When it comes to translating accountability to the realm of the day-to-day dispensing of juvenile justice, many jurisdictions merit study, but few whole systems stand out as models for replication. Nevertheless, a number of individual juvenile justice programs in operation across the country -- some experimental and some well-established, some small- and some large-scale, some little-known and others much-studied -- have succeeded in involving crime victims and the community at large in the justice process, improving the overall consistency and effectiveness of the system's response to juvenile offending, and bringing home the message of accountability to individual offenders.

Examples of such programs are arranged below according to their place in a continuum of sanctions, beginning with those appropriate for the least serious cases and proceeding to those that serve the most serious. Contact information for these programs is provided later in this Bulletin, under "For Further Information."

Immediate Interventions

Immediate interventions are appropriate for most first-time misdemeanor offenders, many minor repeat offenders, and some nonviolent felons -- in other words, for the vast majority of young people who appear in juvenile court (Wilson and Howell, 1993). Too often in the past, the juvenile justice system's response to the bulk of these offenders has been, in effect, no response: diversion that entailed no real conditions or consequences, "probation as usual" without meaningful supervision from the system, or "backdoor" handling without victim or community input. This sort of inattention to accountability at the system's entry level, however understandable as a matter of resource allocation, contributed to the widespread public perception that the juvenile courts were inexcusably callous to victims, negligent of public safety, and indifferent to justice. Worse, it broadcast precisely the wrong message to delinquents themselves.

Diversion
Diversion is best viewed not as diversion from the juvenile justice system but rather as diversion to appropriate services where the formal intervention of the juvenile justice system is not necessary or required. One way to make sure that diversion is not an inappropriate "nonresponse" in a given case is to open up the diversion process and involve community members in diversion decisionmaking and in monitoring and enforcing diversion agreements.

Residents of a neighborhood threatened and disrupted by a young offender are unlikely to take the matter lightly, slight the concerns of victims, or lose sight of the fact that wrong has been done. At the same time, the wrongdoer is, in a very real sense, one of their own: neighbors may have information and insight into the offender's character, background, and needs -- not to mention incentives to turn him or her around -- that professionals remote from the community may lack. Moreover, just by acknowledging and confronting the problem posed by the offender in their midst, neighborhood residents may be contributing to its solution.

This is part of the thinking behind the Community Accountability Boards used by the Thurston County (Washington) Prosecuting Attorney's Office; the Juvenile Conference Committees set up by the New Jersey Superior Court's Family Division; the Youth Commissions, Youth Aid Panels, and Youth Diversion Committees operating in a number of Pennsylvania counties; and other similar programs in Montana, Texas, and elsewhere across the country (Kurlychek, 1997). Each of these programs involves citizen volunteers in the diversion of juveniles charged with minor offenses. Generally, the offender must admit wrongdoing in order to participate and signal a willingness to cooperate in the diversion process. Often, the other parties involved (victims, police, parents) must also agree to the diversion.

Citizen volunteers in the diversion process typically receive some training in juvenile justice system operations, dispute resolution, victim/witness issues, and other matters. Sometimes an effort is made to ensure that volunteers fairly reflect a given community's racial and ethnic diversity and/or that both young people and adults participate. Volunteers generally meet with and review the cases of only those offenders who reside in their own communities. After reviewing the facts surrounding a case, they essentially enter into a "contract" with the offender -- an agreement to keep the matter out of court under certain conditions, which may include a formal apology; direct restitution to the victim; community service; a curfew; participation in drug awareness, motor vehicle safety, or other specialized programs; weekly or monthly progress reports for a definite period; regular contact with designated community organizations; school attendance; or job search activities. Procedures for reviewing and monitoring each contract are adopted, and clear sanctions are prescribed for contract violations.

Victim/offender interaction
One vital accountability-promoting factor that is often missing from diversion programs, even those in which community members participate, is victim-offender interaction. There is no more direct way of encouraging and enabling juvenile offenders to recognize the human consequences of their actions than by making them listen to, acknowledge, and explain themselves to those they have harmed. Properly structured and supervised victim-offender conferencing, whether part of the formal court disposition process or otherwise, can also have significant benefits for victims. In the quarter of a century since the first Victim-Offender Reconciliation program was established in Kitchener, Ontario (Amstutz and Zehr, 1998), more than 150 cities and towns in the United States and Canada have undertaken similar efforts (Bazemore and Day, 1998).

