Effort to Implement the Youth Offender Demonstration Project (YODP) Impact Evaluation: Lessons and Implications for Future Research. Final Report

摘要

In the summer of 2005, the Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (DOL ETA) issued a request for proposals (RFP) to conduct an Impact Study of the Youth Offender Demonstration Program (YODP). The YODP evaluation team selected by DOL was comprised of Social Policy Research Associates (SPR), MDRC, Decision Information Resources (DIR), and Johns Hopkins University. As detailed in the RFP, the intended study was a random assignment evaluation to address a number of important questions about how to work most effectively with youth offenders to prevent recidivism and increase their employment and earnings. To try to answer these questions, the study would have had courts in six different jurisdictions agree to use random assignment methodology to assign youth to a control group in which they received only standard incarceration or assign youth to one of two study groups as follows: study group 1, in which youth were incarcerated but received aftercare services from a YODP grantee, or study group 2, in which youth received services from a YODP grantee in lieu of being incarcerated.