This evaluation report presents an examination of the Detention Diversion Advocacy Program’s effectiveness at reducing juvenile recidivism.
This report examines the Detention Diversion Advocacy Program (DDAP), which is a juvenile diversion program in San Francisco that has the goal of diverting youth who have been charged with serious offenses and are either in juvenile detention or likely to be held for detention. The report documents a study to evaluate DDAP’s impact on juvenile recidivism; it provides a brief history of DDAP, a literature review of juvenile diversion programs, and discusses the risk of net-widening. The report provides details of the evaluation design, DDAP client data, and recidivism analysis findings including binary recidivism, binary felony recidivism, and number of post-intervention/non-intervention referrals. Key findings indicate that DDAP participants had a lower likelihood of any subsequent justice referrals and of any subsequent felony referrals, as compared with similarly-situated non-DDAP-served youth. The data also demonstrate that the DDAP group had lower cumulative justice and felony referrals post-intervention/non-intervention, and they support the viability of pre-adjudication diversion for high-risk youth facing serious charges.