Together, the Prison Law Office and Stanislaus County developed the Girls Juvenile Justice Initiative (GJJI) in order to address the county’s lack of gender-responsive resources for justice-involved girls.

Project Kealahou (PK) is a six-year, federally-funded program aimed at improving services and outcomes for Hawai‘i's female youth who are at risk for running away, truancy, abuse, suicide, arrest and incarceration. PK builds upon two decades of sustained cross-agency efforts among the state's mental health, juvenile justice, education, and child welfare systems to promote system-of-care (SOC) principles of community-based, individualized, culturally and linguistically competent, family driven, youth-guided, and evidence-based services.

The goal of this exploratory research was to hear from girls from the First Coast (Duval, Clay, Nassau, Baker, and St. Johns counties) who are in juvenile residential commitment programs in Florida, to better understand their common pathways into the system, their experiences with services, and their recommendations for improving the response to girls.

This brief describes an ongoing evaluation of PACE that will help policymakers and practitioners understand and strengthen the program’s effects for at-risk girls on a range of outcomes, including education, delinquency, risky behavior, social support, and mental health. More broadly, the study will inform the national dialogue about how to better serve such girls.

This paper examines the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes in federal criminal cases. Unlike cash-bail regimes that are prevalent in state courts, federal courts rarely use money bail as a condition of pretrial release. Nonetheless, this paper documents significant effects of pretrial detention for federal criminal defendants. Using data spanning 71 federal district courts, I present evidence that pretrial release reduces a defendant’s sentence increases the probability that they will receive a sentence below the recommended sentencing range.

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impacts. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race; (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines; and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This pilot study compared the recidivism risks of older, high-risk juvenile probationers exposed or unexposed to an experimental case-management intervention to further the development of a supportive community intervention. The experimental intervention targeted unmet basic needs before and after the exposed group aged out of the juvenile justice system to prevent transition to adult crime. A prospective-cohort design compared the recidivism risks of the intervention group (n = 29) with a randomly selected comparison group (n = 114) stratified by gender, race, and risks/needs.

No program or intervention can be expected to work for everyone. Providing too much or the wrong kind of services not only fails to improve outcomes, but it can make outcomes worse by placing excessive burdens on some participants and interfering with their engagement in productive activities, like work or school. This is the foundation for a body of evidence-based principles referred to as risk, need, responsivity, or RNR (Andrews & Bonta, 2010).

The National Domestic Violence Prosecution Best Practices Guide is a living document highlighting current best practices in the prosecution of domestic violence. It was inspired by the Women Prosecutors Section of the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) and a National Symposium on the Prosecution of Domestic Violence Cases, hosted by the NDAA and Alliance for HOPE International in San Diego in October 2015. The two-day national symposium included 100 of our nation’s leading prosecutors reenvisioning the prosecution of domestic violence cases in the United States.

Drugs (BJS)
Outlines types of drug-related crime, including possession, distribution and manufacture of drugs as well as other offenses stemming from drug use or addiction.

National DNA Database Statistics (BJS)
Describes the National DNA Index and provides the numbers of offender profiles, arrestees, forensic profiles, participating laboratories and investigations aided in each state.

Office of National Drug Control Policy
Collection of data sets on drug use among arrestees, drug control budgets, and drug availability.