About This Project

Replace offense-category-driven JDTC assignment with a validated Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) style intake screen that routes youth to treatment-court or traditional processing based on measured predictors of benefit, not judicial discretion alone -- and make subgroup outcome reporting a condition of continued program funding, not an optional research add-on. Mechanism: at intake, every youth referred to a drug/treatment court gets a standardized structured assessment covering trauma history, family stability, co-occurring mental health indicators, and substance use severity, in addition to the offense record already collected. This assessment feeds a decision-support tool (not a black-box algorithm -- a transparent, auditable scoring rubric built from the RNR framework already used in adult corrections) that flags which youth profiles have historically shown benefit from treatment-court-style intensive supervision versus those better served by lighter-touch traditional processing. Critically, every jurisdiction using the tool is contractually required to report outcomes broken out by these same subgroup categories -- not just aggregate recidivism -- to a shared, de-identified national dataset. That closes the exact data gap that currently makes retroactive meta-analysis useless: right now we can't answer "for whom does this work" because nobody consistently measured the "for whom." This isn't a new intervention -- it doesn't require inventing a new treatment court model. It's a redesign of triage plus a funding condition. States that already run adult RNR-based risk assessment tools (most do, for probation and parole) have the institutional muscle memory to adapt this for juvenile treatment-court intake at low marginal cost.

Timeline