Juvenile justice reforms, including the growing use of youth diversion programs that offer alternatives to youth arrest and incarceration, have helped contribute to a substantial decrease in the number of young people who are involved in the justice system in recent years. Despite this overall decrease, such reforms have also corresponded with a troubling increase in the juvenile justice system’s inequitable burden on youth of color and Black youth in particular.
Often differing from one another in their theoretical framework, structure and implementation, the constellation of justice reform strategies referred to as youth diversion vary widely in their ability to improve outcomes for participating youth or meaningfully reduce justice system involvement. When implemented well, with a clear theory of change grounded in youth development, collaborative design and oversight and data-driven protections against widening the net of justice system involvement, youth diversion can be an important tool for equity, justice and overall public health. When implemented poorly, however, youth diversion efforts are in danger of unintentionally deepening inequity.
Before turning to strategies and tools that help promote equity in youth diversion, let’s consider two hypothetical youth diversion programs: Program A, designed with equity in mind as an explicit priority that therefore develops a social-ecological and social justice framework, and Program B, designed based on a solely individual-level theory of change.
Taylor Schooley
In Program B, well-meaning program staff may make decisions based on assumptions that their program is beneficial for any young person and may change or grow reactively — setting eligibility guidelines, program requirements or reporting requirements based only on what particular partners are comfortable with at the time, for example, or expanding geographically only where requested. This program may work well for some young people but, especially in the context of youth diversion, will very likely exclude the young people who are most impacted by the justice system to begin with.
Youth of color, who are increasingly more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as the overall population of justice-involved youth declines, may be less likely to be referred to diversion because eligibility guidelines fail to push for the types of cases that most impact them. Youth of color may be less likely to complete the program because completion and reporting requirements fail to minimize specific barriers for families of color or for youth involved in the child welfare system.
Surveys part of safeguards
In Program A, by contrast, there are built-in safeguards to catch any inequitable patterns that may arise from policy decisions or particular aspects of program design and structure. This means that even if eligibility requirements are already designed in a way that is informed by data, program staff also regularly assess and compare referral and arrest data to make sure the program is adjusting as needed to avoid disproportionately excluding Black youth, Indigenous youth or any youth of color.
Regular surveys and interviews informed by process and outcomes data also allow program staff to understand whether there are structural changes or additional protections needed to ensure youth of color, youth involved in the child welfare system, youth experiencing homelessness, etc. are not falling through the cracks of burdensome or culturally unresponsive approaches and requirements. Program A engages system-impacted youth, community members and a wide range of partners in collaborative oversight and problem-solving.
These very different approaches will likely mean that Program A will serve youth of color at about the same rate that youth of color are arrested in that particular jurisdiction and Program B will serve far fewer, thereby actually increasing inequitable justice system involvement as proportionally more white youth are given the opportunity to complete a youth diversion program in lieu of justice responses.
Meaningfully promoting equity in youth diversion and other youth justice transformation efforts is a complex and extraordinarily important task. Youth justice system involvement is a public health crisis. The staggering disproportionate impact and harms even a first-time arrest imposes on youth of color worsen wellbeing, academic and social outcomes for those youth and their communities long term. An effective youth diversion program offers a mechanism by which a jurisdiction can equitably reduce the population of justice-involved youth and increase wellbeing and safety both for the young people and the public.
Above all, approaches to designing an effective youth diversion program that promotes equity should be informed by your community but the following key considerations are foundational:
- Clear theoretical framework
- How are you defining youth diversion?
- What is your theory of change?
- Do you know what works and what doesn’t for all youth?
- Meaningful collaboration
- How will you build from existing work and fill gaps?
- How will you use data to engage key partners across sectors?
- How will you center youth leadership?
- Data-responsive Infrastructure
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- How will you center impacted communities in your distribution of resources?
- How will you provide flexible, responsive coordination and support to reduce real barriers to access and engagement?
- How will you commit to robust data protections and analyses?
In Los Angeles County, the Department of Health Services Division of Youth Diversion and Development (YDD) coordinates a growing network of community-based youth diversion and youth development programs in partnership with community and law enforcement agencies countywide. In collaboration with youth, community, justice partners and other youth-serving agencies, YDD works to address the above considerations as it strives to promote equity in all aspects of structure and practice.
YDD’s commitment to a social justice approach to youth development, a steering committee that meets quarterly to provide oversight and opportunities for shared learning, and regular assessment and protected sharing of data to guide program and policy decisions create an environment in which challenges and problems are surfaced as soon as possible and potential solutions are generated with, not for, the people who are most impacted by the program itself. Reflecting YDD’s core values of restorative practices, this foundation keeps YDD accountable to its community and makes sure Los Angeles County’s youth diversion programs are always actively working towards improving equity.
In 2019, YDD and its partners worked with Human Impact Partners to help develop an evaluation framework focused on assessing and preventing racial inequities in youth diversion programs. Human Impact Partners created a framework that offers much more detailed guidance and metrics at five major touchpoints: initial contact, referral, enrollment, participation and completion and thriving after completion. This framework has been an invaluable tool for promoting equity in youth diversion in Los Angeles and is a wonderful guide for anyone looking to improve equity in their own community.
Taylor Schooley is the senior research and policy manager for Los Angeles County’s Division of Youth Diversion and Development. A public health researcher by training, Taylor leads the division’s research and evaluation efforts in addition to facilitating data-driven collaborative policy planning focused on advancing health equity through youth justice transformation.