Spotlight On: Performance Measures for the Juvenile Justice System: A National Demonstration Project

by Caren Harp1

Congress considers performance measurement to be a national priority. Unfortunately, however, practitioners generally greet the subject of performance measures with skepticism and resistance. Much of the resistance derives from the perception that historically, performance standards have been developed by academics, researchers and policy makers, most of whom have little experience with, or understanding of, the actual work of practitioners or the operation of the court system. Departing from this tradition, the Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ) Project at Florida Atlantic University, the American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI), and the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) have developed a set of performance measures to help ensure accountability of the juvenile justice system to citizens.

Congress awarded a grant to APRI and its partners to carry out a national project to demonstrate that it is both possible and valuable to measure the performance of juvenile justice systems to help:

• Reduce juvenile crime;
• Serve crime victims;
• Hold offenders accountable to repair the harm experienced by victims and communities; and
• Develop the competencies of offenders and communities to assist juvenile offenders to become responsible, productive citizens.

The ultimate goal is to build a core set of juvenile justice performance measures for potential use nationwide.

Benchmarks

The project will test a set of measures, or benchmarks, that are tied directly to the goals of community safety, offender accountability and competency development.2 The benchmarks also take into account the axiom that communities are safest when citizens are actively involved in the justice system. The measures include both intermediate and impact outcomes that are directly connected to the goals of community safety, offender accountability and competency development. In addition, to qualify as benchmarks, measures must be:

• Measurable with reasonable accuracy and reliability;
• Accessible;
• Concise, while striving to cover the broadest spectrum of quality of performance indicators;
• Representative of the broadest scale investment of the citizenry, the juvenile justice system and crime victims;
• Reflective of positive gains, i.e., indicative of community achievement toward positive outcomes rather than just reduction of negative circumstances; and
• Understandable by the community.

Intermediate outcomes will measure the degree to which organizational objectives are being met. These include:

• Resistance to drugs and alcohol
• Restitution
• Community service
• School participation
• Victim satisfaction; and
• Citizen participation in the system.

Impact outcomes will measure the degree to which the juvenile justice system has had some long-term, profound impact on offenders and communities. These measures include:

• Juvenile crime rate
• Law abiding behavior of offenders within one year after completing juvenile court obligations
• Adult criminal convictions in adulthood (18-21yoa).

Four participating jurisdictions—Deschutes County, OR, Allegheny County, PA, Cook County, IL and the State of South Carolina—will collect data on these measures and present findings in a number of formats, including periodic outcome-based management reports (e.g., reporting intermediate outcome data by judicial officer, supervisor, probation unit, and individual probation caseloads) and a system-wide “report card.” The “report cards” will allow jurisdictions to establish local benchmark measures, detect trends, and evaluate effectiveness of their current efforts. Jurisdictions will disseminate their report cards to policy makers and make them available to citizens in their communities through newspapers, web sites or other appropriate means.

APRI and its partners will document and analyze the experiences of the demonstration sites, i.e., obstacles to implementation, data collection issues and problem-solving techniques. This information will be used to improve the performance measurement strategies and report cards, and to provide national guidance for juvenile justice performance measurement and planning.

National Priority

This national demonstration project was funded to develop and test a “juvenile justice system report card” with the intent of building a core set of juvenile justice performance measures for wider consideration and use. The performance measures in this project were developed by practitioners and citizens. They reflect the values, needs and expectations of victims, offenders and communities while pragmatically capturing the work of practitioners. Additionally, the value of measuring these benchmarks is apparent almost immediately. The measures are tied directly to the identified goals of community safety, offender accountability and competency development, so performance on the measures relates directly to advancement of the system’s philosophy. These measures are intended to inform management decisions, guide resource allocation and inform citizens about the successes and challenges of juvenile court.

The performance measures grant began October 1, 2003. Data collection for the report cards begins January 1, 2004. We anticipate completing the project with a full report to OJJDP and congressional staff by Sept. 30, 2004. Additional products will include software and an instruction manual for data collection and report card production, a monograph on the viability of the “balanced approach” as a philosophy for all juvenile justice systems, and implementation guidance for use of the “balanced” philosophy and report card. For additional information about the performance measures project and future efforts to measure performance, please contact APRI’s National Juvenile Justice Prosecution Center at (703) 549-4253.

1 Caren Harp, Senior Attorney, taken from the performance measures grant application developed by Ms. Harp, Doug Thomas, Research Associate, NCJJ and Dennis Maloney of the BARJ Project.

2 Caren Harp, “Bringing Balance to Juvenile Justice,” APRI Special Topic Monograph Series, 2002.