Building Capacity for Equitable Juvenile Diversion Practices
Formal court processing can lead to negative outcomes for youth. Youth diversion programs can provide an alternative method of addressing young people's needs while limiting unnecessary engagement in the juvenile justice system. Louisiana's Jefferson Parish Pre-Trial Juvenile Diversion Program provides such an alternative to traditional court processing, offering young people case management, connections to community resources, and other services based upon a tool that assigns a recidivism risk score.
Prior to 2015, the Diversion Program’s risk assessment procedures involved structured professional judgement, which may have presented opportunities for unconscious biases to impact risk perceptions. Their transition to a structured risk assessment process in 2015 may lead to better alignment between youth risks and needs. The new risk-responsive process may also help address racial inequities, as Black and Latino youth are more likely than White youth to be perceived as high risk.
Evaluation of the Pre-Trial Diversion Program
AIR's evaluation looks at the implementation of the Diversion Program, including the program’s structured risk assessment, and compares outcomes and impacts for youth who have and have not been assessed for recidivism risk using an evidence-based tool.
Overall, our evaluation seeks to examine Diversion Program processes, outcomes, and impacts to assess whether and to what extent the program promotes racial equity. We aim to understand the implementation of the Diversion Program and how the program staff affect outcomes for young people. To understand programmatic impact, we compare outcomes for those who have completed the Diversion Program and those in the Jefferson Parish Probation Department.
