JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRAM ANALYSIS

Juvenile Justice Program Analysis



Juvenile Justice Program Analysis

Introduction

Current levels of juvenile crime and a review of juvenile justice programming outcomes reveal the need for prevention-oriented, family-based juvenile crime reduction programming. This article presents the Growing Up FAST: Families and Adolescents Surviving and Thriving Diversion Program as an illustration of a logic-model-based approach to the development, implementation, and eventual outcome evaluation of a juvenile crime prevention program. This paper presents the use of a logic model (Julian and United) that guided the development and implementation of the Growing Up FAST: Families and Adolescents Surviving and Thriving Diversion Program. Thus, we report on a program that currently is being implemented with families who are referred by Juvenile Court Intake Officers to our project. In this case, the logic model has provided a practical means for theory-driven development and implementation of this juvenile crime-prevention initiative. More specifically, this article presents the theoretical basis of this family-based diversion program and its consequent evaluation through use of a logic model. Both theory-building and evaluative efforts are built upon the notion that the Growing Up FAST program, as implemented with families of youth who have come into contact with the juvenile justice system, works to prevent recidivism by fostering family support for the adolescent's transition to successful adulthood.

Analysis

The Growing Up FAST diversion program was developed according to a logic-based evaluation model (Julian and United). This type of evaluation model organizes programmatic events into levels of inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes (see Figure 1). Program activities are thought to be causally linked to initial, intermediate, and longer-term outcomes, each of which in turn are causally linked to each other. By definition, outcome refers to a participant's experience of benefit or change that logically relates to the program's purpose. Outcomes derive from program outputs, defined as quantifiable products of program activities. The difference between outcomes and outputs lies in the utility of their measurement. Outputs inform programmers about program functioning and efficiency. Outcomes inform both programmers and outside stakeholders about the contribution a program is making toward a problem's solution. Thus, through data regarding outputs, an evaluation based on a logic model will provide formative, process-focused information and, through data regarding outcomes, will provide summative, results-focused information as well.

The logic model's unique contribution to research concerned with combined formative and summative evaluation models is its introduction of the notion that short-term through longer-term outcomes are causally linked together and are causally linked to their impact on the social issues the program is meant to address. This step-by-step causal linkage helps to account for intervening variables found both externally (among the myriad influences that affect program participants) and internally (among the individual differences of clients served). In terms of external variables, because social service provision exists in a complex world, it is difficult for a single program to show a direct causal relationship to a long-term community-wide impact. Many events outside a given program's sphere of influence, including those that occur as a result of ...