The Victim Offender Mediation program in Austin, TX, one of four evaluated by Mark S. Umbreit and colleagues during 1990 and 1991 (Umbreit, Coates, and Kalanj, 1994), presents a typical example. Established in 1990 through the joint efforts of the Travis County (Texas) Juvenile Probation Department and the Travis County Dispute Resolution Center, the program receives referrals from the local juvenile court in cases involving property crimes, misdemeanor assaults, and certain kinds of intrafamily victimization offenses. If both the offender and the victim agree to participate, a mediation session is scheduled and the probation officer and victim service officer brief the mediator -- either a trained volunteer or a staff mediator from the Dispute Resolution Center.

During the first part of the meeting, the victim is given an opportunity to express feelings directly to the offender, and the offender is allowed to attempt to explain his or her actions and motives. The second phase of the meeting involves reviewing the victim's losses and developing a plan for repaying/restoring the victim to the greatest extent possible.

Umbreit's evaluation found that, of the cases mediated in 1991, 98 percent resulted in successfully negotiated restitution agreements. Fifty-three percent involved financial restitution, 40 percent involved community service, and 7 percent involved personal service restitution. The evaluation also revealed that 85 percent of victims and 92 percent of participating offenders reported satisfaction with the mediation process and its outcomes (Umbreit, Coates, and Kalanj, 1994).

A broader, more inclusive, and flexible variation on victim-offender conferencing is family group conferencing. Although only recently introduced in this country (through the efforts of justice professionals from Australia and New Zealand, where the practice originated in a Maori conflict resolution ritual), family group conferencing enlarges the circle of accountability by bringing more participants to the table.

Those involved include not only the offender and the victim, but the families and supporters of both, unrelated adults whose opinions matter to the offender or who can give voice to the community's view of the offense, and other community residents who represent both indirect or secondary victims of the offense and potential resources toward the reintegration of the offender (Umbreit and Stacey, 1996). Proponents of family group conferencing assert that the technique is capable of producing all the benefits one could ask of a sanction in an accountability-based juvenile justice system: a powerful stimulus to personal accountability, victim empathy, and remorse; a format within which to begin the process of repair and reconciliation; and the makings of an ad hoc network of resources to assist in the offender's reintegration into the community -- all in one.

Several communities in Minnesota have begun experiments with family group conferencing in recent years (Bazemore and Day, 1998). "Circle sentencing" -- a somewhat similar extrajudicial process in which offenders, victims and their advocates, and other community members come together to attempt to reach a consensus regarding a rehabilitative plan for the offender and an approach to healing the victim and the community -- has also been introduced recently in several Minnesota counties (Pranis, 1997). Through its field-initiated research program, OJJDP is currently funding the evaluation of a similar program in Marion County, IN. This program brings together the offender, his or her victim(s), and supporters of the victim(s) for a conference to discuss how the offender can make amends and restore justice to the community. A unique feature of this program is its focus on offenders age 14 and younger.

Other approaches
A number of other, more conventional interventions for entry-level juvenile offenders either tend to promote accountability or can be designed and implemented with accountability-promotion in mind. Mentoring, teen court, and probation supervision programs all can incorporate a special emphasis on offenders' personal responsibility and obligation to victims. Programs that attempt to modify behavior directly can also emphasize accountability.

For instance, the Bethesda Day Treatment Center in West Milton, PA, provides something more than therapy to the minor juvenile offenders it sees for up to 55 hours per week, insisting upon personal accountability and active efforts to atone. The Bethesda approach begins with strict discipline within the program -- backed by stiff sanctions for rule violations -- combined with the consistent refusal to accept "the false posture of innocence" that negates personal responsibility (Sweet, 1991). All working-age program participants are required to work, and 75 cents of every dollar they earn goes to victim restitution, court costs, and fines. Face-to-face conferences with individual victims -- centered around formal, written acknowledgments of responsibility and requests for forgiveness -- are also required whenever possible. According to one recent study, Bethesda's clients, though assessed at the time of intake as having a greater risk of rearrest, did not recidivate at higher rates than other day treatment clients (Jones and Harris, 1997).

Intermediate Sanctions

Intermediate sanctions are appropriate for juveniles who continue to offend following immediate interventions, offenders involved in drug trafficking, and some violent offenders who need supervision, structure, and monitoring, but not necessarily institutionalization (Wilson and Howell, 1993). While the system's response to offenders at this midlevel must be more serious and intensive -- challenge outdoor programs, intensive probation, electronic monitoring, short-term weekend detention, and so on -- the accountability component of the sanctions employed may be similar to those used at the entry level. Emphasis on acknowledgment of personal responsibility, insistence on various forms of reparation, victim and community involvement in the corrections process -- all these are vital and appropriate in the sanctioning of intermediate-level offenders.

