MENU TITLE: Challenge Activitioes Program Areas- Challenge Activity J.
Series: OJJDP
Published: Fall 1995
14 pages
35,084 bytes

Challenge Activities
Program Areas

Challenge to the States

The 1992 reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act of 1974 added
Part E, State Challenge Activities, to the programs
funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The purpose of Part
E is to provide initiatives for States
participating in the Formula Grants Program to
develop, adopt, and improve policies and programs
in 1 or more of 10 specified Challenge areas.

Challenge Activity J

To develop and adopt policies to establish:

1. A State administrative structure to coordinate
program and fiscal policies for children who have
emotional and behavioral problems and their
families among the major child-serving systems,
including schools, social services, health
services, mental health services, and the juvenile
justice system.

2. A statewide case review system with procedures
to ensure that (a) each youth has a case plan,
based on the use of objective criteria for
determining a youth's danger to the community or
himself or herself, designed to achieve appropriate
placement in the least restrictive and most
familylike setting available in close proximity to
the parents' home, consistent with the best
interests and special needs of the youth; (b) the
status of each youth is reviewed periodically, but
not less frequently than once every 3 months, by a
court or by administrative review to determine the
continuing necessity for and appropriateness of the
placement; (c) with respect to each youth,
procedural safeguards will be applied to ensure
that a dispositional hearing is held to consider
the future status of each youth under State
supervision, in a juvenile or family court or
another court (including a tribal court) of
competent jurisdiction, or by an administrative
body, appointed or approved by the court, not later
than 12 months after the original placement of the
youth and periodically thereafter during the
continuation of out-of-home placement; and (d) a
youth's health, mental health, and education record
is reviewed and updated periodically.

Coordination of services for children, youth, and
families reduces duplication in services, prevents
clients from falling through the cracks of
fragmented programs, maximizes the strengths of
public and private agencies, makes it easier for
families to access services, and more
comprehensively addresses the varied needs within
individual households.1 States and communities can
coordinate services for children, youth, and
families through program linkages, service
integration, and interagency collaboration. These
approaches to coordinating services for children,
youth, and families have few common denominators.
Some services start at the community level,
improving working relationships among line staff
serving shared clients, while others are initiated
by State child- and family-serving agencies. In
some States, governors, legislators, and judges
lead service coordination efforts, while elsewhere
local citizens are the advocates for one-stop
shopping services for families.

Few service coordination reforms have included all
the agencies that have an impact on families. Most
are led by educational, social service, or child
welfare agencies and tend to include health and
mental health services focusing on at-risk children
and their families. Collaborative efforts with a
community development framework focus on housing,
food stamps, and employment to enhance family well-
being. Many service coordination efforts leave out
delinquents, their families, and the juvenile
justice system. Often families, young people, or
providers are not included in the collaboration
process, although ultimately they may be included
in case planning.

The depth of service coordination reforms also
varies. Some are coordinated primarily through
interagency agreements, while others have produced
significant changes in the array of services
available and in funding streams. Many service
coordination reforms have struggled with
conflicting agency policies and with the widespread
belief that information sharing was a violation of
confidentiality. Service coordination may focus on
developing a shared language among child- and
family-serving agencies, sometimes leading to a
change in philosophy toward needs-based,
family-centered, integrated, neighborhood services
that are comprehensive, culturally competent, and
responsive.2 These approaches tend to stress the
benefits of collaborative efforts dedicated to
strengthening families rather than relying on
out-of-home care, with active involvement of
families in identifying their needs and designing
services.

Coordination of services for children, youth, and
families may take different forms, depending on the
leadership for reform, the agencies initially
involved, their location, and the incentives for
certain approaches offered by foundations and
special Federal funds. For example, if a school
principal leads, service coordination may take the
form of different agencies locating their services
in the school. If a mental health center leads,
interagency services are likely to be clustered
around a day treatment center. If the governor's
office is focused on reducing the cost of
children's residential care, State-level
coordination may occur among the educational,
social service, mental health, and juvenile justice
systems. Local service coordination may
concentrate on children and families entering human
services, while State efforts often target "deep-
end" clients served in a fragmented and costly
fashion by several agencies. Limited outcome
information on costs and numbers served is
available, but it is not comparable across efforts.
Therefore, it is impossible to determine which
approaches to coordination of services for
children, youth, and families are most effective in
changing the practices of public and private agency
staff.

