Recent Study Looks at Impact of JDAI Sites

Rely­ing on nation­al data from the Cen­sus of Juve­niles in Res­i­den­tial Place­ment and the JDAI Annu­al Results Reports com­piled from JDAI sites, the Chief Jus­tice Earl War­ren Insti­tute on Law and Social Pol­i­cy at UC Berke­ley Law School issued a report which eval­u­ates JDAI’s impact by pro­vid­ing a quan­ti­ta­tive com­par­i­son of JDAI sites (both indi­vid­u­al­ly and col­lec­tive­ly) with­in a state to the state as a whole. The report cov­ers 23 states and 83 indi­vid­ual JDAI sites that met the study cri­te­ria. The aggre­gate decline in aver­age dai­ly pop­u­la­tion (ADP) in JDAI sites was almost 2.5 times greater than the state totals. And, the aggre­gat­ed decline in com­mit­ments in JDAI sites was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er than that for the state totals. In 47 of 83 sites, the change in ADP was more favor­able than that of the state as a whole, although the pro­por­tion of youth of col­or in con­fine­ment remains disproportionate.

What makes a straight­for­ward sci­en­tif­ic eval­u­a­tion of JDAI dif­fi­cult is the nature of accu­rate and con­sis­tant data; JDAI has been imple­ment­ed dif­fer­ent­ly across sites and has changed over time, and data col­lec­tion stan­dards vary across local and state juris­dic­tions. In addi­tion, this study does not sep­a­rate JDAI site data from the home state cal­cu­la­tions. The report con­cludes that JDAI sites need to spend more ener­gy, atten­tion and resources on accu­rate and con­sis­tent data col­lec­tion in order to sat­is­fy a future, more sci­en­tif­ic study.