Coordinating Treatment and Community Services for High-risk, Young Adults on Community Supervision

Young adults who are justice involved present unique challenges for community supervision agencies, including high rates of recidivism and probation revocation, and low rates of treatment program completion. In response to these problems, Harris County Community Supervision and Corrections Department (HCCSCD, serving the Houston, Texas metropolitan area) created the Young Adult Caseload (YAC) in an effort to treat and supervise this group of clients (aged 17 to 25) in an evidence-based way that recognizes that such clients have a significant amount of neurological development yet to come. HCCSCD lacks sufficient resources to link YAC clients with the wide array of services they need to be successful (e.g., employment, education, health care, family services, substance abuse, transportation, and housing). To address this issue, the purpose of the proposed project is to enhance public safety and to build trust between HCCSCD (its staff and YAC clients), key members and organizations within Houston and the surrounding Harris and continuous counties, and the Harris County community at large, by treating YAC clients with respect and dignity by helping them with programming that is backed by the empirical evidence. HCCSCD proposes to: train HCCSCD staff in the HEAT curriculum (an evidence-based curriculum for justice-involved young men); hire a full-time Community Resources Coordinator whose responsibility will be to link Young Adult Caseload clients to the services they need to be successful; and leverage HCCSCD's research unit to assess and evaluate quality control in staff training, monitor the effectiveness of relationships with community/agency partnerships, and provide consistent feedback to enhance the quality of service delivery for the life of the project. Key issues and outcomes to be assessed in the project include implementation and fidelity in service delivery, intermediate outcomes (e.g., employment, housing, and changes in risk profile of clients), and recidivism (e.g., new arrests, probation revocation, incarceration). The overall goal of the proposed project is to address in meaningful ways the wide range of needs (criminogenic, personal, and contextual) that are presented by this group of young adults by providing services to them that are typically not available to young, high-risk clients who are often marginalized and under-resourced.