Legal Research

New Ohio Juvenile Court "'Youth Assessment System'"

Posted by Chuck Kallendorf: "Ohio juvenile courts have a significant new tool at their disposal that has been developed by the Ohio Department of Youth Services and University of Cincinnati's Center for Criminal Justice Research.

The Ohio Youth Assessment System is a "streamlined, web-based system for assessing young offenders in determining appropriate dispositions, treatment, and levels of supervision, designed, in part, to help judges decide whether they should send juveniles to more-costly state programs or less-expensive community projects," according to a Columbus Dispatch article last Friday morning.

The roots of the Assessment lie in Ohio's RECLAIM program. In evaluating those programs back in 2005 with U.C., ODYS found that the effectiveness of those programs was mitigated by the risk level of the youth being served in the program. Risk principles propose that the intensity of service be matched to the risk level of the offender, in practice calling for the focusing of resources on the most serious cases, with high risk offenders benefiting most from intensive services and low risk youth left to minimal services. In fact, some research suggests that providing intensive treatment to low risk cases can have a detrimental impact on low risk youth because it exposes them to higher risk offenders and disrupts their pro-social community networks. [Ohio's RECLAIM program was created by provisions in the 2003 biennial budget appropriations bill (HB 152), now codified at ORC §5139.41, 5139.43, and 5139.44. The complete text of the 2005 study can be viewed here, or the "Executive Summary" here]...

Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Cincinnati Law Library Blog, 16 September 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on September 17, 2009 (boomark / email).