NCJ Number
213528
Journal
Corrections Compendium Volume: 31 Issue: 1 Dated: January/February 2006 Pages: 6-7,22,24
Date Published
January 2006
Length
5 pages
Annotation
This article reports on an evaluation of Utah's Project Empower, whose distinctive feature was biweekly meetings in which juvenile probationers receiving mental health services met with a panel of probation supervisors who questioned them on their treatment progress during the past 2 weeks.
Abstract
The evaluation's juvenile probationer control group--which received the same intensive probation and treatment services offered the Project Empower participants absent the panel meetings--scored higher on mental health symptom reduction than the treatment group. Both groups achieved better outcomes than national norms. Given these findings, Project Empower immediately discontinued its use of the Probation Review Panel Meeting. The outcome data clearly indicated that standard probation, combined with the treatment services delivered under Project Empower, was significantly reducing mental illness symptoms without the kind of accountability monitoring done by the panel meetings. The evaluation involved 90 youth in Project Empower and 32 youth in the control group. Thirteen symptoms of mental illness were measured for both groups before treatment and after 90 days of treatment or the end of treatment, whichever came first. The instrument used was the Treatment Outcome Package Child Version. The domains measured included accidents, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, assets, conduct, depression, eating, psychosis, school, separation anxiety, sleep, social anxiety, suicide, and violence. At the outset of the evaluation, the two groups had similar scores on these measures. 4 figures, 3 notes, and 9 references