Photo by Susan Madden Lankford
In 2014, the campaign for improved juvenile justice systems enjoyed several steps forward and two big steps backwards. First, Pay For Success (PFS) ideas become plans in New York City, MA, CA, IL, OH and several other states. PFS projects use private financing to aim at social goals with the agreement that local government will reward successful achievement in agreed-upon areas.
This was the year the PFS movement went from “crawl” to “walk” in juvenile justice. For instance, PFS projects aimed at lowering the recidivism rates for juveniles and young adults in Massachusetts and New York City. And a slate of juvenile justice-related projects are well into the planning stages in California, Illinois, Ohio and several other states.
The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) has emerged as an early leader for youth-specific work in the PFS space. NCCD is poised to run point on a number of PFS projects after assisting firms with a broader focus, such as Third Sector Capital Partners.
This is still a very new and untested approach to pushing public policy toward the best solutions, but it’s fair to say that 2014 marked the point at which money started to flow and real plans were made.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) continues to have its influence sapped by dwindling appropriations, at least in the accounts that have anything to do with juvenile justice. Fiscal 2014 brought with it the elimination of the Juvenile Accountability Block Grants, and that will now hold up at least through 2015.
But 2014 was the first full year on the job for Bob Listenbee, OJJDP’s first non-interim director since 2008. In June, he made it clear that OJJDP’s priority would be racial disparities in the system.
At a Congressional field hearing in June, Listenbee stated:
The one we have made the least success with is disproportionate minority contact, but I think there are a lot of new and innovative approaches that are available now through OJJDP, and so we’re concentrating our resources, our training and technical assistance on this particular requirement.
The shooting of Ferguson, Mo. teen Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson had nothing to do with juvenile justice, and everything to do with the use of deadly force by police officers, but there were several attempts in opinion pieces and policy discussions to make this relevant to juvenile justice.
Lisa Thurau, who leads Strategies for Youth, wrote that the shooting could easily have been prevented if police departments made serious efforts to train police on interacting with adolescents. Marc Schindler, the executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, noted the calls for more black police officers after the shooting. He cautioned that in his experience reforming Washington, D.C.’s juvenile facility, diversity was trumped by training.
It was announced in December 2014 that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s final Models for Change conference will be held next year. After years of support for research, organizing and advocacy, MacArthur is out of the juvenile justice funding business, at least for a time. Models for Change began with support for research on adolescents that helped influence major Supreme Court decisions, and then turned toward the notion of fostering state-level juvenile justice reform that could be replicated elsewhere.
The success of all that spending will be assessed over time, but the immediate impact of Models coming to a close will be fiscal, as grants to its many nonprofit partners will end in 2015.
MacArthur’s grants are and were a significant chunk of revenue for lots of juvenile justice organizations, all of which will now have to adapt to a funding landscape that does not include the Chicago-based grantor.
Among the organizations with holes in their future budgets is the Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ), which gets $500,000 each year to put on the Models for Change conference. CJJ will get that funding in 2015, along with a separate two-year grant for $300,000 to spread Models for Change lessons among states. But after that, one of the oldest national juvenile justice organizations in the country will have to find a new way to sustain. CJJ used to be buffered by an annual federal appropriation, and MacArthur really saved it from impending doom when that was cut off in the mid-2000s.
It is unknown whether another philanthropic entity enter the juvenile justice fray in 2015. A hopeful indicator: one unlikely donor voiced an interest just days before the new year.
