Why

What

Who

Communities That Care is a prevention system designed to reduce levels of adolescent delinquency and substance use. 

Communities That Care provides a structure for engaging community stakeholders, a process for establishing a shared community vision, tools for assessing levels of risk and protection in communities, and processes for prioritizing risk and protective factors and setting specific, measurable, community goals.

There are approximately 417,000 students aged 10-17 in the public school system in Maricopa County that would be targeted by the CTC program.

For an initial cost of $156.4 million over 5 years covering 417,000 students aged 10-17 in the Maricopa County public school system.

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. 

Arrests - We use data for overall arrests in Maricopa County, but do not have access to ZIP level estimates. Instead we estimate local arrests based on the proportion of youth in a ZIP code, and multiply by the ratio of overall crime in the ZIP code's city to the overall state level.

Smoking and Alcohol Incidence - Data for these estimates is taken for the city of Phoenix, since local estimates are unavailable.

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.

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.