Title II, Part B, of the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) sets out detailed requirements that a state must satisfy in order to be eligible to receive funding under the JJDPA’s Formula Grants Program, including the submission of a state plan that satisfies statutory requirements. The Formula Grants program supports state and local delinquency prevention and intervention efforts and juvenile justice system improvements by providing funding to help implement comprehensive juvenile justice plans based on the needs in those jurisdictions. Through the Formula Grants program, states can provide job training, mental health and substance abuse treatment, community-based programs and services, reentry/aftercare services, and school programs to prevent truancy. The purpose of this annotated manual is twofold. First, it is to inform states about the core requirements a state must address under the JJDPA, and what the JJDPA requires states to include in a state compliance monitoring manual. Second, this annotated manual is designed to give states an example of how a state should demonstrate compliance with the core requirements and how a state should structure its compliance monitoring manual.

Bruises are one of the most common injuries observed on victims of violent crime, such as victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. However, bruises can be difficult for forensic nurse examiners to detect, particularly on victims with darker skin tones. An inaccurate documentation of injuries can be detrimental to the victim’s legal case against their attacker as well as to the victim’s medical treatment. This report investigates whether or not an alternate light source is more useful for detecting and visualizing bruises than standard white light. An alternate light source can be used to identify physiological evidence, including bruises, biological fluids, and hair, and physical evidence, such as fibers and other trace materials, through fluorescence by using specific wavelengths of light. Researchers reported that they were five times more likely to detect a bruise on study participants with an alternate light source than with white light.

The federal Bureau of Prison's (BOP) is responsible not only for the supervision and custody of more than 157,000 federal inmates, but also for their health care, safety, and rehabilitation. The COVID-19 pandemic has strained BOP's institutions, yet BOP's obligation to provide inmates with programs to advance their education and development remains. Further, BOP has ongoing challenges with leadership instability and staff shortages. In response, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) raised federal prison management as an emerging issue on its High-Risk List. The BOP developed two questions on its annual feedback survey to BOP staff about its COVID-19 guidance and deployed the survey in December 2021. This is a promising step; however, the recommendation remains only partially addressed, as BOP still needs to review and assess staff feedback to determine whether modifications to its guidance are needed. The GAO will continue to monitor BOP's efforts. In addition, BOP has processes, such as teleconferences among BOP officials and facility inspections, to identify best practices and lessons learned related to BOP's COVID-19 response. However, BOP does not capture or share, bureau-wide, the lessons and practices discussed at its teleconferences, or have an approach for ensuring that facilities apply them, as appropriate. In response, GAO recommended that BOP develop and implement an approach to (1) capture and share best practices and lessons learned for responding to COVID-19 and future public health emergencies; and (2) ensure its facilities are applying, as appropriate, these best practices and lessons learned. The First Step Act (FSA) requires the U.S. Attorney General, in consultation with an Independent Review Committee, to develop and release publicly on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) website a risk and needs assessment system. GAO is currently reviewing DOJ's and BOP's implementation of certain FSA requirements related to the risk and needs assessment and has a number of audit steps planned.

The U.S. Department of Justice's pattern-or-practice police reform program has been an unprecedented event in American policing, intervening in local and state law enforcement agencies as never before and requiring a sweeping package of reforms. The program has reached reform settlements with forty agencies, including twenty with judicially enforced consent decrees. Academic research on the program, however, has been fairly modest. Social scientists have largely focused on a few selected issues. There is no study of the full impact of the program on one agency, and there is no comprehensive study of the impact of the program as a whole. Evaluations of individual agencies have been generally favorable, although with backsliding in some agencies. This review argues that the combination of several major goals and the various elements of specific consent decree reforms has created a web of accountability that is unmatched by any previous police reform effort.

