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

• Peoria County, IL: via a restorative justice project, “reduced African American youth
admissions to detention for aggravated battery (school fights) by 43 percent;”
• Pima County, AZ: through the development of alternatives to secure detention, “were
able to significantly lower the average daily population of youth of color over the last
five years by over half;”
• Santa Cruz, CA: reduced the number of Latino youth detained (no figures cited).
The Institute has not issued an evaluation report or data on the results of its efforts. 16
According to its 2009 Annual Report, the Institute has “continued to work in jurisdictions across
the country and have achieved results that demonstrate that our approach works. We recently
shared those results with more than 18 jurisdictions in our first Racial and Ethnic Disparities
Training Institute” (W. Haywood Burns Institute, 2009). No information on the Training Institute
is available on the Burns Web site.
A review of the literature on DMC published by OJJDP in 2002 noted that some states
and localities have made explicit efforts to reduce DMC and implemented a number of other
juvenile justice reforms. The report goes on to note that “[w]hat is not reflected in the literature
(as represented by this review) is a systematic assessment of the impact of these efforts on the
level of DMC within the affected communities or a systematic effort to identify characteristics of
programs that appear to reduce DMC levels” (Pope, Lovell, & Hsia, 2002). OJJDP’s Web site
provides a listing of 145 studies related to state and local DMC initiatives published between
1990 and 2006. Of these studies, only 13 are evaluations, and five of the 13 evaluations were
related to OJJDP’s multistate DMC initiative in the early 1990s. 17
We would argue that OJJDP’s conclusion in 2002 still holds eight years later. There is
clearly a need for more evaluative information regarding the effectiveness of DMC initiatives.
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