A utilization-focused evaluation of three post-charge diversion programs for juvenile offenders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, Canada enacted the new 'Youth Criminal Justice Act' ('YCJA'), with an emphasis on non-court and non-custodial measures for juvenile offenders. The development of effective programs for juvenile offenders is essential to support this new focus. Towards this goal, a process and outcome evaluation was conducted of three post-charge programs for juvenile offenders (related to violence prevention, anger management, and substance abuse, respectively). This research also aimed to develop a customized youth measure for these programs and assess the applicability of identity formation theory to programming for juvenile offenders. Two studies were conducted to meet these three goals. The first involved conducting questionnaires with program youth, parents and guardians, program counsellors, and case managers, as well as assessing youth recidivism. The second study involved a six-week follow-up questionnaire with program completers. Adopting a utilization-focused approach, the evaluation involved an examination of four program components: program processes, program outcomes, the impact of processes on outcomes and program theory (based on the development of a program logic model). The examination of these program components provided important information about both strengths and weaknesses of the program. These findings are employed to make several recommendations regarding these programs. While the programs did not appear to impact youth recidivism, the programs serve an essential role in fulfilling the mandate of the YCJA by providing non-custodial options for juvenile offenders. As part of this research, a pre-post youth measure was developed to be used as a quality assurance tool in subsequent programs. This measure will allow program staff to continually improve the program. The current research provides preliminary support for the application of identity formation theories to programs for juvenile offenders. Specifically, the creation of relationships between youth and staff led to youth imitation of and identification with staff (an identity formation mechanism). The potential applications of identity formation theory to programs for juvenile offenders are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".