JRSA Presentation: Analysis of Data from the Iowa Juvenile Courts

Presentation

10/01/2003

Introductory Statement

The Iowa Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning (the Iowa SAC) is involved in a number of different activities including research, evaluation, technical assistance, and consultation to assist the Iowa juvenile court and its various services. Some of the current projects include: (1) the development and creation of a computerized risk/needs assessment for juvenile court intake to be used across the state, (2) the analysis and reporting of delinquency data through the Justice Data Warehouse (developed and implemented by the Iowa SAC), (3) the oversight of Iowa’s disproportionate minority confinement (DMC) effort, and (4) the tracking of a number of delinquency services to measure results.

In the mid 1990’s four new community-based services were implemented in the state --

tracking & monitoring, day treatment, life skills, and school-based services. The State’s Chief Juvenile Court Officers elicited CJJP’s assistance to track these services in order to provide results regarding program completion, re-referral, and out-of-home placements.

Purpose

The purpose of the presentation is to discuss the factors that led to the collection of data, the manner in which the results/findings are used by the state, and the use of crime, data and program performance measurement challenges amid new fiscal realities.

This effort ties in with the juvenile court’s desire to determine effective strategies in juvenile justice related issues.

The Programs

The state of Iowa has 99 counties, organized into eight judicial districts. Each of these districts has a Chief Juvenile Court Officer who oversees the juvenile court officers and juvenile court services. In the mid-1990’s the Iowa legislature appropriated money for four new community-based delinquency services (Tracking and Monitoring, Day Treatment, Life Skills, and School-Based Services).

Tracking and Monitoring Services – are activities undertaken to provide intensive one-to-one guidance and monitoring of a child (under 18 years of age) with the goal of maintaining client accountability and establishing positive behavior patterns for a client in a non-residential, community-based setting. These services are designed to provide a continuum of individualized interventions to adolescents and their families 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and are composed of two primary service components. The primary service components include:

• Adolescent tracking, guidance, monitoring directed toward maintaining client accountability and multiple daily contacts through direct client contract, telephone, or electronic monitoring devices;

• Advocacy and outreach services which are designed to provide advocacy for the client and may include assistance in accessing a variety of resources (e.g., referral to community organizations, health services, education, employment, legal, etc).

Community-Based Day Treatment Services – are activities intended to provide daily treatment and support services to youth adjudicated as delinquent or evaluated by a juvenile court officer to be at risk of such adjudication. These youth experience problems that place them at risk of group care or state institutional placement. Supervised community treatment services were developed by the Iowa Department of Human Services, in collaboration with Chief Juvenile Court Officers, as a result of funds appropriated to the Department for these purposes.

• Treatment (including supportive therapy or counseling)

• Educational programming (including skill development services)

Life Skills Development Services – are intended to provide training in life and job-seeking skills, as well as job training experiences, to adjudicated delinquent youth or youth who are evaluated by a juvenile court officer to be at risk of such adjudication. These youth receive specific training to develop and enhance their interpersonal skills.

Examples of allowable skill development training includes, but is not limited to, interpersonal relationships, self-esteem, anger-management, problem-solving, stress reduction, accountability and accepting responsibility, victim empathy, job skills and experiences. Life Skills development instruction is provided in community-based settings to prevent placement in more restrictive settings or assist youth in returning to their communities from out-of-home placement.

School-Based Supervision Services – provides on-site services to middle and high school students experiencing truancy or other behavior problems at home, at school, or in the community. These programs are designed to assist with behavior and classroom management, conflict resolution, school attendance and violence prevention. It is the aim of these services to identify and address problems before they escalate and typically involve the family in addressing the student’s problems. These programs reflect an important partnership among DHS, juvenile court services, and the local schools.

These services basically led to the development of school liaisons who were considered school employees but paid jointly by the JCS and the school/community.

Data Collection/Methodology

Tracking & Monitoring, Day Treatment, and Life Skills

In the late 1990s the court desired information regarding the effectiveness of the services – as such they began with the first three services (tracking and monitoring, day treatment, life skills) because it was assumed that the services were somewhat similar and more common. The information desired was very basic – client name, JCO name, program type, status of completion (successful / unsuccessful), re-referral to juvenile court (defined as the filing of a police complaint), and out-of-home placement. In the beginning we agreed to capture information from closed cases in a given month (e.g., January) then six month later we captured the outcome data and compiled the information into one-page fact sheets (description of program, funding/allocation amounts, and highlights of findings). These immediately became popular to describe the program and when courting funding. So a decision was made to expand the capture to two month out of the year (Jan and July) and then it was decided to capture information monthly switching from closed case to new admissions to better identify the use of the service. The outcome information was to come from the JCO field staff so it was considered to be time intensive and as such we decided to take snap shot pictures a few times a year instead of capturing outcome information on every new admission. The hope is that through a new data justice warehouse that we can begin to use that to track these individuals and take the burden off of the field staff and be able to track more and be more timely.

