Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

For nearly two decades, Connecticut has been reforming its criminal justice system through greater usage of data and evidence-based decision making. It began with a reform of its adult system in 2003 primarily under the impetus of the Council of State Governments’ Justice Reinvestment Initiative. More recent are reforms aimed at the state’s juvenile justice system undertaken as part of its “Raise the Age” initiative.

Inherent to the reforms in both systems was the utilization of recidivism as an outcome measure. Connecticut’s Public Act 14-217 required the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy (IMRP) at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) to evaluate the effectiveness of juvenile parole services in the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and make recommendations for cost-effective program improvements. As directed, the IMRP focused its research on establishing a baseline rate of recidivism among adjudicated (convicted) juvenile offenders committed to DCF, which could be utilized in Connecticut’s state-specific implementation of the Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative benefit-cost model.

As part of its juvenile recidivism study, IMRP secured comprehensive juvenile and criminal justice data from three state agencies: the Court Support Services Division of the Judicial Branch ('CSSD'); the Department of Children and Families ('DCF'), and the Department of Corrections ('DOC'). This three-agency dataset ('the IMRP dataset') contains information on juvenile arrests, disposition, incarceration, movement, parole, probation, programming and adult and juvenile reoffending for about 82,968 unique individuals younger than 18 years old who were arrested and charged with crimes, either as juveniles or as adults, in Connecticut between 2000 and 2014 ('formerly criminalized youth').

As a continuation of these efforts, the IMRP will link state agency data on juvenile justice, criminal justice and recidivism to US Census Bureau-held data with respect to young persons who have been involved in criminal or juvenile justice in Connecticut. This needs assessment aims to identify the services that formerly criminalized youth might be eligible for, the services they do access, and any correlation of program utilization to recidivism and other outcomes such as employment, earnings, and housing stability. IMRP-held data will be linked to US Census Bureau-held data with respect to identification and death, location, earnings and income, employment, housing assistance, and health insurance enrollment.

While traditional recidivism studies tend to measure failure by criminal justice metrics—rearrest, reconviction, or reincarceration—they can offer little insight into what happens to those who do not reoffend. By linking Connecticut juvenile recidivism data to data held by the US Census Bureau, results may identify government programs whose utilization is associated with non-recidivism, higher earnings, more stable housing, or other socially desirable outcomes. Correlations identified by this needs assessment may assist the state of Connecticut (and other governments) to better tailor public policy to the program needs, uptake and eligibility of formerly criminalized youth, and can suggest directions for further public policy research as to how state or federal dollars might be invested to reduce the human and public costs of criminal justice.