This report provides an analysis of the XXX County Teen Court ...

Partnership Project 2
Abstract
During 2004, the University of Maryland Department of Criminology and Criminal
Justice began a project aimed at providing a model for evaluation of juvenile justice
diversion projects in Maryland. The project, funded by the Justice Research and Statistics
Association’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Council solicitation, was intended to demonstrate
the advantages of using a systematic, collaborative, and coordinated approach to the
evaluation of one type of diversion project funded through the Maryland State Advisory
Board’s Youth Strategies Grant (YSG) Competition: Teen Courts (TCs). This project
applied a model of researcher-practitioner collaboration (Program Development
Evaluation, PDE) to develop a framework for evaluation in collaboration with the project
and county-level practitioners involved in managing the TCs as well as the state-level
administrators charged with overseeing the grants.
The evaluation involves (1) a process evaluation to determine whether the TCs met
the standards they had created for themselves; and (2) an outcome evaluation utilizing a
randomized design to determine the effectiveness of TCs in reducing future recidivism.
The PDE process allowed the TC coordinators and Local Management Board
representatives to be directly involved in developing both parts of the evaluation. This
report summarizes the preliminary findings of the process evaluation.
Despite challenges encountered during this evaluation, the broader aims of this
evaluation partnership project were met. The PDE method was successfully used to
involve researchers and practitioners in a collaborative process resulting in a clear plan for
the evaluation of a juvenile justice diversion project in Maryland. The advantages of using