compliance

Youth Services Insider has been trying to get a handle on what the early days of the Trump administration have brought on at two key youth services agencies: the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) at the Justice Department, and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at Health and Human Services.

In August, the Justice Department published a proposed set of new rules for compliance monitoring related to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act that would render most states out of compliance on at least one of the law’s four core standards.

The Justice Department last week published proposed new rules related to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) that will require most states to make significant improvements or face the loss of federal funds at a time when the appropriation has dropped significantly.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved yet another attempt to update the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which has not been reauthorized since 2002. The bill, S.1169, would phase out the lone exception in the law that permits the detention of status offenders; set new terms for failure to comply with the act; limit expenditures on mentoring and require the collection of new data on juvenile offenders.

Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) have scuttled a provision of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act reauthorization that would allow states out of compliance with the law to use penalized funds to work back toward compliance.

This week’s Senate Judiciary Committee “Compliance-Gate” hearing on Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention grants brought a relatively bureaucratic kerfuffle into the political theater.  It isn’t every day that an assistant attorney general testifies at the same hearing as two of her employees, and is asked by a senator – Judiciary Chair Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) – to vow she will not punish them in any way.

Failure to comply with any single core requirement is supposed to result in a 20 percent reduction to the formula grant sent to the state by OJJDP.

There are a handful of programs that drive much of the federal investment on youth in crisis, namely those involved in the juvenile justice or child welfare systems (or both). Sadly, recent developments call into question whether taxpayers are getting what they paid for when it comes to these vital programs.

A pair of California-based child advocacy groups is calling for drastic changes to the way that state compliance with federal child welfare laws is monitored, and the way that states are penalized for compliance failure.