Background Data

Tracking & Monitoring, Day Treatment, & Life Skills

by Sex

Calendar Year 2002

Student Characteristics	2000 Iowa Census (Ages 0-17)	Tracking & Monitoring	Day Treatment	Life Skills
SEX	%	%	%	%
Male	51.3	75.4	75.4	63.0
Female	48.7	24.6	24.6	23.7
N	733,638	2,934	268	670
RACE	%	%	%	%
Caucasian	90.8	84.7	75.4	83.8
African-American	3.0	9.7	16.0	11.5
Hispanic*	4.5	2.9	3.4	3.4
Native American	0.4	0.3	0.4	0.1
Asian/Pacific Islander	1.4	1.0	1.1	0.1
Mixed/Other	4.2	1.4	3.7	0.7
N	733,638	2,928	268	671

*Please note that the Hispanic/Latino category is an ethnic category, and all of the youth numbered in this category by the Census Bureau are counted above in the other six racial categories. In addition, there were 35 individuals who received a combination of services not included in the above data.

• The majority of juveniles served by these three services are white and male.

• There appears to be some overrepresentation of persons with color in comparison with the general population, but I am not sure at this point how this compares to the percent of person of color under juvenile court supervision. It should also be noted that the percent of persons of color receiving these community-based services is somewhat lower than the percent in the state training school (23%).

Outcome Data

The Chief Juvenile Court Officers decided to capture follow-up data regarding, program completion status (successful or unsuccessful), recidivism (re-referral to juvenile court on a new complaint) and out-of-home placement. Because the follow-up data is currently collected from the juvenile court officers, meaning that this is a time consuming process, a decision was made to limit the follow-up from tracking everyone who is admitted to one of these services to tracking quarterly cohorts. So for the Months of January, April, July, October, I send the list of new admits for the previous year during January and the other months to the juvenile court offices and then the officers fill-in whether the juvenile has successfully completed the program, been re-referred to juvenile court, or been placed out of the home. We are currently working on an automated way of doing this so that we can take the strain of the juvenile court officers as well as increase the number of cases that we track to everyone being admitted to one of the services. We have just recently developed a justice data warehouse that captures court information and once cleaned and the data quality checked off on we will put it to use.

Delinquency Services by Program Completion Status

Program Type	Successful		Unsuccessful
	n	%	n	%
Tracking & Monitoring	768	79.7	196	20.3
Day Treatment	116	80.6	28	19.4
Life Skills	176	97.8	4	2.2
Total	1060	82.3	228	17.7

Delinquency Services by Recidivism

Program Type	Recidivism		No Recidivism
	n	%	n	%
Tracking & Monitoring	224	23.3	740	77.1
Day Treatment	36	25.0	108	75.0
Life Skills	20	11.1	160	88.9
Total	280	21.7	1,008	78.3

Delinquency Services by Out-of-Home Placement

Program Type	Out-of-Home Placement		No Out-of-Home Placement
	n	%	n	%
Tracking & Monitoring	152	15.8	812	84.2
Day Treatment	20	13.9	124	86.1
Life Skills	12	6.7	168	93.3
Total	184	14.3	1,104	85.7

• These data are really baseline data and do not really tell us all that much at this point other than that day treatment has slightly higher rates of recidivism than the tracking and monitoring and over twice that of life skills.

• Conversely Life-skills services have the lowest recidivism rates, the highest completion rate and the lowest out-of-home placement rates.

School-Based Supervision Services

The planning and implementation for the collection of school liaison data took a little longer, part of the problems was agreeing on the definition of terms such as a contact and collection period and so on. The other reason was that school districts had different definitions of terms and ways of capturing or not capturing information. For example, attendance and truancy -- After some development and trial runs it was decided to define a contact as a meaningful contact in which the liaison and student discussed a referral reason or focus of intervention (attendance issues, truancy issues, disciplinary behavioral issues, law violations, GPA/academic issues, tardiness issues, mental health issues). At first the chiefs asked the liaisons to capture background information from all students from whom they had one of these meaningful contacts and then capture pre and post performance information on those students having 5 or more meaningful contact within a 60-day period. The performance items captured were attendance, truancy, tardies, suspensions, law violations, GPA. The information was captured pre- and post- liaison involvement.

