Effective Use of the Large Body of Research on the Effectiveness of Programs for Juvenile Offenders and the Failure of the Model Programs Approach

Michael Baglivio, Kevin Wolff, Katherine Jackowski, Gabrielle Chapman, Mark Greenwald, and Katherine Gomez (2018, this issue) report the relationship of ratings of the quality of service delivery for 56 residential programs for juvenile offenders in Florida to the subsequent recidivism of the youth who participated in those programs. Quality of service delivery is one of the four components of the Standardized Program Evaluation Protocol (SPEPTM), a scheme for assessing the expected effects of therapeutic juvenile justice programs on recidivism. The other SPEPTM components include the generic program type (cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy, individual counseling, etc.), the amount of service provided (duration and contact hours), and the recidivism risk of the youth served. The focus on these factors, how each is defined, and the associated rating and weighting scheme are based on the program features found to be associated most strongly with recidivism reductions in a meta-analysis of 548 controlled studies of interventions with juvenile offenders (Howell and Lipsey, 2012; Lipsey, 2009). The SPEPTM allows for a certain amount of flexibility and local tailoring of the data sources that provide input for the ratings and the data elements incorporated into those ratings. The recidivism risk rating, for instance, is based on scores from a validated risk assessment instrument, but no particular instrument is specified and this rating is adapted to whatever eligible assessment is in use by a juvenile justice system. Similarly, even though the SPEPTM specifications for the quality of service delivery rating address the treatment