Reforming Juvenile Justice A Developmental Approach (2013) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix A: Costs and Benefits of Juvenile Justice Interventions
Appendix A: Costs and Benefits of Juvenile Justice Interventions
Pages 393-410
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From page 393... ...
After summarizing the basic tenets of benefit-cost analysis, this section discusses how to apply it to juvenile offender programs. The discussion mainly addresses how to measure the benefits of programs that reduce crime, because doing so is the primary methodological challenge for BCAs of juvenile justice programs.
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From page 394... ...
That is, a program's effectiveness is necessary but not sufficient for its benefits to exceed its costs. By a similar logic, programs with small impacts may pass benefit-cost tests.2 Legislators and other public officials must allocate scarce public resources among many competing uses, such as criminal justice, education, health, environmental protection, transportation, and defense.
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From page 395... ...
How can one extrapolate benefits or costs beyond the follow-up period, after a youth leaves a program, when impact data are gathered? The costs of juvenile justice programs occur mainly at the outset, although the benefits may be realized many years later.
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From page 396... ...
Evaluations may measure program outcomes with self-reports of criminal activity by juvenile offenders or as the number of arrests or convictions using criminal justice system records. The estimate is exogenous to the BCA and serves as its starting point.6 If self-reports are available and deemed reliable, for each crime j one can readily compute this term as the difference between the average number of crimes committed by untreated and treated juvenile offenders.7 BCAs typically use administrative data on arrests or convictions.
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From page 397... ...
recognized this problem in a randomized clinical trial of multisystemic therapy that collected arrest data over a 13.7 year follow-up period. They translated arrests into crimes using both a conservative estimate of one victimization per arrest and an expansive one of multiple victimizations per arrest.
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From page 398... ...
The savings in costs accrue to four groups: victims and their families, nonvictims, society, and offenders and their families. For victims and their families, the primary tangible costs of crime consist of costs not covered by private insurance, including property damage and loss, physical and mental health care costs, and earnings losses (including fringe benefits)
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From page 399... ...
A successful intervention may reduce these costs.12 If one of its effects is to increase offenders' long-term earnings, the higher direct and indirect taxes paid from those earnings are benefits to society. A comprehensive BCA measures all four types of cost savings, thereby capturing a program's benefits for all members of society.13 Decision makers in the criminal justice system will also be interested in the benefits to their agencies because their agencies bear the costs of operating juvenile justice programs.
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From page 400... ...
Other elements pose difficult challenges or have yet to be successfully measured.15 The careful, detailed, though admittedly incomplete bottom-up estimates of victim costs developed by Miller and colleagues (1996) are widely used.16 For juvenile justice programs that pass a benefitcost test, the bottom-up savings in victim costs per treated offender are at least double the savings in costs to society (Drake, Aos, and Miller, 2009)
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From page 401... ...
. Because of these and other shortcomings, the property value approach has fallen out of favor for BCAs of criminal justice interventions.20,21 17 See Bateman and colleagues (2002)
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From page 402... ...
, such as multi systemic therapy, multidimensional treatment foster care, and functional family therapy. They also include other interventions that WSIPP judges to be effective, such as drug courts, as well as interventions shown to be ineffective, such as Scared Straight and juvenile intensive probation supervision.
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From page 403... ...
Boot camp programs do not reduce crime, but because they cost less than placing offenders in an institution, they also pass a benefit-cost test when the baseline is institutionalization. For juvenile offenders in group or foster homes, multidimensional treatment foster care's benefits exceed its costs by $33,000.
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From page 404... ...
Costs Ratio Costs Institution Aggression replacement therapyc $66,954 $1,473 $65,481 45.5 .93 Functional family therapyc 60,639 3,198 57,341 19.0 .99 Family integrated transitionsc 27,020 10,968 16,052 2.5 .86 Sex offender treatmentb 60,477 35,592 24,885 1.7 n/a Boot campb 0 –8,661 8,661 n/a n/a Wilderness challengeb 0 3,350 –3,350 n/a n/a Group or Multidimensional treatment 40,787 7,739 33,047 5.3 n/a Foster Home foster carec Parole Regular surveillance oriented 0 1,301 –1,301 n/a n/a parole (versus no parole supervision) b Intensive parole supervisionb 0 7,015 –7,015 n/a n/a Probation Aggression replacement therapyc 36,043 1,476 34,566 24.4 .93 Functional family therapyc 37,739 3,190 34,549 11.9 .99 Multisystemic therapyc 29,302 7,206 22,096 4.1 .91 Intensive probation supervisionb 0 1,735 –1,735 n/a n/a
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From page 405... ...
. cAdapted from Washington State Institute for Public Policy (2011)
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From page 406... ...
However, bottom-line estimates of total benefits and costs have a degree of uncertainty, because estimates of some of the underlying parameters needed to conduct a BCA are themselves uncertain.23 WSIPP's (2011) recent analyses take this uncertainty into account using Monte Carlo methods, which provide an estimate of the probability that benefits will exceed costs when parameters values are systematically varied.24 The Monte Carlo results in the last column of Table A-1 imply that one can be highly confident that aggression replacement therapy, family integrated transitions, functional family therapy, multisystemic therapy, and victim offender mediation are successful programs from a benefit-cost perspective.
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From page 407... ...
Building on its methodological innovations, WSIPP is currently developing a tool that other jurisdictions can use to derive benefit-cost estimates of criminal justice programs (Aos and Drake, 2010)
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From page 408... ...
Because program evaluations have not measured this "second round" impact on crime, BCAs cannot include its benefits.27 Recognizing these reasons why benefits are understated further strengthens our earlier conclusion: states and localities can choose from a portfolio of programs for juvenile offenders that, if implemented well, can reduce crime and produce extraordinarily large economic returns. As noted above, bottom-line estimates of total benefits and costs have a degree of uncertainty.
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From page 409... ...
The WSIPP model under development (Aos and Drake, 2010) , which will have the capacity to execute Monte Carlo simulations, will substantially improve BCAs of criminal justice programs.
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