Although no two efforts to coordinate services for
children, youth, and families are identical, common
elements may include joint case planning, case
management, fiscal change, shared information and
outcome measures, and service design.

Joint Case Planning

Joint case planning involves staff from different
agencies meeting to plan services for a child
and/or family.3 Staff members may be called
together by one agency to assist in completing that
agency's case plan. In some communities, a standing
multidisciplinary committee meets to plan
residential services or to make referrals to
community-based services. Sometimes joint case
planning includes regular interagency reviews of
the progress of an individual child and family.
Joint case planning can evaluate unmet needs and
apply a uniform system for determining a youth's
danger to the community.

Interagency case planning can ensure adherence to
criteria for determining the level of
restrictiveness of services and can monitor cases
so that the least restrictive, closest-to-family
alternatives are consistently used. Joint case
planning may allow several agencies to have one
provider meet the needs of children and the family
that each agency previously would have attempted to
meet in isolation. For example, intensive
individual attention from one person from a public
agency or private contractor could offer a
delinquent the daily contact and coaching in
prosocial behavior required by the juvenile justice
system; the tutoring and support for daily
attendance desired by the school system; and the
guidance in improved problem-solving skills and
parent-child communication usually offered by the
mental health system.

Case Management

The child or family may have one case manager who
convenes the interagency case planning group and
keeps information flowing among providers involved
with the family. In some places, the cases are
recognized as "multineeds" or "multiagency," and
one member of the case planning team is designated
as case manager. Sometimes a case manager is
assigned when a youth is involved with the court in
a child welfare, children in need of supervision
(CHINS), or delinquency case. If needs are not met,
case managers may refine the joint case plan,
change services, and make funding decisions. One
agency may get Medicaid reimbursement for case
management functions.

In addition to centralizing the responsibility for
interagency care for a child and family, a single
case manager increases the possibility that
consistent case planning will occur throughout the
client's involvement with the agencies. For
example, delinquents benefit from having a case
manager oversee their service plan from intake
through disposition and refinement of services in
aftercare with a continuity in services designed to
build on strengths and meet needs. Case managers
can also serve as family advocates to ensure that
families with multiple needs obtain access to a
range of services.

Fiscal Change

Service delivery systems cannot change without
fiscal improvements, such as pooling resources and
redesigning funding streams. Such improvements may
take the form of joint funding for a program, joint
hiring of staff, or sharing the costs of a service
or placement for an individual. To prevent the
fragmentation caused by inflexible Federal and
State funding streams, service coordination teams
have identified the amount spent at a particular
location or for a target group and have asked
agencies to separate those funds to contribute to a
pool. Sometimes the process of merging funding
streams leads agencies to a joint decision to fund
provision of interagency services rather than
isolated programs.

In addition to moving away from categorical funding
by pooling resources, fiscal changes to support
coordination of services include using funds to
leverage additional money and maximize Federal
dollars; reallocating existing funds for different
services; and locating discretionary funds for
flexible service purchasing at the line staff
level.

Shared Information and Outcome Measures

Agencies usually report the services they have
delivered but not the impact of such services. Some
efforts to coordinate services for children, youth,
and families have established specific joint
outcome measures and have involved agencies in
collaboratively collecting information on the
achievement of these outcomes. For example,
agencies might decide on the shared goal of
reducing the dropout rate in a particular school or
community. Effective interagency services (for
example, health, education, substance abuse, mental
health, or juvenile justice) provided to children
in the target group should result in an increased
number of children staying in school.
Accountability may be described as day-to-day
interagency awareness of steps being taken to
achieve the desired outcomes and their short-term
effectiveness, while evaluation is an objective,
periodic examination of the degree to which the
outcomes are reached.

Fragmentation may occur when a family receives
services from several agencies with incompatible
information systems. For example, a child welfare
worker providing protective services may have to go
to different information systems in other social
service branches in the same building to find out
whether the family receives public assistance or
food stamps. A shared information system that
tracks interagency services and outcomes is ideal.
Such a system can be initiated either by setting up
a new interagency data bank or by agreeing to use
common identifiers for children and families to
make cross-agency access possible.

