Developing Future JDAI Leaders Has Big Payoff

The Applied Lead­er­ship Net­work (ALN) pro­vides an exten­sive lead­er­ship cur­ricu­lum for future JDAI lead­ers to encour­age new meth­ods and skills to effec­tive­ly lead deten­tion reform in deep­er and more mean­ing­ful ways.

TJ Bohl and Kevin Williams of Pierce Coun­ty, Wash­ing­ton, used the valu­able ALN lessons and strate­gies to engage juve­nile pro­ba­tion, deten­tion, pros­e­cu­tor, clerk’s office and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sion­als in using data to go deep­er in deten­tion reform and reduc­ing racial/​ethnic dis­par­i­ties. Forty five staff mem­bers vol­un­teered to serve on sev­en work groups to explore meth­ods to go even deep­er in reduc­ing deten­tion bed nights for African-Amer­i­can youth. The top­ics explored by the work groups included:

• Ensur­ing diver­sion oppor­tu­ni­ties are equal for all youth.
• Enhanc­ing the deten­tion RAI to pro­mote equi­ty in deci­sions for all youth.
• Reduc­ing aver­age length of stay for African-Amer­i­can youth with high deten­tion RAI scores.
• Increas­ing sus­pend­ed sen­tences for eli­gi­ble African-Amer­i­can youth to reduce commitments.
• Devel­op more effec­tive pro­ba­tion approach­es to reduce reof­fend­ing and insti­tu­tion­al commitments.
• Reduc­ing the num­ber of par­ent refusals for African-Amer­i­can youth eli­gi­ble for release from detention.
• Enhance coor­di­na­tion of data track­ing between juve­nile jus­tice agen­cies to pro­mote DMC reduction.

On Feb­ru­ary 28, 2013, Bohl and Williams led a meet­ing to report on the progress made with each work group and to define how spe­cif­ic rec­om­men­da­tions for sys­tem improve­ment will be pre­sent­ed to juve­nile court judges and admin­is­tra­tors. Camille Hen­der­son, the ALN Coach, attend­ed the pre­sen­ta­tion and gave high marks to the lead­ers for their use of new ideas and skills learned from the Applied Lead­er­ship Net­work in engag­ing staff to con­tin­ue this impor­tant work at Pierce Coun­ty Juve­nile Court.