Juvenile Probation

Overview  

Our goal is to learn how youth and families experience juvenile probation so that we can enhance their experiences and outcomes. Below are just a handful of our active projects.

Empowering Family Voice Project

Family engagement is crucial to supporting young people involved in the juvenile justice system. Funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Empowering Family Voice project helps jurisdictions understand and improve how they engage youth and families during and after juvenile probation. By gathering direct feedback from youth and their families, we generate actionable insights that help shape policies, programs, and practices to better support young people

Family Engagement Assessment Tool 

Family engagement is a key component of effective juvenile probation, yet staff perceptions and experiences often shape how engagement strategies are implemented. Supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, this project provides a free, online tool that helps juvenile probation departments assess and improve family engagement based on staff perspectives. By gathering anonymous feedback from probation staff, this tool allows departments to identify strengths, challenges, and areas for growth—ultimately supporting better outcomes for youth and families.

NSF CAREER AWARD: Developing and Testing the Integrated Youth Development Model Framework 

To advance the health, prosperity, and welfare of justice-involved youth and move the field into the future, juvenile justice system policymakers, practitioners, and researchers need a guiding framework that illuminates how interdisciplinary approaches can be integrated to promote youth thriving and a structured set of tools and approaches that can test the framework. 

We need a model framework for organizing and guiding the field, new tools for measuring youths’ success rather than just their deficits and recidivism, and a model program that can be replicated easily in other jurisdictions to promote youth success. That is the goal of this NSF CAREER Award. 

Learn more here.