Supporting Youth in Transition to Adulthood: Lessons Learned from Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice

The Georgetown Public Policy Institute's Center for Juvenile Justice Reform and the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative collaborated to publish this paper that describes case assessment, case management, and other practices implemented in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. The practices highlighted have shown promise in improving outcomes for the transition-age population

How Human Services Programs and Their Clients Can Benefit From National Health Reform Legislation

Explains how information technology investments for Medicaid expansion also will enable state agencies to share information that expedites eligibility determination for other needs-based benefits, increases access to supports, and facilitates enrollment

Lifting the Burden of Addiction: Philanthropic Opportunities to Address Substance Use Disorders in the United States

Substance use disorders (SUDs), also known as substance abuse or addiction, affect an estimated 20 million or more adolescents and adults in the U.S. This guidance provides philanthropic funders with the tools & information to reduce immediate harm from substance use disorders and reduce the burden of the disorder over the long term. This includes reducing the damage the disorder causes to people with SUDs and their loved ones, reducing the overall incidence of SUDs, and reducing SUD-related costs to society. We present four strategies for philanthropic funders who want to help:- Save lives and reduce SUD-related illness and homelessness- Improve access to evidence-based treatment- Improve SUD care by changing systems and policies- Fund innovation to improve prevention and treatmen

Clear Consensus, Ambiguous Commitment

Americans from every demographic, socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic category identify themselves as concerned about the environment, and most say that they have personally taken steps to reduce pollution or improve environmental quality in some way. One of the most salient cultural and social signatures of the contemporary era in the United States, and throughout much of the world, has been the diffusion of a desire to protect, preserve, and restore features of the natural environment to a greater degree than current practices and policies do. These environmental concerns are not only widely shared, they have been extended to become a wide policy agenda. No longer confined to preserving national parks or eliminating the most noxious forms of smog and the most obvious kinds of water pollution, the environmental agenda has expanded to embrace the preservation of open spaces, critical habitats, wetlands, tropical rain forests, and other natural areas; the reduction of all forms of harmful pollution and emissions; and the reformation of personal habits of consumption and corporate practices of production that underlie the supply and demand of products that directly or indirectly harm the environment. Environmental implications are everywhere and they have seeped into everyone\u27s consciousness

A New Framework for Assessing the Benefits of Early Education

This working paper is among a series of papers funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts through its "Advancing Quality Pre-K for All" initiative. The paper proposes that future preschool valuations devote appropriate attention to the related potential long-term social and economic benefits by utilizing a more comprehensive analytical framework. Such an approach would provide a clearer picture of the long-term social and economic benefits of early education that can help facilitate smart, targeted investments in preschool. The framework for evaluating investments in early childhood education should include the human capital benefits accruing directly to individuals, and the additional benefits these investments provide to families, communities, and society at large. Using a broad analytical framework to value prekindergarten enumerates the different ways that individual and societal benefits may be assessed, and can be benchmarked against existing cost-benefit studies on early education. Though current cost-benefit analyses are a necessary starting point for evaluating early education programs, some of the possible longer-run benefits that are more difficult to quantify are excluded by the typical cost-benefit analysis. Without a comprehensive look at the benefits of early education, its value will remain underestimated

Alaska pretrial project proposal: organizational structure change to incorporate a mental health focus

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2018The Pretrial Enforcement Division (PED) for the Alaska Department of Corrections (DOC) came into operation on January 1, 2018. PED emerged out of senate bill ninety-one (91) in hopes to reduce incarceration population, and the overall costs of corrections to the state. In response to the new division, a closer look at how this may or may not affect the prison population with behavioral health needs is analyzed. DOC is the number one mental health provider in the state, and often individuals with behavioral health needs are incarcerated longer than those without. With the proposal of assessing all defendants prior to initial arraignment for behavioral health needs, and making referrals to identified community providers, it is hopeful that this can be mitigated. Pretrial supervision for those with identified needs will include Pretrial Enforcement Officers (PEO) to handle specialized caseloads, Crisis Intervention Training (CIT), community behavioral health services, and access to social services

The Out-Front Western Region: An Overview

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network ---- with 36 states and 61 researchers ---- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.This first "Special Analysis Report" focuses on the Western region, which has the largest number of states -- six out of thirteen -- that are affirmatively implementing the Affordable Care Act. That is, they have state-administered health insurance exchanges and have expanded Medicaid as authorized under the law. Altogether, there are eleven states in the Western region of the contiguous states, and nine of them are in our sample. This report describes the policy setting and goal alignment of all nine Western sample states, with emphasis on five states -- California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Nevada -- that are clearly out front as ACA-affirming states. New Mexico is also an affirming ACA state, although its exchange will not be state run until 2014. Arizona and Idaho occupy an "In-Between" category; that is, in between affirming and oppositional. Arizona rejected the state-run exchange option but accepted Medicaid expansion. Idaho so far has done the opposite, accepting the state-run exchange option while tabling Medicaid expansion. Utah is the one fully oppositional state in our sample, choosing in 2013 not to run its exchange or expand Medicaid