The Imprint went through all of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) funding notices.
You can click here to read our Youth Services Insider report from yesterday on the intriguing emergence of “invited awards,“ a segment of OJJDP funds that appear to have been made in a fashion more common to private philanthropy.
Click here for the Excel chart we created with every single grant listed by name, state, grant description and amount. Following here is a breakdown of OJJDP 2013 funds by key juvenile justice subjects:
Juvenile System Improvement
Total: 11 grants; $3.6 million
Among the Winners: National Partnership for Juvenile Services, based in Kentucky, $200,000 to expand the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative; $1 million for the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) programs in three cities; Portland State University in Oregon, $1.4 million to assist with certain sites of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Reclaiming Futures initiative.
Notes: Many of the grants made out of this new account support further work on two foundation-led reform efforts: Reclaiming Futures, a drug court initiative led by the New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. OJJDP has made recent investments to expand both efforts.
Development Services Group gets $235,000 to assist with the National Forum on Youth Violence. The other draw in this program is GREAT, which has for a long time been a carved-out appropriation from OJJDP’s Title V Incentive Grants.
Youth Development, Prevention and Safety
Total: 29 grants; $28.3 million
Among the Winners: National Juvenile Defender Center, based in D.C., $695,000 for a Juvenile Indigent Defense Special Initiative; National Court Appointed Special Advocates Association (CASA), based in Washington, $5 million divided into two grants for training and expansion.
Notes: This appears to blend a majority of small- and mid-size grants for local mentoring with some larger grants to longtime OJJDP partners like the National Children’s Advocacy Center and the National Children’s Alliance.
National CASA used to snag a Congressional earmark each year back when pork was still on the menu. The Justice Department still manages to work in funding for it each year, and this time around it comes from one of the new accounts.
State and Community Development
Total: 71 grants; $13.7 million
Among the Winners: Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, $347,500 for a Youth Justice Project; Futures Without Violence of California, $3 million for the Defending Childhood Initiative; Civics First of Connecticut, $347,500 for a Youth-Law Enforcement Training Project.
Notes: The vast majority of these grants are $59,639 allocations for states to use to enforce underage drinking laws. Mixed in are a number of grants in line with Justice Department pet projects such as the Defending Childhood initiative and its collaboration on discipline with the Department of Education.
Equal Justice Initiative is certainly a racy partner for the government. The Alabama-based organization has been the central legal entity in the push to roll back life without parole sentences for juvenile offenders.
Funding Directly to States, Territories and Tribes
Total: $28.4 million for formula grants; $16.8 million for Juvenile Accountability Block Grants (JABG); $5.6 million for tribal youth programs.
Notes: These totals appear to be well under what was appropriated for these programs by Congress. Here are the totals approved in the spending agreement from last year:
- Title II Formula Grants: $44 million
- JABG: $16.8 million
- Tribal Youth: $10 million
The majority of states received a grant in the neighborhood of $400,000. For less populous states, that amount has been business as usual for the past few years; for others, it is well below what they used to get.
Violence Prevention
Total: $8 million for projects; $1.8 million for research
Among the Winners: Missouri Health Department’s Aim4Peace Violence Prevention Project; Maryland Safe Streets Initiative in Baltimore and in Prince George’s County; American Institutes for Research evaluation of the Massachusetts Safe and Successful Youth Initiative.
Notes: This is the one 2013 juvenile justice program for which there was an official press release from the Department of Justice, which is no surprise because this is their baby. Community-based Violence Prevention is a program conceived of by Attorney General Eric Holder, and some hope that this one day could expand to a broader program along the lines envisioned in the PROMISE Act legislation.
YSI was intrigued to see Maryland’s Safe Streets in the mix. It is a program that uses community outreach and mobilization to stem violent activity among 14- to 25-year-olds in high-crime areas. A key part of the mission is, when an act of violence or killing does occur, stopping the spiral of retribution.
Safe Streets took a public image hit in Baltimore a few years back when a federal indictment of Black Guerilla Family – a prison gang operating in the city – revealed ties between the Safe Streets West Baltimore site and some of the gang’s top street leaders.
It appears from the Baltimore Safe Streets website that the initiative is not currently operating in West Baltimore.
Disproportionate Minority Contact Planning
Total: $400,000
Among the Winners: Montana, Iowa, Illinois and Utah ($100,000 each)
Notes: Last we checked, DMC planning was part of what states were supposed to spend their Title II formula grants on, since it is one of the four core requirements of the JJDPA. YSI will be interested to learn what the four state agencies in question here have planned.
Mentoring
Total: $15 million multi-state grants; $49 million national grants; $4.4 million local grants; $4 million for mentoring research; $1 million for a national resource center
Among the Winners: Goodwill Industries; Boys and Girls Clubs of America; National Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) Association
Notes: Goodwill gets $9 million, presumably for its GoodGuides mentoring model, after missing out on federal support in 2012.
Goodwill got a big investment up front from the Justice Department for GoodGuides; $19 million in stimulus funds, and another $5 million in 2011. The Imprint has heard from people involved with GoodGuides that most of the Goodwill sites were not able to sustain the programs after the federal dollars dried up.
The Virginia-based National Mentoring Partnership has been given a $1 million grant to establish the National Mentoring Resource Center.
