By Patrick T. McCarthy
Twenty years ago, the Annie E.
Casey Foundation launched an
initiative aimed at tackling a persistent
problem in the juvenile
justice system: Too many young
people who came into contact with the system
were being confined unnecessarily in secure
detention. Building on research showing
that such confinement leads to significantly
worse outcomes for youths, the foundation
set out to help local agencies implement alternatives
to detention.
Today the Juvenile Detention Alternatives
Initiative (JDAI) is being
implemented in more than 200
counties in 39 states and the
District of Columbia. One in four US youths
lives in a participating community. The use
of secure confinement in these communities
has dropped 43 percent, and there has
been no decrease in public safety. Although
JDAI has not been implemented in every
community in the country, the approach,
tools, and lessons learned have been shared
broadly, and other juvenile justice leaders
are taking action on their own.
JDAI is one example of a philanthropic
initiative that has dramatically scaled up
its impact over time. The Edna McConnell
Clark Foundation’s pioneering work, the
opportunities provided by the US government’s
Social Innovation Fund, and the
hard work of legions of social entrepreneurs
mean that many proven programs now are reaching more people who need them. It’s
an impressive, energizing story. But we still
have a long way to go before we can say we’ve
solved the problem of how to scale up human
services programs effectively.
From Program Replication
to True Scale
Replicating proven programs with fidelity
is both critical and tough to do right, but we
should be careful not to confuse program
expansion with achieving population-level
scale. Achieving that scale means attaining
a meaningful, measurable result for a
specific population. Supporting a particular
evidence-based program or model to
expand reach, grow in size, and capture a
greater percentage of market share may be
a necessary part of the path toward a large
scale. But we shouldn’t declare victory until,
for instance, all children in Baltimore enter
school ready to learn, or all youths between
the ages of 18 and 24 in Maine are connected
to school or work, or all children in the
United States read proficiently by the end of
third grade.
To reach these types of ambitious goals,
the road to scale inevitably will run through
public systems. And decades of experience
tell us that a bad system will trump a good
program—every time, all the time. Whether
programs focus on youths involved in the
juvenile justice system, students in public
schools, families in the child welfare system,
or young mothers receiving public health
services, even the greatest programs cannot
succeed in a lasting way if they depend
on dysfunctional systems. Programs can
sink or swim, depending on how systems
handle issues from intake, eligibility, and
case planning to the selection and compensation
of private providers. Similarly, policy
decisions that determine program priorities,
budget allocations, or staffing levels
can accelerate or impede progress toward
greater scale.
The JDAI Story
In developing the JDAI strategy, the Casey
Foundation noted the many ways that
the juvenile justice system could trump
any programmatic intervention we could
mount in communities, so we decided to
start with changing the system itself. JDAI
works directly with the local agencies responsible
for juvenile detention. We help
them in such critical areas as adopting screening tools and processes for objectively
assessing risk and making admission
decisions; implementing case processing
reforms to minimize unnecessary delays;
collecting and using data to track the young
people’s progress; and developing effective
non-secure alternatives in the community.
A common thread in the JDAI approach is
strong collaborations among the important
actors in the system, including the courts,
probation officers, prosecutors, defenders,
and community groups.
The results speak for themselves. In addition
to reductions in confinement in the
targeted communities, we’re beginning to
see the national needle moving, too. In 1997,
almost 28,000 young people were in detention.
In 2011, only 19,000 were in detention.
Recent federal data indicate that both the
number and rate of young people confined
have decreased by more than 40 percent
nationwide since the mid-1990s, when this
issue first became a priority for the Casey Foundation and others, notably the John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Although many factors have influenced this
trend, this is genuinely a population-level
shift that would have been hard to imagine
just 20 years ago, when youths were being
described as “super-predators” and mass
incarceration was at its peak.
With JDAI’s strategy of working directly
with the public system to reform core functions,
inappropriate detention is prevented
for every youth who comes into contact with
the system in that community. In other
words, we move the needle—achieve scale—for an important outcome in a targeted
population.
The strategy of directly engaging the
public system also helps ensure that JDAI
implementation won’t be sloughed off
in the next change of leadership or budget
crisis, events that can derail even the
strongest programs. The goal of JDAI is
to advance fundamental system reforms
so they become deeply rooted and cannot
easily be removed or reversed. In addition,
the program changes how existing resources are used rather than requiring
new dollars, so there are no savings to be
had by downsizing or dropping JDAI from
the budget. In fact, by preventing unnecessary
secure detention, communities have
been able to close facilities or avoid building
new ones, and the resources saved can
be reinvested to expand alternatives to detention.
Ending JDAI could actually cost
jurisdictions money.
Following the Evidence
Of course, not every outcome we want to
change is best achieved by working directly
with a public system in this way. But few
programs are not at risk of being trumped
by bad systems.
In addition, just as public systems can
affect what programs are able to achieve, so
too can effective programs influence public
systems. Innovative approaches can function
as proof points and help build evidence
for new ways of serving a public system’s
clients. As we glean more information from
evaluations of proven programs, we can
see common principles of effective service
delivery that can guide changes in public
systems in areas from case processing to
procurement criteria for contracted services.
Given that these systems serve whole
populations, it is incumbent on all of us who
care about those populations to help public
systems follow the evidence.
Twenty years is a long time to stick with
a single program, especially for a foundation.
At the Casey Foundation, we have
stuck with JDAI for a variety of reasons, including
its evidence of effectiveness and the
fact that we’ve found cost-effective ways to
help an accelerating number of communities
adopt the program. But for any foundation
that is focused on tough, pivotal problems,
the most important reason to stay the
course with a program like JDAI is that it is
moving the needle for whole populations
in community after community, state after
state. That’s scale, and it’s something we
can’t achieve through program replication
alone.