Service Design

Attempts to coordinate services and improve the
quality of provision among child- and family-
serving agencies usually improve the quality of
provision. As a result of collaboration, natural
supports and new providers may be included in joint
case planning with traditional public and private
services. Flexible funding may be identified for
individualized purchase of services or contracts
for services designed specifically in response to
unmet child and family needs. Reform of service
design may change the way services are planned,
with emphasis placed on family and caregiver
involvement in designing a unique service for the
child and family, and with line workers having
discretion over flexible funds.

Co-location. Many communities station staff from a
variety of agencies in a school, family resource
center, or other accessible place. These one-stop
centers make it easier for families to obtain food
stamps, medical care, counseling, and afterschool
care, although communities do not necessarily go
beyond co-locating services to coordination through
joint case planning or case management.

Single Entry. In most jurisdictions, families must
complete multiple, almost identical forms to
register or to be determined eligible for services.
One of the outcomes of co-located services is that
some agencies have worked with Federal regulations
to design a single information form that can be
completed by parents when, for example, they
register a child in school or seek medical care.
The form is used automatically to determine a
family's eligibility for other services and to
enroll the family in the appropriate programs.

Neighborhood Improvement. When services are
delivered in families' homes or children's schools,
coordination may reach beyond traditional agencies
to involve neighborhoods. Coordinated, family-
centered, needs-based services can be provided by
neighbors of at-risk youth and their families. A
family advocate who works in the home with
delinquents may organize young people to repair
dilapidated public housing, build playgrounds for
young children, or take a stand against drugs and
gangs in their neighborhood.

Virginia's Comprehensive Services Model

Virginia's Comprehensive Services Act for At-Risk
Youth and Families (1992) is an example of a
statewide coordinated service delivery system for
troubled and at-risk youth and their families. The
Act cuts across the juvenile justice, social
service, education, health, mental health, and
substance abuse treatment systems. Many elements of
the coordinated services for children, youth, and
families described above can be found in Virginia's
Comprehensive Services Act implementation.

In 1990, the secretaries of Virginia's Departments
of Health and Human Resources, Public Safety, and
Education formed an interagency council to
recommend changes to the service delivery system
for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed
children. This move followed a study that predicted
that expenditures for children's residential care
would continue to increase. Approximately $110
million was spent on education, youth and families
services, mental health and mental retardation
services, and substance abuse treatment for 5,000
children in residential care in 1990.

Five demonstration projects featured a variety of
community-based services, including intensive
probation, therapeutic respite care, parent and
student aide programs, afterschool programs,
therapeutic summer programs, preschool prevention
programs, day treatment, transition classrooms,
intensive home-based services, and therapeutic
foster homes. These projects resulted in proposals
for restructuring the service delivery system and
funding streams through legislation. Hundreds of
people were involved in developing legislation
through the Council on Community Services for Youth
and Families. The intent of the legislation was "to
create a collaborative system of services and
funding that is child-centered, family-focused, and
community-based when addressing the strengths and
needs of troubled and at-risk youths and their
families" through:

o Appropriate services in the least restrictive
environment, to preserve families while protecting
the welfare of children and maintaining public
safety.

o Early intervention with young children and their
families.

o Services responsive to the unique and diverse
strengths and needs of troubled and at-risk youth
and their families.

o Interagency collaboration and family involvement
in service delivery and management.

o A public and private partnership in the delivery
of services to troubled and at-risk youths and
their families.

o Flexibility at the community level in the use of
funds.

The Act required creation of interagency teams at
the State and local levels, creation of a State
trust fund for localities to expand community-based
services, consolidation of eight categorical
funding streams from four agencies into a State
pool distributed to localities on a formula basis,
and provision of training and technical assistance
to localities.4 The target population includes
children placed for special education, handicapped
children placed by local social service agencies or
the Department of Youth and Family Services,
children referred from child welfare, and
delinquents.

The State executive council, which meets bimonthly,
establishes interagency programmatic and fiscal
policies, oversees the trust fund, and advises the
governor. The council consists of a parent
representative; agency heads from the Departments
of Health, Social Services, Mental Health, Mental
Retardation and Substance Abuse Services,
Education, and Youth and Family Services; and the
executive secretary of the State supreme court.

