A Review of the Status of DMC Efforts in Iowa and Virginia - April 2010

These data were used to illustrate how localities can examine the impacts of specific DMC
interventions. We were not able to obtain the requested data from Virginia.
In October of 2008, JRSA release an interim report on our findings to date (Poulin,
Iwama & Orchowsky, 2008). That report included a review of the status of DMC efforts in the
two states, including a list of past DMC studies, key stakeholders in the states, the impetus for
DMC efforts, a review of identified problems and suggested causes of DMC in the two states,
and an attempt to connect DMC activities to problems and suggested causes. Also included were
a presentation of the Relative Rate Index (RRI) data for the two states and a discussion of the
findings of our interviews with 28 state and local stakeholders regarding the nature of the DMC
problem.
The current report summarizes the overall findings of our effort, and provides our
conclusions and recommendations based on those findings. It builds on the information
presented in the interim report and further work that has been done since that report was
released. This latter work has included a second round of interviews and discussions with state
and local stakeholders, along with the analysis of the Iowa data discussed previously and a
review of the 2009 DMC reduction plans submitted to OJJDP by the two states.
It is not the intent of this report to present an evaluation of the two states’ efforts to
address DMC. Instead, we employ the two states as case studies, under the assumption that the
DMC activities and issues in these two states are typical of those facing states across the country.
It should be noted, however, that Iowa and Virginia were selected in part because of their longstanding
and ongoing efforts to address DMC, and not to be “representative,” in the statistical
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sense, of all states in the country. Moreover, we have not contacted any other states to
specifically determine to what extent the activities and issues in Iowa and Virginia have
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