Connections

Connections is a community-based, collaborative juvenile justice and mental health program that uses a strength-based, wraparound approach to address the needs of juvenile offenders with emotional and behavioral disorders and their families. Balanced and restorative justice principles and values are incorporated in plans to increase youths’ skills, provide services to victims, and increase public safety.

Connections staff are combined into teams consisting of a mental health professional serving as a care coordinator, a family assistance specialist, a probation counselor, and a juvenile services associate. The mental health care coordinator facilitates wraparound team meetings with youths, families, and team members to identify strengths, determine needs, and locate or create services and supports. The family assistance specialists provide emotional and practical support, often by helping a family prepare for meetings or accompanying them through court proceedings. The probations counselor’s primary responsibility is to ensure that services promote community safety, and the counselor is responsible for ongoing supervision of court orders. The juvenile services associate works closely with youths to assist them in completing requirements of the treatment plan; in addition they also work as mentors, often accompanying youths in the community to activities. A staff clinical psychologist provides 20 hours a week to the program, performing psychological evaluations, staffing cases, and counseling youths.

The goal of this program is to address the needs of juvenile offenders with emotional and behavioral disorders and their families.

The evaluation found that youths in the comparison group were 2.8 times as likely to commit an offense as youths in Connections. Youths in the comparison group were three times as likely to commit a felony offense as youths in Connections. Of youths in Connections, 72 percent served detention at some point in the 790-day postidentification window—this is significantly different from the comparison group, in which all youths served detention. Of those who did serve detention, the youths in Connections had an average of 4.4 detention episodes, significantly fewer than the average of 7.5 episodes served by youths in the comparison group. The findings show that youths in Connections took three times as long to recidivate, served fewer episodes of detention, and spent fewer total days in detention, compared with the comparison group.