The State management team includes staff from five
child-serving agencies; administrators from local
school divisions, health departments, juvenile
court service units, community services boards, and
departments of social services; nonprofit and
for-profit providers; parents; judges; and local
government officials. The team meets twice monthly
to distribute the trust fund, coordinate
implementation of the Act, and provide training and
technical assistance. After extensive policy
debate, the State management team agreed to create
a system that could change, based on the following
principles:

o Funding should follow at-risk youth and their
families, based on individual service needs.

o Decisionmaking should occur at the community
level.

o Effective use of financial resources should be
maximized while containing growth.

o Ongoing evaluation should ensure due process and
service effectiveness.

o The administrative burden on localities should be
minimized.

Community policy and management teams are appointed
locally at the city or county level and may be
multijurisdictional. At a minimum the teams must
include local agency heads or their designees from
juvenile court services units, social service
bureaus, the health department, the community
services board, and local school divisions; a
parent representative; and local private providers.
The community policy and management teams develop
interagency service delivery and referral and
review policies and procedures to monitor
expenditure of funds. The teams also coordinate
long-range planning and develop new services.

Family assessment and planning teams are appointed
by the community policy and management team. A
community may have several family assessment and
planning teams with staff from the juvenile court
services unit, the Departments of Health and Social
Services, the community services board, and the
local school divisions; and a parent. The teams
review referrals of youth and families; ensure
thorough assessment and case planning; provide for
family participation in all aspects of assessment,
planning, and implementation of services; develop
individual family service plans; make referrals to
services; and recommend expenditures from the local
allocation of pooled State funds. The focus of the
local family assessment and planning teams has been
on children who were:

o At risk of residential or day placement.

o At risk of removal from the home.

o Requiring intensive coordination among more than
two agencies.

o Returning to the community from residential
placement.

For each youth and family, family assessment and
planning teams designate one case manager who is
responsible for ensuring that the family service
plan is fulfilled. Teams are encouraged to
integrate the family service plan with other agency
plans. A family assessment and planning team can
constitute the Individualized Education Planning
Team (if appropriate individuals attend and notice
is properly given) and the 6-month administrative
review for child welfare cases (although a separate
foster care service plan is still required).

Virginia's Office of Comprehensive Services for
Youth and Families has a full-time coordinator and
two technical assistance coordinators. The office
disseminated a detailed implementation plan for
coordinated services for at-risk youth and their
families.

Contact:
Alan Saunders
Director
Office of Comprehensive Services
700 East Franklin Street
Richmond, VA 23208
804-786-5382

Other Approaches to Coordination of Services for
Children, Youth, and Families

Tennessee Children's Plan. This Plan calls for
family-focused, community-based services to reduce
the number of children in State care, provide
flexible funding to meet identified needs
regardless of the custodial department, ensure more
appropriate placements and services, and maximize
Federal funding. Between 1989 and 1991, the number
of children entering State care increased 33
percent in Tennessee; 31 percent of these children
were in inappropriate placements, with 10 percent
needing more intensive placements and 21 percent
needing less intensive placements.

The Community Health Agencies were chosen to
implement the Assessment and Care Coordination
Teams (ACCT's), which serve as liaison between the
State and community in the coordinated and
collaborative effort to provide services for
children and families. ACCT's stimulate the
development of services in the community to
preserve families, reunify children with their
families, and reduce the number of children in
State care. To ensure more appropriate placements
and services, ACCT's use three mechanisms:

o Case assessment.

o Case planning.

o Case management.

The case plan ensures that services are provided in
the least restrictive alternative, the family is
strengthened, and stability for the child is
maintained. The case manager ensures timely
delivery of services to meet the identified needs
and periodically reviews the case plan.

To improve management of services to children and
families, ACCT's have developed an improved
information system. They maximize Federal funding
by working with the eligibility staff of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services to collect
information essential for the determination of
eligibility for Federal funding.

Contact:
Pat Dishmao Managed Care for Children
Tennessee Department of Health
312 Eighth Avenue North
Nashville, TN 37247-5410
615-741-8905

Alabama's Strengths- and Needs-Based Service
Crafting. Alabama has initiated a bottom-up child
welfare reform, driven by a change in philosophy
that has cross-systems impact. Using strengths and
needs as the basis for planning services for
children and their families, Alabama's approach
increases collaboration with families and drives
the development of an expanded array of accessible
interagency services.

