project

Improving Treatment for Juvenile Justice

Juvenile Justice Service Center

Research Team

Project Overview

In February of 2019, the Philadelphia DAO established new juvenile justice policies aimed at improving the treatment of and outcomes for youth within the Juvenile Justice system and decreasing the use of out-of-home placement. Prior to 2019 there were no systemized efforts made by the DAO to track the prosecution, disposition, and ultimate outcomes of juvenile cases. As a result, there are no data with which to compare or benchmark the effect of the recent reform efforts.

UPenn researchers are working with the DAO to enter records of all youth discharged from the juvenile justice system from January 1, 2016 – December 31, 2018. The goal of this project will be the creation of a complete dataset allowing for the analysis of data and the creation of a public report outlining the full juvenile justice experiences of all youth whose petitions received a final disposition prior to the implementation of the juvenile justice reforms.