APRI Highlights - Summer 2003

Measuring Impact -- A Report Card for Juvenile Justice Systems

Caren Harp, Director, National Juvenile Justice Prosecution Center

Taxpayers invest significant resources in the juvenile justice system. In return, they expect the system to do three basic things: protect communities, hold offenders accountable both to victims and to communities, and develop competencies in offenders such that they cease their criminal activities and re-enter communities as productive, contributing members of society. But how do citizens, or system practitioners, know if the system is achieving these goals? Currently, they do not.

One result of this lack of information has been that citizens in many states, through the initiative petition process and their legislatures, have expressed a lack of confidence in the juvenile justice system by enacting laws that allow prosecution of juvenile offenders in adult court at younger ages and for a wider variety of offenses.

In recent years, two jurisdictions have dedicated significant time and effort to the development of a benchmark reporting system for juvenile justice. Deschutes County (Bend), OR, and the State of Pennsylvania have made great strides in identifying specific goals for juvenile justice, and in developing ways to measure attainment of those goals. Deschutes County has taken the measurement process one step further by communicating system achievements to the community in the form of a report card. The system-wide “report card” allows the jurisdiction to detect trends, and evaluate effectiveness of their current efforts. Deschutes County disseminates its report card to key system actors and policymakers, and makes it available to citizens through the newspaper.

This summer, APRI’s National Juvenile Justice Prosecution Center expects to receive funding to demonstrate the use of juvenile justice system report cards in four jurisdictions. These national demonstration sites will be among the first to utilize performance measures in juvenile justice. The performance measures and report card developed in Deschutes County and Allegheny County, PA, will serve as the starting point for the APRI project. In partnership with the National Center on Juvenile Justice and Florida Atlantic University, APRI will work with the four sites to help them implement the benchmark reporting system, collect the requisite data and report on their results. The ultimate product will be a plan for adopting the juvenile justice report card nationwide.

For more information about juvenile justice system performance measures or the national demonstration project, please contact the National Juvenile Justice Prosecution Center at (703) 549-4253 or juvenilejustice@ndaa-apri.org.