The Community Intensive Supervision Project (CISP) in Allegheny County (including Pittsburgh), PA, offers a good example of an intermediate sanctions program centered around accountability. CISP is a nonresidential supervision and treatment program that serves male repeat and drug offenders in four high-crime Allegheny County neighborhoods. The CISP approach emphasizes highly structured supervision and scheduling (including electronic monitoring), required school attendance followed by attendance at a neighborhood reporting center, drug and alcohol testing, intensive family involvement, tutoring, job skills training and employment services, and programming designed especially for African American males.

What is unique about CISP, however, is the extent to which it has managed to embed itself in some of the neighborhoods in which it operates. By locating its reporting centers in the neighborhoods whose delinquent sons it serves; by staffing the centers with potential role models from those same neighborhoods; by making a much-needed contribution to those neighborhoods in the form of useful, reliable, routine community service work; and perhaps most of all by involving neighborhood development groups, businesses, churches, and other indigenous leaders and institutions in directing and devising that work, the program has succeeded in positioning its reporting centers as valuable local resources.

As part of their participation in CISP, young offenders work within their own neighborhoods, painting homes, registering voters, recycling telephone books, tutoring children, cleaning vacant lots, removing graffiti, and shoveling snow for businesses and churches -- not occasionally but regularly and not for the sake of symbolism or in token of remorse, but because it is work that needs to be done. The intangible benefits of this approach are significant, enabling young offenders to discharge their obligations to the community while in turn encouraging the community to value and accept responsibility for offenders.

Like many sanctions programs in recent years, CISP has also incorporated victim awareness and restitution elements into its program. (One creative restitution initiative involving CISP is described below under "A System of Accountability-Based Sanctions: The Allegheny County Experience.") Unfortunately, many jurisdictions have discovered that, while it is easy to order an indigent or unemployable offender to pay restitution, it is much harder to create a practical structure under which restitution actually happens on something other than a sporadic basis.

The statewide Utah Juvenile Court has developed a practical solution to this problem in the form of a work restitution fund. Established by State law in 1979, the fund -- which is underwritten by juvenile court fines -- allows juveniles who are otherwise unable to pay restitution to earn money by doing public service work. Communities can arrange service projects that suit their individual needs -- bus cleaning, graffiti removal, library work, park clearing, small-scale construction, and so on -- with projects sponsored by both the public and private sectors. The offenders' earnings are paid directly from the fund to the victims.

Not surprisingly, restitution has become an increasingly common and effective sanction for juvenile offenders in Utah. In 1988, nearly a third of all petitioned delinquency cases resulted in some form of restitution arrangement. Restitution paid to victims of juvenile crime in Utah rose from less than $250,000 in 1980 to more than $550,000 in 1990, and by the end of that period, it is estimated that as much as two-thirds of the restitution ordered by the Utah Juvenile Court was being collected and returned to victims (The Administrative Office of the Courts, 1991).

Another form of an accountability-promoting work component that is suitable for some offenders at the intermediate and entry levels is surrogate victim service -- that is, service rendered to a class of victims rather than to the offender's own victim. This interesting variation combines the flexibility and other administrative virtues of community service sanctioning with some of the teaching and healing potential of a victim restitution sanction. For example, in Dakota County, MN, near Minneapolis-St. Paul, Crime Repair Crews composed of low-risk offenders will repair property damage caused by crime within 48 hours of receiving a call from a victim or victim's advocate. Local police and sheriffs responding to complaints of criminal property damage -- for example, broken windows, graffiti, or damage from vandalism -- leave Crime Repair Crew cards with victims. If they choose to call the number on the card, the victims get prompt service at no cost. Offenders get a chance not only to see first hand the aftermath of a crime, but to do something about it.

Secure Corrections

Secure corrections programs are for the small minority of serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders who threaten the public safety and can be neither effectively treated nor held fully accountable without a period of incarceration. While secure corrections traditionally meant large, centralized, congregate-care "training schools" with few real services for young offenders and no links with their home communities, expert consensus now strongly favors smaller secure facilities that provide intensive counseling, education, and training and that are not so remote as to rule out family contact and gradual community reintegration (Wilson and Howell, 1993).

Although secure placements limit some options for promoting accountability among juvenile offenders -- particularly those that involve service to and interaction with the community -- a number of other creative possibilities remain. Impact of Crime on Victims, a California Youth Authority (CYA) program for its wards, is an innovative systemwide attempt to cultivate a sense of personal accountability, victim awareness, and empathy among incarcerated offenders. Established in 1984, the program now combines an educational curriculum -- 35 to 60 hours of experiential learning over 6 to 12 weeks, conducted by specially trained CYA instructors -- with in-person presentations from crime victims and victims' advocates.

