Why

What

Who

Youth that have contact with the justice system are less likely to graduate from high school and more like to be arrested again as an adult. As a result, they suffer worse health outcomes than their peers.

A short-term group therapy intervention that emphasizes strategies to correct cognitive distortions and flawed thinking processes that can cause criminal behavior.

The program is often applied in group settings, typically ranging from 20 to 30 sessions. It is carried out by trained professionals and training for non-therapist group facilitators often involves 40 hours or more of specialized lessons and skill building. 

Approximately 1,400 juveniles in Houston, aged 10-16, who in the past 12 months were released to parole, put on probation, or given supervisory caution after encountering the juvenile justice system.

For a $537,000 investment in one year covering one cohort of 1,439 juveniles ($373.26 per child), the following results are expected.

We use a variety of data sources to tailor our analysis to the location and to make our estimates as accurate as possible. However, sometimes data is unavailable, either because it has not been collected, or because it is not shared publicly. We encourage government agencies and other organizations to share their de-identified data online and researchers to prioritize the following gaps in the data. 

Arrest Data - Ideally we would collect local juvenile arrest data for Houston, with information about felony and misdemeanor arrests. However, since this level of detail is unavailable, we instead use data on total crimes from the Houston Police Beats for a 12 month period of November 2014 through October 2015. We then use information from the Texas Department of Public Safety, as well as a few other sources, to estimate what percentage of overall crime in Houston leads to a juvenile arrest.

Marginal Cost of Juvenile Incarceration - Costs of incarceration per offender are typically reported as the total costs of the prison system divided by the total number of prisoners. However, many of these costs are fixed, hence we want to use the marginal cost of incarceration for an additional prisoner. While this has been estimated for adult prisoners in some localities, we do not have a juvenile offender estimate, so we ultimately multiplied the ratio of average juvenile incarceration costs over average adult incarceration costs by the marginal adult incarceration cost.

Substance Abuse - Unfortunately we were not able to find local substance abuse data for the eligible population, so we instead used a couple of measures to get an idea of how this measure would be affected. One was from an analysis of the rate of substance abuse among juvenile offenders from a study performed in Connecticut. The other was a measure from Texas that indicated chemical dependency rates among juvenile offenders.We also use national costs of drug use, as well as distributions of drug users over time, to map out the returns to state and local government through Medicaid. Ideally the cost and usage measures would be for the eligible population we model the program for.