NCJ Number
247466
Date Published
May 2014
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This report highlights three promising supervision strategies for working with justice-involved youth.
Abstract
This report from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency is part of an eight-part series on finding strategies to decrease incarceration rates among justice-involved youth. The strategies are aimed at keeping more youth in their homes and communities rather than in out-of-home placements and secure detention facilities. This report highlights three strategies that have proven to reduce incarceration rates for youth. The first strategy, reducing supervision for youth who do not need it, relies on risk assessments, screening instruments, and other tools to help juvenile justice systems shift youth to the lowest form of supervision needed to meet their needs, or in some cases, to divert them entirely from the juvenile justice system. The second strategy, working to reduce revocations, involves training probation department personnel to encourage different responses to behaviors to avoid revocations, clarifying which rules would no longer result in revocation, and problem solving with the youths and their families to obtain the right response. The third strategy, build stronger supervision partnerships with families and service providers, includes articulating roles for each member of the supervision team in the work and their relationships to each other, sharing access to information systems, providing joint trainings, hiring personnel to work with families in the system, using models that place families at the center of the process, and developing family orientation programs.