Describing and Evaluating Juvenile Offender Programming

Abstract

Chapter 4 provided an outline of the major decision areas encountered in juvenile justice systems and the alternative courses of action commonly associated with those decisions. This chapter provides a more detailed overview of the range of sanction and program options available in these systems. It also presents an introduction to the methodology of program evaluation and a summary of comparative evaluations of alternative approaches to juvenile offender programming. The latter involve narrative and meta-analytic comparisons of the efficacy of different forms of programming. The discussion of these issues is designed as an introduction to the description of specific programs in succeeding chapters.