The strengths- and needs-based approach offers a
single reference point for accountability for all
service providers who work with the child and
family. The target of this reform is problem-driven
services that assume that the family is one of the
child's problems. Although it is widely recognized
that the enduring harm caused by separation from
family members to whom children are attached is
often a greater risk than maltreatment, provision
of services based on strengths and needs represents
a large change in philosophical approach.
Caseworkers are encouraged to:

o Identify and build on family strengths.

o Preserve ties between children and families.

o Attend to needs that, if unmet, put children at
risk.

Little change will occur unless the family (and
older child) agree with service providers about
their needs. An essential aspect of Alabama's
system of care is to involve children and parents
as partners in identifying needs and crafting
services to meet those needs.

The way services are matched to the agreed-upon
needs of the child and family is also changing in
Alabama. Providers may try to individualize
services but operate programs with a relatively
inflexible menu. Crafting services means that
everyone involved with the family participates in
shaping a service collaboration unique to that
family and those caregivers. A child or family is
not referred to an agency to fix a problem, and a
provider is not sent to a family. Strengths- and
needs-based service crafting has occurred at the
county level in Alabama, with training and coaching
provided to caseworkers and providers on how to
capitalize on strengths, reach agreement with a
family about its needs, and assist it in
collaborating with caregivers in crafting
strengths-and needs-based services.

To achieve a different way of thinking about the
strengths and needs of children and families, the
30 principles of Alabama's system of care have been
delineated. The success of the Alabama reform is
being examined through case-by-case evaluation:

o Did this family actively participate in
identifying its strengths and needs?

o Did the family (and older child) become involved
in crafting a service it would accept?

o Did the caregiver feel effective as a member of a
team with the family and other caregivers in
crafting the service?

o Did the service meet the need? If not, was the
service refined to meet the need?

Contact:
Paul Vincent
Director, Family and Children's Services
Department of Human Resources
50 Ripley Street
Montgomery, AL 23208
205-242-9500

San Diego, California's New Beginnings. New
Beginnings is a joint effort of local agencies in
the city of San Diego, the county of San Diego, the
San Diego School District, and the San Diego
Community College District to design and implement
service integration. After 2 years of frequent
meetings, the collaborative developed a statement
of philosophy and governance.

The group decided to provide the services of many
agencies at or near one school: 63 percent of the
students' families were served by at least one
agency, while 16 percent were clients of at least
four programs. A major breakthrough achieved by New
Beginnings was development of a single registration
that a family could use to determine eligibility
for food stamps, free lunches, and other programs.

Participating agencies agreed to reduce the number
of people a family had to see to get help. For
example, a unit of 6 welfare eligibility workers
became responsible for families in the school who
previously had been assigned to more than 100
workers. The collaborators in New Beginnings found
that procedures, not the laws, were the major
barriers to information sharing among
agencies.

Contacts:
Kathleen Armogida, Co-Chair
Department of Health Services
619-236-2237

Connie Robert, Co-Chair
Department of Social Services
619-338-2945

New Beginnings
San Diego City Schools
4100 Normal Street
San Diego, CA 92103
619-293-8371

Neighborhood/Community Service Centers. In late
1994, the New Jersey Governor's Advisory Council on
Juvenile Justice recommended the creation of an
independent Juvenile Justice Commission at the
State level and Youth Services Commissions (YSC's)
in each county. They recognized the need for local
entities to advocate, plan, and implement
community-based services for youth and sanctions
for juvenile offenders, as well as to support
prevention and intervention strategies to reduce
delinquency.

The Advisory Council also recommended the use of
neighborhood/community service centers located at
schools or other sites identified by communities.
They endorsed the concept of the "Community
School," proposed by the New Jersey Department of
Education's Safe Schools Initiative, and recognized
that schools can serve as a point of contact
between children and the many institutions and
agencies that are intended to serve them. When
school is not in session, their facilities can
still be used by various social service agencies to
provide services to youth. Schools are not expected
to provide all the social, behavioral, and health
services juveniles need; instead, they work in
conjunction with experts in those fields. This
collaboration provides a safe and convenient place
in the community for youth and their families to
obtain needed services.

