JUVENILE JUSTICE AND IDEOLOGY OF JUVENILE COURT

Juvenile Justice and Ideology of Juvenile Court: Community Based Sanctions for Juvenile Offenders

Community-Based Sanctions for Juvenile Offenders

Introduction

In this study, I evaluated the implementation of community-based sanctions in the North Carolina counties. State legislation mandated the development of local sanctions continuums for juvenile offenders. An implementation evaluation of a policy assesses the degree of convergence between intended services and actual service provision, provides insight about variability across program sites, and informs an impact evaluation. Following a brief description of the federal policy context, I explain juvenile justice reform efforts in North Carolina, focusing on the state-local partnership that supports sanctions continuums. The purpose of this study was to compare local implementation of sanctions with state-level expectations regarding the reform legislation and to describe implementation variability across counties. Guided by Matland's (1995) ambiguity-conflict model of policy implementation, I also identified factors affecting implementation at the local level (Holsinger and Latessa, 1999).

Graduated sanctions are a key feature of state juvenile justice policy. Federal funding is contingent on state adoption of graduated sanctions for juvenile offenders. Despite widespread utilization, limited information exists regarding the implementation or effects of graduated sanctions for juveniles. Nationally, approximately 90% of delinquent youth are supervised in local communities, so a system of graduated sanctions depends on local efforts to develop and sustain a continuum of sanctions and services. North Carolina is one of many states that enacted juvenile justice reforms based on a graduated sanctions model. Using data from 93 counties, the local implementation of sanctions was examined and compared to an idealized state model (Burke and Pennell, 2001). Factors affecting policy implementation were identified. Most counties did not have full implementation of sanctions continuum. Counties with fewer financial resources showed lower implementation levels, but regression analysis indicated that political factors had the greatest effect on policy implementation.

PART A

Sanctions Policy in Juvenile Justice

Legislatively, the federal government supported state adoption of graduated sanctions for juveniles through financial incentives from the Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grant program. Administratively, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention endorsed graduated sanctions as a key feature in a juvenile crime reduction strategy called the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (Holsinger and Latessa, 1999). Federal legislative and administrative documents describe graduated sanctions as an array of sanctions, available for every offense, that are sure, immediate, consistent, individualized, and community-based, and escalate with subsequent and more serious offenses. All state agencies have accessed federal funds and established some form of graduated sanctions systems. Conceptual models of graduated sanctions depict a comprehensive array of sanctions across multiple levels of supervision as one key component. Administrators in several states have followed the blueprint of the Comprehensive Strategy to develop sanctions continuums. Cooperation between state and local governments is important to ensure comprehensiveness. Focusing on juvenile sanctions policy in one state facilitates the examination of the role of local communities (Chapin, 2007).

Recent trends point to the need for renewed theoretical and research attention to sentencing decisions ...