As mentioned above, about one-seventh of the Youth Development, Prevention and Safety Division grants went to mentoring.
Sex Offenders
Total: $1.4 million
Among the Winners: Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault, Kansas City, Mo; Family and Child Treatment of Southern Nevada; The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.
Notes: The Missouri and Nevada programs receive $300,000 each for direct services. The Oklahoma grant is for evaluation of the university’s Community-Based Services for Problematic Sexual Behavior of Youth.
Program evaluation in this area could prove to have a significant impact on the way states and jurisdictions handle juvenile sex offenders. There is a serious dearth of research on the matter, but what data does exist suggests that juvenile sex offenders are far less likely to recidivate than adults.
Drug Courts
Total: $3.9 million for family drug courts; $2 million for juvenile drug court training and technical assistance
Among the Winners: Jackson County, Wis.; Idaho Child Protection Drug Court; Rhode Island Family Treatment Drug Court
Notes: These grants pertain more to the actions of adults than youths. The family drug courts deal with nonviolent adult offenders who are in front of the court for child abuse or neglect and are struggling with dependency.
It will be interesting to see, given more time, if some federal funds get directed toward family drug treatment for juvenile offenders. Family-involved drug treatment was one of the few strategies that appeared to have any measurable impact on serious juveniles, according to a major study called Pathways to Desistance.
OJJDP, which helped fund the study, published a bulletin in 2010 that focused on the impact of family-involved drug treatment.
Reentry
Total: $9.7 million
Among the Winners: St. Louis Agency on Training and Employment, $358,000 for the You Only Live Once program; City of Los Angeles, $750,000 for a youth development reentry program; $25,000-$50,000 planning grants for reentry in Idaho, Minnesota, Georgia, and the Yurok Tribe in California.
Notes: All of this funding comes from the Second Chance Act.
Missing and Exploited Youth
Total: $33.5 million for missing and exploited youth; $22 million for Internet Crimes Against Children “invited awards”; $3 million for ICAC assistance
Among the Winners: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, $31.2 million; Fox Valley Technical College, $2.85 million.
Notes: Nothing new here; these two groups have been getting the bulk of OJJDP’s missing/exploited funding for more than a decade.
NCMEC has its own individual authorization. Fox Valley gets $2.5 million to do training and assistance for the nationwide AMBER Alert program and $350,000 to support programs for missing and exploited children.
Fox Valley is also one of four grantees that will do national training for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The training programs will focus on core training, digital evidence forensics, and officer wellness.
Most of the 60 ICAC “invited” grants went to state or county agencies and were in the ballpark of $200,000-$400,000.
Native American Youth
Total: $5.6 million for Tribal Youth Programs; $1 million for training and technical assistance for the Tribal Youth Program; $750,000 for the Task Force on American Indian/Alaska Native Children Exposed to Violence; $850,000 for the National Intertribal Youth Leadership Development Initiative.
Among the Winners: United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY), Tribal Law and Policy Institute; Education Development Center (EDC).
Notes: 14 tribes snagged youth program grants, all in the neighborhood of $300,000 to $500,000. UNITY will handle the youth leadership program for OJJDP, Tribal Law and Policy Institute gets the grant to support the task force, and EDC gets the training grant.
Research
Total: $1.4 for Field-initiated research; $6.9 million for “Invited Research Awards”; $4 million for mentoring research; $1.8 million to evaluate community-based violence prevention programs; $800,000 for juvenile justice data analysis.
Among the Winners: American Institutes for Research (AIR), University of Arizona, National Academy of Sciences
Notes: AIR will evaluate the Massachusetts Safe and Successful Youth Initiative, while Johns Hopkins received funding to examine the impact of three outdoor education programs on violence in the community.
The National Academy gets a modest $100,000 grant to host a forum on Children’s Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Health. Meanwhile, the University of Arizona got just over $700,000 to study the impact of Reclaiming Futures, a drug court initiative led by the New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. OJJDP helped finance an expansion of the initiative.
Many of the other invited research grants went to groups tasked with evaluating local “Safe Start” programs.
Individual Grants
State Advisory Group Training/Technical Assistance
Winner: ICF Incorporated, $300,000
Notes: The Virginia-based ICF replaces Development Services Group (DSG), which received the SAG training grant every year from 2006 to 2012. But all is not lost for DSG…
Model Programs Guide
Winner: Development Services Group, $375,125
Notes: The name sounds like some sort of annual document, but this is actually an excellent and growing resource on the OJJDP website. Click here to check it out if you haven’t already.
National Girls Institute Training and Technical Assistance
Winner: American Institutes for Research (AIR), $400,000
Notes: An announcement on the OJJDP listserv said that the grant would be split between AIR and the National Crittenton Foundation to “support” the institute.
There is no mention made in the grants of Crittenton. The institute is currently led through a cooperative agreement between OJJDP and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
Juvenile Justice Information Sharing Program
Winner: Institute for Intergovernmental Research, $175,000
Notes: The institute takes over for the Pikes Peak Community Foundation in Colorado.
National Center for Youth in Custody
Winner: National Partnership for Juvenile Services, $375,000
Notes: This used to be run jointly between the partnership and the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, so apparently OJJDP decided to go with one partner for this year.