The neighborhood/community centers build upon New
Jersey's School Based Youth Services (SBYS), which
in 1988 was the first statewide effort in the
Nation to place comprehensive services in or near
secondary schools. SBYS changed State systems to
improve the delivery of services to children and
families and developed coordination locally among
education, employment, health, and human service
agencies. SBYS operates in 30 urban, rural, and
suburban school districts across the State. Each
site provides the following core services: health
care, mental health, family counseling, job
training, substance abuse treatment, and
recreation. Many sites also provide teen parenting
education, transportation, day care, tutoring, and
family planning. Programs operate before, during,
and after school, as well as during the summer.

Contact:
Jennifer Seeland
Office of Interagency Initiatives
New Jersey Department of Education
240 West State Street
Trenton, NJ 08625
609-292-5935

States interested in coordinating services for
children and families across the juvenile justice,
education, social service, health, and mental
health service systems should adopt a system's
approach that includes a case review process in
which the status of each youth is reviewed
periodically to ensure that the placement is
appropriate and necessary. The concept for this
requirement of periodic case review has been used
in other systems at the Federal and State levels,
including child welfare, special education, and
mental health. Local interagency collaboration in
identifying the needs of children and families and
in redesigning services to meet those needs must be
supported by changes in funding streams and
policies at the State level.

Resources

Bruner, Charles. 1991. Thinking Collaboratively.
Education and Human Services Consortium.

Chynoweth, Judith, and Barbara Dyer. 1991.
Strengthening Families: A Guide for State
Policymaking. Council of Governors' Policy
Advisors.

Directory of Federally Funded Resource Centers.
1993. National Center for Service Integration.

Final Report. December 30, 1994. Governor's
Advisory Council on Juvenile Justice. Trenton, NJ.

Gardner, Sidney. 1991. Comments on Serving Children
and Families Effectively. Education and Human
Services Consortium.

Gardner, Sidney. 1991. "Failure by Fragmentation."
Equity and Choice 6.

Leveraging Dollars, Leveraging Change: Refinancing
and Restructuring Children's Services in Five
Sites. 1991. Center for the Study of Social Policy.

Soler, Mark, and Carol Shauffer. 1992.
Confidentiality Regulations as Barriers to
Interagency Collaboration. Youth Law Center.

Together We Can. 1993. U.S. Department of Education
and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Endnotes

1 Little research has been done on the impact of
coordinated services although, as described in
Together We Can, practitioners believe that a
profamily system of integrated care meets the needs
of children and families most effectively. Services
Integration: A Twenty-Year Retrospective documents
the difficulty of achieving interagency
coordination, concluding that access to services
improves for some clients, but little long-term
agency change occurs. 

2 According to Together We Can, "Simply increasing
coordination among service providers by helping
schools and other organizations refer children and
families to each others' services or stationing
workers at more accessible locations to provide
business-as-usual services will not be enough.
Adding a program here or a service there is not the
answer either. To make a real difference in
families' lives, the type, quality, and degree of
services and service delivery must be altered
throughout the community. Child-and family-serving
institutions must work together to change
fundamentally the way they think, behave, and use
their resources. The entire system must change"
(Together We Can, pp. 13-15).

3 In doing joint case planning, most communities
have found that it is State and local agency policy
that stands in the way of sharing information, not
Federal confidentiality regulations. In some places
all participants in interagency case planning agree
to keep information confidential among themselves;
elsewhere, the family is asked to authorize release
of information among all the agencies involved.

4 The Virginia task force appointed to design a
funding formula for allocating pooled funds was
guided by the principle that costs should not
simply be shifted from the State to the localities.
The allocation went beyond poverty indicators and
is based instead on three equally weighted
variables: total youth population; poverty (food
stamp recipients with children under age 18 in the
household); and risk factors related to out-of-home
placements, child protective services complaints,
juvenile court intake complaints, and severely
emotionally disturbed or severely learning disabled
children identified by local school divisions.

------------------------------

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention acknowledges the outstanding
contribution made by Marty Beyer, Ph.D., Youth
Advocate, in the development of this paper.

This document was prepared under contract number
OJP-94-C-004 from the Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department
of Justice.

Points of view or opinions expressed in this
document are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent the official position or
policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of
Justice.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the
National Institute of Justice, and the Office for
Victims of Crime.