Effects of Functional Family Parole on Re-Arrest and Employment for Youth in Washington State

• NCJ Number: 306738
• Date Published: October 2011
• Author(s): Barbara A. Lucenko; Lijian He; David Mancuso; Barbara Felver
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation

Annotation

This paper summarizes an outcome evaluation which looked at re-arrests and employment after participation in a new model of juvenile parole services used by the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration in Washington State.

Abstract

The authors of this paper present the results of an outcome evaluation to determine a new model of parole’s effectiveness in reaching the program’s outcome goals. The model, called Functional Family Parole (FFP), is intended to make families the unit of intervention and uses family-based therapy approaches to enhance case management outcomes. Results show that FFP-group youth were less likely to be arrested and had fewer total arrests during the nine months following release than those released later without parole; they were also more likely to be employed, and earned more on average during the year following release than those released without parole. FFP-youth were also 48 percent less likely to be re-arrested than those released later without parole. In the technical appendix, the authors also discuss the methodology of the study, which used a natural experiment using propensity score matching with regression models.