Diversion Programs: Conduct a Community Needs Assessment

Before you select a diversion program to implement, it is important to understand what the specific needs of your community are. A need is the gap between “what is” and “what should be”.

Your community needs assessment should include data collection (from publicly available databases), supplemented with interviews from stakeholders, which can provide a complete picture of the issues surrounding the juvenile justice system. You should also be aware of programs and treatment services already available in your community so that diversion efforts are not duplicative, and available resources are leveraged. Finally, once you collect the information, it is important that you make decisions about diversion based on your community’s specific needs. These needs will impact many choices made about your program such as the point of contact at which diversion will occur.

This section provides guidance on how to conduct a community needs assessment for diversion efforts, and provides a brief overview of how that information can be used to make informed decisions.

• Conduct a Needs Assessment for the Community

  It is important to assess the needs of your community’s juvenile justice system to select an appropriate diversion program that fits with the culture of the system, while also addressing the specific population that will be targeted by diversion efforts.

  The first step is to find out what is already known about the needs of youths who could be diverted away from full engagement in the juvenile justice system. Before you begin, you should decide the focus and scope of the needs assessment, secure commitment from all levels of your organization for conducting the assessment, and ensure that you can use the results of the needs assessment in future planning. If possible, you will want to form a committee of representatives from organizations that are critical to ensuring that commitment and follow up.

  • Begin by collecting basic demographic information about your community to get an accurate picture of the youth population, and then supplement that information with more specific data related to youth behavior. Demographic information (such as gender, age, or ethnicity) can be collected from publicly available data, including the U.S. Census Bureau or other state- or county-level databases. The data can give you a description of the youth population in your community such as how many people are under the age of 18, the gender and race/ethnicity breakdown, and the socioeconomic status of families. The information can start you off with an accurate picture of what your community looks like.
    
    Depending on the information available in your community, it is helpful to collect additional data about characteristics of at-risk or justice-involved youths that could impact decisions about diversion programming. For instance, arrest records from law enforcement agencies or referrals handled by the juvenile court system could provide you with information about which offenses are being committed by youths.
    
    For example, Bexar County, Texas, conducted a needs assessment to determine what services were needed for youths with substance use issues. They began by reviewing demographic data from publicly available databases and then collected additional information on youth substance use in the county. The substance use data came from a variety of sources, including the Texas School Survey of Drug and Alcohol Use, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and the Texas Department of Public Safety. After gathering this information, they found that Bexar County had a large population under 18, and many youths were Hispanic, uninsured, enrolled in Medicaid, and living in poverty. These demographics ultimately impacted their recommendations about improving substance use treatment options for youths.
  
  
  • If possible, conduct focus groups and interviews with stakeholders (e.g., juvenile justice personnel, service or treatment providers, parents, and youths) to capture information that cannot be found in the data. It may be worth going beyond the numbers in the demographic data to ensure that you accurately assess the needs of your community. Speaking with individuals in the justice system who work with youths may provide you with insight you would not have obtained elsewhere. Similarly, talking to youths and families can also provide a different perspective on the system’s response to youths and their needs. For example, the Department of Juvenile Justice in Cook County, Illinois, conducted interviews with over 200 juvenile justice stakeholders to increase the department’s understanding of the systems’ strengths and weaknesses when responding to court-involved youths. Respondents included current and former court-involved youths, their families, community members, court personnel, service providers, and leaders within the juvenile justice system. The results of this needs assessment gave officials in the county a broad picture of the current system response, including the challenges that needed to be addressed. With regards to diversion, the assessment showed that the current system only offered diversion from the formal processing, which required guilty pleas and resulted in youths being placed on probation and having records. The system did not have a true diversion program in place such as one that would keep youths from entering the system. As a result of these findings, a series of recommendations and potential changes to the system were developed.
  
  
  • Create an inventory of the programs and treatment services currently available for youths in your community. The goal is to document which interventions are currently in place in your community to determine the gaps in services. This process can show you what programs and services may need to be set up to fully meet the needs of diverted youths. Conversely, you may find that services are already available in the community, and you can tap into existing resources without having to establish a new program.
    
    For example, Santa Clara County in California focused on addressing the unmet needs of seriously mentally ill juveniles in the community. A service gap analysis was conducted, which found significant gaps in services available to youths, primarily in screening and assessing youths for mental illnesses early in the court process. They also found that lack of adequate resources was the primary problem, as there was limited access to short-term beds in appropriate facilities. Youth and family access to wraparound services was also limited. Because of the service gap analysis, as well as supplemental information they collected on the target population, the county developed the first juvenile mental health court program in the country called Court for Individualized Treatment of Adolescents (CITA). CITA was designed to improve screening of youths for mental illness and connect youths and families to community-based resources through a wraparound approach. The team developing the program was also able to realign existing resources in the county, rather than invest funding to develop new services.

  Take a Look
  The University of Kansas Community Tool Box provides important information on assessing community needs and resources, such as collecting information about the problem, conducting focus groups and interviews, SWOT analysis, and determining service utilization. The Tool Box also provides information on community-based participatory research, an approach your community may want to explore, which greatly relies on the involvement of community members directly impacted by decisions made about juvenile diversion efforts.

  

• Use the Information from Your Needs Assessment to Inform Diversion Efforts

  The information collected from the community needs assessment should guide decisions made about diversion programming.

  • Use the findings from your community needs assessment and inventory of programs and treatment services to make informed decisions about diversion programming. With the results of your needs assessment completed, you will have useful information to help with the next steps to take and decisions to make. There are many questions to ask about the need for diversion. For instance, do you need to implement a diversion program, or are there other ways you can address your community’s needs such as changes in policies or procedures?
    
    If you decide that a diversion program is needed, you will need to make several decisions. First, you will need to decide at what point of contact the youths will be diverted. The point of contact will impact what type of program is implemented. Diversion can occur at several different contact points in the juvenile justice system (e.g., referral to court, intake, or petition); generally, however, youths are diverted preadjudication, before the initiation of formal court procedures. Preadjudication diversion is generally used with lower-risk youths following their contact with the police or referral to court. With preadjudication diversion, youths are diverted from the system with no further processing by law enforcement or court services.
    
    Selecting the appropriate point of contact should be based on the information from your community needs assessment and the inventory of programs and services already available in your community, and supplemented with research findings about the effectiveness of diversion. For example, research has found that the further a youth is processed into the juvenile justice system, the greater the likelihood of his or her future delinquent behavior. This is important to consider because in the long term, it may be more beneficial to divert youths from the system at an earlier contact point. However, if your community needs assessment found that youths require specialized treatment, such as mental health services, and these services can only be provided with a referral from the court, then you will need to select the point of contact that can provide those referrals.
    
    The next decisions, about the specific program you implement, are discussed in the next section, Do Supportive Research.