Report 2019-116 Recommendation 7 Responses

Report 2019-116: Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act: Weak Oversight Has Hindered Its Meaningful Implementation (Release Date: May 2020)

Recommendation #7 To: Los Angeles County Probation Department

To determine the effectiveness of its use of JJCPA funds, Los Angeles should include in its year-end reports to Community Corrections descriptions or analyses of how its JJCPA-funded programs influenced its juvenile justice trends, as required by law.

6-Month Agency Response

As a follow-up to our 60-Day response, the influence of the JJCPA funded programs on juvenile justice trends in Los Angeles County was previously documented in several evaluation reports. Additionally, Probation included information in the year-end report submitted to BSCC (October 1, 2020). Examples of information included in this report are as follows: regarding School-Based programming, a recent evaluation from Research Development Associates (RDA), completed in April 2018, included the finding that "youth receiving these services were 30-40% less likely to recidivate than the comparison group." In an analysis by the RAND Corporation focusing on Fiscal Year (FY) 2016-2017, youth receiving Multi-Systemic Therapy (MST) were compared to those who were near misses for program participation. Youth in MST had better outcomes with respect to arrest, incarceration, completion of probation, restitution, community service and probation violation, even if not statistically significant. Similarly, an RDA evaluation of the Client Assessment Rehabilitation Evaluation (CARE) Project found that the program was highly effective in reducing negative contacts with the juvenile system and improving dispositional outcomes for Public Defender clients. These evaluation efforts provide more direct evidence that JJCPA-funded programming may be contributing to decreases in juvenile arrests that have been observed since 2017. In addition, many of the JJCPA-funded efforts are grounded in evidence-based prevention and intervention models. Therefore, although recent evaluation data are not yet available for all programs, the use of evidence-based practices further increases the likelihood that JJCPA-funded programs contributed to overall reductions in youth juvenile justice involvement. Evaluation efforts are underway for additional JJCPA-funded programs, and we will continue to include available evaluation and other descriptions/analyses in future year-end reports.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Fully Implemented

60-Day Agency Response

The influence of the JJCPA funded programs on juvenile justice trends in Los Angeles County has previously been documented in several evaluation reports. However, in collaboration with the JJCPA evaluator, the Probation Department will develop a format that further demonstrates program impacts of JJCPA-funded programs on Los Angeles County's juvenile justice trends for the year-end report to Community Corrections due in October 2020.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2019-116

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.