Issues for Change

Community-Based Alternatives

A model juvenile justice system recognizes that it cannot substitute for the families and communities of the youth it serves. On the contrary, it seeks to partner wherever possible with families and communities, to tap their knowledge and enlist their aid. A model system tries to preserve vital connections by keeping delinquent youth at home when it is safe to do so, holding them accountable through informal, local means, meeting their needs through community-based services and programs, and reserving formal coercion and commitment for only the most serious cases.

This calls for infrastructure. In a model system, probation officers, court intake officers, judges and other decision-makers would have access to an array of local alternatives to formal processing and incarceration—including specialized services of all kinds, flexible sanctions, informal dispute resolution forums, and school- and neighborhood-based programs that structure youths’ time and address their deficits. These local alternative mechanisms would be scientifically tested, widely understood, and solidly supported. The structure of fiscal incentives would encourage their use and stimulate their growth.

Models for Change is working in Illinois and Louisiana to diminish system reliance on formal processing and confinement of youth, and to increase the use and expand the array of local alternatives.

In Illinois, five demonstration sites funded by Models for Change are establishing governance structures that will promote local community ownership of delinquency problems and expand community-based responses to delinquency. In Cook, DuPage and Peoria Counties, efforts are focusing on reducing the unnecessary detention of juveniles—especially those who would be better handled in the child welfare or mental health systems—through diversion. In Ogle County and the 2nd Judicial District (a largely rural 12-county area in the southern part of the state), the focus of the work is on supporting and strengthening local leadership bodies known as Juvenile Justice Councils—boosting their capacity to survey community needs and resources, to map the array of existing programs and services capable of providing alternatives for local youth, to identify critical gaps in services, and to plan and organize the community’s response.

In Louisiana, initial pilot work in Jefferson and Rapides Parishes involves convening agencies responsible for youth with mental health, substance abuse and other special problems in a collaborative planning process for the purpose of developing a diversion policy and alternatives for those involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

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