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

of prior adjudications of guilt, number and nature of pending petitions, supervision status, and
history of failure to appear or runaway/escape. These seven weighted items generate the total
DAI score that is classified into one of three categories: release; placement in a detention
alternative; or placement in secure detention.
DJJ conducted a study of the DAI’s implementation in 2004 that examined data from
2003. During that time, the DAI was completed for just over a third of detention-eligible intakes.
Of those completions, over half of the decisions were overridden, mostly to place youth in secure
detention (Department of Juvenile Justice, 2004). A validation study of the DAI published in
2007 concluded that there were acceptable rates of: 1) reoffending within 30 days of the initial
offense (6.5%); and 2) failure to appear (1.3%), when the decisions recommended by the
instrument were followed (Reiner, Miller & Gangal, 2007). A recent study of the juvenile justice
system by the Virginia State Crime Commission included a survey of juvenile court judges and
Court Service Unit (CSU) directors (CSUs staff juvenile courts in Virginia). The survey found
that 74% judges and 63% of CSU Directors rated the Detention Assessment Instrument as either
“very” or “somewhat” effective in reducing DMC (Virginia State Crime Commission, 2008). 13
DJJ is currently working with Orbis Partners, Inc. to implement their Youth Assessment
and Screening Instrument (YASI), which generates risk and assessment scores in 10 domains of
functioning. The YASI will replace the Risk Assessment Form, an instrument used at intake to
classify juveniles according to their relative risk of reoffending.
To summarize, both Iowa and Virginia are actively pursuing the development and
improvement of structured decision-making tools, both for detention decisions and service
delivery. Neither state has produced an assessment of how their use of such instruments has
affected DMC.
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