This Urban Institute study illustrates the financial costs and long-term effects of youth incarceration and suggests a new model to prevent and address illegal actions by youth. This new model calls for a continuum-based approach that includes restorative justice programming, family counseling and mentoring support, and interventions to address substance abuse. The brief reviews four areas to create this continuum, including: capturing and reinvesting savings resulting from youth detention facilities closures; repurposing youth detention facilities; maximizing existing state and federal funding sources; and identifying innovative funding strategies for opportunities for youth and their families.

This section from an Urban Institute report describes a social impact bond, issued in Denver, Colorado in February 2016, to fund a supportive housing program for 250 persons most frequently involved in the criminal justice system. The section presents participants’ first-hand accounts as well as challenges of utilizing the housing lease-up process to stem homelessness or returns to jail for this transitional population.

The National Association of Counties will host a three-part webinar series to discuss strategies county leaders can use to create comprehensive reentry substance abuse treatment plans with law enforcement officials for individuals in jails and upon reentry. The first webinar will be held on April 25, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. ET.

This Annie E. Casey Foundation report examines young returning citizens’ complex set of needs upon reintegration from the juvenile justice system. The report offers model programs and anticipated outcomes, as well as systems that address health, housing, education, and employment needs of formerly incarcerated youth.

This Mathematica report follows a 36-month evaluation of the Linking to Employment Activities Pre-Release (LEAP) grants, which the U.S. Department of Labor awarded to 20 local workforce development boards. The grants were made to test methods of establishing jail-based American Job Centers (AJCs) to support incarcerated persons with employment services for successful reintegration. The report provides a descriptive implementation analysis of the strategies that the grantees identified as well as design challenges in this environment.

This MDRC research-to-practice brief profiles the PACE Center for Girls, a Florida-based nonprofit organization serving school-aged girls at risk of involvement with the justice system. This brief identifies the uniqueness of PACE’s gender-responsive approaches that are tailored to meet the specific challenges of middle and high school-aged girls at risk. The PACE evaluation suggests ways that researchers can collaborate with practitioners in producing actionable social-sector evidence and translating evidence into practice to improve interventions.

This issue brief from the Council of State Governments’ National Reentry Resource Center is a self-assessment tool with which programs can assess their delivery of integrated reentry and employment interventions for citizens returning from incarceration. This tool focuses on helping reentry practitioners improve the capacity of their programming and services to reduce the likelihood of their clients’ return to incarceration and to increase long-term job retention.

This MDRC article highlights promising practices for interagency coordination between the criminal justice and child support enforcement systems. It identifies types of collaboration between these programs, suggests how to target program populations, and addresses institutional constraints that hinder implementation of reforms between the two systems. For additional information on reentry, OFA hosted a webinar entitled “Providing Effective Employment and Supportive Services to Low-Income Women with Criminal Records,” which can be found here.

This National Institute of Justice report identifies how the standard functional family therapy (FFT) manual was tailored to address issues common to the gang population. Prior to this study, there had been a lack of any in-depth evaluations of therapeutic programs targeting an urban and mostly minority population at high risk of or currently involved in gangs. The study “was intended to provide a rigorous test of FFT under contemporary natural conditions, with an urban, predominantly minority population selected for its high risk of gang involvement.”