive approach to prevention and early intervention programs, while enhancing the juvenile justice system's capacity to provide immediate and appropriate accountability and treatment for juvenile offenders, including those with special treatment needs.

OJJDP's Part D Gang Program is considering development of a rural gang prevention and intervention program, and will continue to support a range of comprehensive prevention, intervention, and suppression activities at the local level, evaluate those activities, and inform communities about the nature and extent of gang activities and effective and innovative programs through OJJDP's National Youth Gang Center. Similarly, activities related to the identification of school-based gang programs and the evaluation of the Boys and Girls Clubs gang outreach effort, along with an evaluation of selected youth gun violence reduction programs, will complement existing law enforcement and prosecutorial training programs by supporting and informing grassroots community organizations' efforts to address juvenile gangs and juvenile access to, carriage of, and use of guns. This programming builds on OJJDP's youth-focused community policing, mentoring, and conflict resolution initiatives and programming, including the work of the Congress of National Black Churches in supporting local churches to address the prevention of drug abuse, youth violence, and hate crime.

In support of the need to break the cycle of violence, OJJDP's SafeKids/Safe Streets demonstration program, currently being implemented in partnership with other OJP offices and bureaus, will improve linkages between the dependency and criminal court systems, child welfare and social service providers, and family strengthening programs and will complement ongoing support of Court Appointed Special Advocates, Child Advocacy Centers, and prosecutor and judicial training in the dependency field, funded under the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990, as amended.

The Plan's research and evaluation programming will support many of the above activities by filling in critical gaps in knowledge about the level and seriousness of juvenile crime and victimization, its causes and correlates, and effective programs in preventing delinquency and violence. At the same time, OJJDP's research efforts will also be geared toward efforts that monitor and evaluate the ways juveniles are treated by the juvenile and criminal justice systems, particularly in relation to juvenile violence and its impact.

As described below, OJJDP is also utilizing its national perspective to disseminate information to those at the grassroots level: practitioners, policy makers, community leaders, and service providers who are directly responsible for planning and implementing policies and programs that impact juvenile crime and violence. An additional OJJDP goal is to help practitioners and policy makers translate this information into action through its training and technical assistance providers as part of its mission to provide meaningful assistance for the replication of successful and promising strategies and programs.

OJJDP will continue to fund longitudinal research on the causes and correlates of delinquency. Even more important, however, OJJDP will regularly share the findings from this research with the field through OJJDP's publications, home page on the World Wide Web, and JuvJust (an electronic newsletter); utilize state-of-the-art technology to provide the field with an interactive CD-ROM on promising and effective programs designed to prevent delinquency and reduce recidivism; air national satellite teleconferences on key topics of relevance to practitioners; and publish new reports and documents on timely topics. Some examples of these publication topics include youth action to prevent delinquency; family strengthening; juvenile substance abuse (prevention, intervention, and testing); balanced and restorative justice; developmental pathways in delinquent behavior, gang migration, capacity building for substance abuse treatment, youth gangs, restitution programs, school safety, and conditions of confinement.

The various contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, and interagency fund transfers described in the Proposed Program Plan form a continuum of activity designed to address youth violence, delinquency, and victimization. In isolation, this programming can do little. However, the emphasis of OJJDP's programming is on collaboration. It is through collaboration that federal, state, and local agencies; Native American tribes; national organizations; private philanthropies; the corporate and business sector; health, mental health, and social service agencies; schools; youth; families; and clergy can come together to form partnerships and leverage additional resources, identify needs and priorities, and implement innovative strategies. In the past few years, the combined efforts of these varied groups have brought about the beginnings of change in the prevalence of juvenile crime, violence, and victimization. Now is the time to strengthen old partnerships and forge new ones to develop support for a long-term, comprehensive approach to a more effective juvenile justice system.

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