Youth Criminal Legal Reform

YOUTH WELLNESS ZONES

The Youth Wellness Zone initiative is a place-based, collective-impact approach to create meaningful, positive change in youth mental wellness in Washington state. “Zones,” hyperlocal geographic regions, utilize community expertise and engagement to identify needs and create change in built and social environments, service entities, and local policies. These zones specifically engage young people in their communities in defining wellness, identifying areas for improvement, and actioning place-based innovation to directly and indirectly improve individual youth mental wellbeing. Learn more here.

hOUSING STABILITY FOR YOUTH (H-SYNC)

H-SYNC is a prevention tool for youth homelessness developed by the CoLab team in collaboration with workgroups in Snohomish and Kitsap Counties. The model uses routine practices already embedded in court systems to automatically identify and refer youth and families to needed prevention/intervention services. Learn more here.

aCCELERATING RESEARCH USE IN COURTS (ARC)

With growing calls for justice systems, especially juvenile justice systems, to integrate developmental and behavioral health science within all aspects of the justice process, it is critical to develop a standardized measure of how individuals use research evidence within these systems. With ARC, CoLab developed and tested a new tool for measuring the use of research evidence in a sample of juvenile court leaders across multiple states. Learn more here.

OPPORTUNITY BASED PROBATION (OBP)

CoLab partners with Pierce County to facilitate the implementation and preliminary analysis of the OBP program, wherein youth create meaningful goals and incentives that reward prosocial behavior.

rEDESIGNING DATA TO REDUCE DISPARITIES

UW CoLab collaborated with the Washington State Partnership Council on Juvenile Justice (WA-PCJJ) and the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) to assess how to invest in better development, distribution, and use of data pertaining to disparities in juvenile arrest and referral in Washington State by county, and where available, city. We investigated how to make this data user-focused and how to present and share information in a manner that supports local decision-making. Learn more here.