Thousands of CYA wards have completed the course. The classroom component consists of readings, audiovisual materials, and interactive teaching strategies. It covers a number of crime-specific topics, beginning with property crime and progressing through domestic violence, crimes against the elderly, child abuse, sexual assault, assault, robbery, drunk driving, drug dealing, and gang violence before concluding with homicide (Lowe, 1996).

In-person visits from crime victims, survivors, and victims' advocates are frequently vivid and emotional scenes. In the words of one guest panelist, whose daughter and grandson were brutally murdered by a former CYA ward, "I have the feeling that those who have heard my message will remember it" (O'Hara, 1996). In fact, one study concluded that the program has a positive impact on participants' empathy for victims (Pedersen, 1996). A limited study of the Victims Awareness program operated by the Washington State Department of Corrections, which was modeled on the CYA program, indicated that those who had completed the program were less likely to recidivate and more likely to fulfill restitution obligations than those who had not (Stutz, 1994).

It should be noted that the Impact of Crime on Victims program is overseen by CYA's highly active Victim Services Division, which also performs a number of other services essential to the operation of a victim-sensitive accountability-based juvenile justice system -- including direct victim notification, education, and outreach; restitution collection and disbursement; and maintenance of a centralized database to track confidential victim information.

Opportunities to hold even the most serious and violent offenders accountable should not be neglected. The Capital Offender Program at the Texas Youth Commission's Giddings State Home and School works exclusively with juvenile murderers, assigning them to 16 weeks of twice-weekly, 3-hour group psychotherapy and role-playing sessions designed in part to bring home to them the enormity of their responsibility. Part of the treatment involves offenders imaginatively reenacting their crimes, but in the role of their victims. They are even left alone in a darkened room to simulate their victims' deaths. The program, which has been in operation for 10 years, has been found to reduce the likelihood of rearrest for a violent offense within a year of release by 53 percent and to have a statistically significant impact on violence-related rearrest for at least 3 years following release (Stone, 1996).

A System of Accountability-Based Sanctions: The Allegheny County Experience

Although it may be supported by academic research and guided by insights derived from small-scale pilot and demonstration programs, accountability reform under the JAIBG program will take place, if at all, only in real-world juvenile court systems -- places where maneuvering room is limited, inertia is strong, and compromise unavoidable. For that reason, the recent experience of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), PA, may be all the more instructive to juvenile justice professionals. Allegheny County was competitively selected by OJJDP to receive an Accountability-Based Community (ABC) Intervention Program grant in 1993. What followed was a 3-year effort to develop workable, cost-effective accountability-based sanctions out of the materials presented by a busy, well-established urban court system. A brief sketch of the methods, successes, and failures of the County's ABC Project can inform other jurisdictions embarking on system accountability reform.¹

System assessment
Any large-scale effort to reorient a local juvenile justice system in the direction of accountability must be preceded by a thorough, candid, and wide-open system assessment. Much of the first year of the ABC Project was devoted to just such an assessment of Allegheny County's juvenile court services. Conducted by the National Center for Juvenile Justice, in periodic consultation with an ABC Task Force consisting of 45 influential community leaders, the assessment went far beyond examining previously available information, generating copious amounts of new data from surveys, interviews, and followups with hundreds of individuals inside and outside the court system. In the process, the assessment not only generated the preliminary information needed to guide reform, it helped to build top-to-bottom systemwide consensus for and commitment to that reform.

Planning and development
A planning subcommittee of the ABC Task Force then identified 15 program- and system-enhancement tasks for the second year of the project. Most were highly specific, focusing on localized gaps in the available continuum of sanctions, as measured against an ideal accountability-based system. Each such gap was addressed by a small task group consisting of selected juvenile probation officers, supervisors, and members of the ABC Task Force, who worked on developing a response over the course of the year. To accomplish the most basic of the tasks conceived by the planning subcommittee -- to articulate a new mission for juvenile court services, based on accountability principles -- the ABC Project convened a strategic planning retreat, in which a top-to-bottom cross-section of court services staff members met to reexamine their beliefs about their role in the community, their ultimate objectives, and the strategies they should use to achieve them.