Background Data

School Liaisons Sex and Race of Students

Student Characteristics	2000 Iowa Census (Ages 0-17)		2000-2001 School Year		2001-2002 School Year
SEX	N	%	N	%	N	%
Male	376,710	51.3	2,634	67.1	3,895	66.7
Female	356,928	48.7	1,292	32.9	1,942	33.3
Unknown	--	--	--	--	2	0.0
Total	733638	100.0	3,926	100.0	5,840	100.0
RACE
Caucasian	666,498	90.8	3,415	87.0	5,152	88.2
African-American	22,040	3.0	216	5.5	318	5.4
Hispanic*	32,727	4.5	115	2.9	207	3.5
Native American	3,148	0.4	15	0.4	21	0.4
Asian/Pacific Islander	10,566	1.4	35	0.9	25	0.4
Mixed/Other	31,386	4.2	50	1.3	104	1.8
Unknown	--	--	80	2.0	12	0.2
Total*	733,638	100.0	3,846	100.0	5,827	100.0

*Please note that the Hispanic/Latino category is an ethnic category, and all of the youth numbered in this category by the Census Bureau are counted above in the other six racial categories.

• Sex - the school liaisons have been working with twice as many males as females in the two years we have been tracking these data.

• Race – the percent of youth of color receiving school-based services is 10.2 percent that is somewhat close to the percent of youth in the general population.

However, the representation for youth of color for community based services including, school liaison services, is not as high for some of the upper end services such as residential group care (16 percent), detention centers (30 percent), the boys state training school (26 percent), the girls juvenile home (30 percent), and residential group care (16 percent).

Grade Level

Grade Level	2000-2001 School Year		2001-2002 School Year
	N	%	N	%
Elementary (grades 1-5)	126	3.2	327	5.6
Middle School (grades 6-8)	1,564	39.8	2,266	38.8
High School (grades 9-12)	2,159	55.0	3,243	55.5
Unknown	77	2.0	4	0.1
State Total	3,849	100.0	5,840	100.0

• Most of the focus of the school liaison program is upon High School and Middle School youths.

• However, more attention and services are being provided to elementary students.

Outcomes

School-Based Supervision Services

Pre- & Post- Measures

	Attendance		Truancy		Tardiness		Suspensions		Law Violations		GPA
	%		%		%		%		%		%
	00-01	01-02	00-01	01-02	00-01	01-02	00-01	01-02	00-01	01-02	00-01	01-02
Worsened	48.1	40.1	21.9	40.1	38.1	27.7	24.5	15.1	28.7	7.6	54.4	53.1
Stayed the Same	12.4	13.1	61.2	13.1	33.2	35.7	57.7	63.7	62.9	67.3	8.2	9.8
Improved	39.5	46.7	16.9	46.7	28.7	36.6	17.7	21.2	8.4	25.2	37.4	37.1
N	3,875	4,672	3,762	4,673	3,831	4,612	3,926	4,613	3,761	4,661	3,356	3,844
Pre Mean	5.6	5.2	1.2	1.2	3.6	3.2	1.1	0.9	0.4	0.4	2.6	2.0
Post Mean	5.1	5.0	1.2	1.1	3.4	3.1	1.0	0.8	0.2	0.2	2.5	2.0

Conclusions

The data regarding these four services began being collected to – (some of dicks words) --- although the data has only been captured for a relatively short time it is already being seen by juvenile court personnel as meaningful and useful. These data are being used by the juvenile court to:

• Provide baseline and trend data regarding the effectiveness of the services.

• Allow for comparisons with different levels of services

• Provide information about the effectiveness of the services.

• Obtain and maintain funding levels for these services.

Recommendations and next steps

• Need to compare race and sex findings with the total percentages of juveniles under juvenile court supervision.

• Need to explore which types of groups (male, female, ages, etc) account for higher / lower rates of recidivism, out-of-home placement, program completion and other outcomes (school liaisons).

• Automate the initial data capture – so that all offices are reporting electronically (not sure how realistically this will be for the schools).

• Automate the follow-up data collection for the tracking and monitoring, day treatment, and life skills.