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The goals of this study were to examine how providing Medicaid coverage for halfway house residents may affect care seeking, improve health care usage, and decrease criminal recidivism relative to providing health care through prison or jail medical facilities. To achieve these goals, we developed a researcher-practitioner partnership with the Connecticut Department of Correction (DOC) to implement a mixed-methods research design.

Qualitative data collection included focus groups with halfway house residents; interviews with halfway house staff, correctional health providers, correctional officers, and state-level DOC officials; and site observations of DOC medical facilities. Quantitative data collection included collection of administrative and recidivism data from DOC, coding of study participants' DOC medical charts to measure their baseline health status and health care usage in prison or jail, and collection of Medicaid enrollment and claims data from Connecticut's Department of Social Services (DSS) to measure Medicaid enrollment and health care usage in the community.

In response to growing concerns about recidivism and the welfare of youth who return to communities from incarceration, the federal government passed the Second Chance Act (SCA) in 2008 to authorize funding to support the development, implementation, and evaluation of juvenile reentry programs (H.R. 1593, 110th Cong. 2007). Since then, more than 100 juvenile SCA awards have been made to grantees across the U.S. to improve reentry programming and outcomes for youth returning home after placement in juvenile correctional institutions (State Government Justice Center, 2017).

The purpose of this evaluation was to evaluate five FY2010 juvenile SCA grantees who were funded to implement comprehensive reentry programs for high-risk youth, and to provide policymakers, practitioners, and funders with empirical evidence about the degree to which the SCA program effectively reduced recidivism and improved reintegration outcomes for youth offenders, and to inform future comprehensive juvenile reentry efforts.

Specific goals of this study included:

1. identifying strong sites for an impact evaluation;
2. assessing the extent to which the sites successfully implemented a comprehensive and integrated model of juvenile reentry for a high-risk, high-needs population;
3. assessing program operations and adherence to reentry principles;
4. evaluating the impact of the SCA programs;
5. determining the cost effectiveness of the SCA programs, and their cost-benefit in terms of crime prevented; and
6. disseminating evaluation findings to practitioner and researcher audiences.

Since 2008, the Youth Restoration Project (YRP) and the Central Falls School District (CFSD) in Rhode Island have collaborated to implement a multi-level restorative justice intervention focused on building partnerships among police, schools, social services, families, and communities through training and dialogue. Restorative justice (RJ) encompasses a broad framework of practices aimed at repairing harm and achieving accountability rather than imposing punishment. In criminal justice contexts, RJ models include victim-offender mediation, peer courts, and RJ conferences. The current project undertaken by the Urban Institute focused on evaluating the impact of restorative justice conferences conducted by the YRP in partnership with Family Services of Rhode Island. A restorative justice conference (RJC) is a highly structured, facilitated meeting that allows affected parties (e.g., offending student, victim, teacher) and their allies (e.g., parents/guardians, peers) to arrive at the best possible solution for all parties following a negative event or behavior. Three different types of student misbehavior were considered for referral to restorative conferencing as an alternative to more formal processes: (1) arrestable offenses (with or without victims), (2) chronic unexcused absenteeism (truancy), or (3) chronic disruptive behavior.

The Urban Institute began implementing a conference observation pilot in a CFSD middle school and high school in fall 2014; the 2015-2016 school year was the first full year of implementation. Starting in 2016-2017, a middle school and high school in Providence also participated; conference observations were also conducted in a charter high school in the area. At these 5 schools between 2015-2016 and 2017-2018, 786 cases were referred for RJ conferencing; conferences were held in about half of these cases (379). A total of 105 conferences were observed by trained field staff. Post-conference interviews were conducted in the months following RJCs and allowed adult conference participants to share feedback regarding their experience and satisfaction with the conference process. Additionally, an outcome evaluation was conducted using student administrative data to assess the impact of conferences on student behavior. Finally, teacher surveys and focus groups were conducted in 4 participating schools to assess teacher perceptions of overall school climate as well as attitudes toward restorative practices and RJCs.

This collection includes data from restorative justice conference observation (DS1) and teacher surveys (DS2). Administrative data from the outcome evaluation and qualitative data from post-conference interviews and teacher focus groups were not deposited and are not included in the ICPSR release.