Expansion and enhancement of the continuum
The planning and development activities undertaken in the second year of the ABC Project bore fruit during the third year in a variety of new intervention programs, expansions or enhancements of existing intervention programs, and formal revisions of policies and procedures that could alter the trajectory of the system for years to come. Among the significant and lasting accomplishments of the ABC Project in Allegheny County are the following:

Creating opportunities for accountability. Rather than simply demanding accountability, the ABC Project sought to enable it by putting together the Bloomfield-Garfield Collaborative Internship Program. Under the program, a working partnership between the community-based intensive probation program CISP and a neighboring community development group, selected probationers are given the opportunity to work for construction contractors engaged in remodeling and renovating housing in the neighborhood. Prospective interns sign 3- to 6-month contracts undertaking not only to pay restitution while in the program, but to continue their schooling and to keep themselves drug- and alcohol-free at the same time. In return for their physical work -- literally restoring the community they have offended -- they receive job mentoring, real-life work experience and, in some cases, permanent employment, and other tangible help.

A number of neighborhood institutions contribute services to the program -- a local drug and alcohol program does the drug testing; a bank provides interns with checking and savings accounts, financial guidance, and workshops; and health centers, a neighborhood job center, local police, the area high school, a paint supplier, and a hardware chain all participate. In this way, the program helps to create a web of local accountability, in which the obligations of juvenile offenders are interlaced with and supported by matching community responsibilities. The result is not just more productive and connected ex-delinquents, but more community ownership of local delinquency problems.

Boosting the accountability element in probation. As a result of the ABC Project, Allegheny County has taken two concrete steps to boost the accountability content of the probation sanction. First, it significantly expanded its school-based probation program, from 9 to 21 local schools. The program places probation officers in permanent offices in the county's schools, so they see their charges every day and can easily monitor progress in school, peer relationships, day-to-day conduct and attitudes, pressures, and so forth. Because they work so closely with their probationers, both literally and figuratively, school-based probation officers have more opportunities to convey the message of accountability and to hold their probationers to it.

No probation system can be said to be accountability based, however, without the capacity to impose swift, sure, nontrivial, attention-getting consequences for probation violations. As a direct result of urgent ABC Project recommendations, Allegheny County established a special 22-bed probation sanctions unit for juveniles, using a residential facility previously devoted to other purposes. The decision allows local juvenile court judges to impose structured residential placements of up to 60 days on probation violators. This was a critically needed midlevel sanctioning option and one that sends a strong message to juveniles regarding the seriousness of their probation obligations.

Adapting and remodeling existing programs. ABC Project planners attempted to maximize the impact of the funds available by filling unmet needs with existing programs wherever possible. A prime example of this approach involved aftercare, which assessors had identified as a critically neglected area of the continuum in Allegheny County. Experts consulted by the aftercare task group pointed to several existing Allegheny County programs that could easily be expanded to provide aftercare services -- notably CISP, the neighborhood-based intensive probation program; Allegheny Academy, a private day treatment program; and several others that were capable of providing structure to juveniles released from more secure commitments. Now all juveniles released to the county from institutions receive a minimum of 90 days of aftercare supervision as a matter of course -- with no substantial new hiring, facility, or other program startup costs incurred.

Fostering community accountability. The ABC Project tried in other ways to recruit local community institutions into the effort to reclaim young offenders, with substantial results in the form of several new community-based intervention programs. For example, the ABC Project sponsored a providers forum attended by 70 community service representatives. One of the problems aired at the forum was the disproportionate confinement and court-involvement of African American juveniles in Allegheny County. After the forum, a faith-based African American community organization came forward with the idea for Issachar House, a community-run, community-staffed secure group home for teenage African American males just starting on the road to delinquency.

Another program that owes its startup to ABC Project funding is Cycle Breakers, an intensive intervention and mentoring program run by a community-based social service agency under contract with the juvenile court. Cycle Breakers attempts to reduce recidivism among adolescent males returning to the community from institutions. The ABC Project was also instrumental in the creation of two community-based intervention programs for female juvenile offenders.

Although the ABC Project made significant progress, it did not by any means succeed in creating a model accountability-based system in Allegheny County. For instance, ambitious efforts to create a state-of-the-art management information system for Allegheny County eventually foundered. Consequently, a crucial piece of the accountability puzzle -- the ability to track juveniles through the system, share up-to-date information among various agencies, and monitor program costs and outcomes -- is still missing. Nevertheless, the project left an impressive record of achievement and serves as an instructive example for system reformers in other jurisdictions.

¹ For more information, see Patrick Griffin's 1999 article, Establishing a Continuum of Accountability-Based Sanctions for Juveniles: Allegheny County's Experience, a copy of which is available from the National Center for Juvenile Justice at 412-227-6950.