This report reviews (1) the extent to which school districts that received key federal disaster recovery grants served students from selected socially vulnerable groups, (2) the recovery experiences of selected K-12 school districts in socially vulnerable communities, and (3) the extent to which the U.S. Department of Education's Restart program supports school disaster recovery. Most school districts that received key federal disaster recovery grants following 2017-2019 presidentially-declared major disasters had elevated proportions of students from certain socially vulnerable groups, according to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) analysis of federal data. Research shows that socially vulnerable groups—including children who are low income, minorities, English learners, or living with disabilities—are particularly susceptible to the adverse effects of disasters. School districts serving high proportions of children in these groups may need more recovery assistance compared to districts with less vulnerable student populations. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Public Assistance program and the U.S. Department of Education's Immediate Aid to Restart School Operations (Restart) program may provide such assistance. The authors found that 57% of school districts receiving these key grants for 2017-2019 disasters served a higher than average proportion of students in two or more of these socially vulnerable groups, compared to 38% of all school districts nationwide. Officials from five selected school districts in socially vulnerable communities described heightened challenges recovering from recent natural disasters. These challenges generally fell into four areas of recovery: emotional, academic, financial, and physical. For instance, officials said the disasters caused significant emotional trauma to students due to stressors including extended housing instability, food insecurity, parental job loss, and social disconnection. To address these needs, districts worked to obtain additional mental health and support services. But officials cited frequent challenges in doing so. For instance, officials in two rural districts said their communities lacked sufficient qualified mental health providers.

High schools play a crucial role in helping students plan for and transition to postsecondary education and career pathways. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, supporting all students in their transition to life after high school remains important for postsecondary success. Resources, such as school counselors and advising technologies, can affect students' postsecondary choices. Differences in access to supports in high school contribute to significant variation in student access to postsecondary opportunities; high school students experiencing poverty and students in minoritized racial/ethnic groups generally experience the largest barriers to such access. Emerging evidence suggests that high school students' postsecondary aspirations and their engagement with school counselors have changed during the pandemic. In this Data Note, the authors compare nationally representative survey response data from the 2020 and 2021 Learn Together Surveys to examine differences in how high school teachers and principals provided supports to students for successful postsecondary transitions before and during the first year of the pandemic. The authors find that access to supports for postsecondary transitions was unevenly distributed across student groups. High-achieving students reportedly had the most access to such supports, while underachieving students and those who did not ask for these supports had the least access to them. Additionally, high school teachers reported providing fewer students with college and career readiness supports one year into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community colleges are mission-driven institutions committed to access and community needs. They serve diverse populations. The majority of students are employed, so they have to balance work with school; about one-third are first-generation, so they are navigating an unfamiliar system for the first time in their families; and 15% are single parents, juggling child care along with course load. With this understanding that students are people with complex needs and responsibilities, community colleges are innovating in the ways they are delivering wraparound supports — sometimes referred to as basic needs supports — that address non-academic barriers to college success. Common examples of wraparound supports are mental health supports and services, emergency funds and stipends, and housing and food assistance. Enhanced wraparound supports can lead to higher rates of retention and completion for students. This report explores supports offered by individual institutions, as well as broader and coordinated approaches that encompass states or entire systems. It cites examples from current state legislation and programs that support these efforts. Highlighted state examples are from Illinois, Minnesota, California, Arkansas, and North Carolina.

Some advocates have called to forgive student loans because student loans contribute to racial and socioeconomic wealth gaps. The usual measures of financial wealth, however, is a misleading indicator of the economic status of student loan borrowers. Medical school graduates typically owe six-figure student loans but that doesn’t mean they are poorer than high-school graduates who did not go to college. Wealth, properly measured, should include the value of educational investments students borrowed to make. Measured appropriately, student debt is concentrated among high-wealth households and loan forgiveness is regressive whether measured by income, educational attainment, or wealth. Across-the-board forgiveness is therefore a costly and ineffective way to reduce economic gaps by race or socioeconomic status. Only targeted policies, such as income-based repayment plans, can address the inequities caused by federal student lending programs.

A vast amount of Florida’s built environment, including residential, business, and transportation, relies on concrete. The concrete industry in Florida and in the U.S. is presently facing two major challenges: the rising cost of cement and a shortage of fly ash, which is used in the concrete mixture. These challenges are the impetus for efforts to develop concrete formulations that require less portland cement and to discover and develop new supplementary cementitious materials. Portland cement is the basic ingredient of concrete, which is formed when portland cement creates a paste with water that binds with sand and rock to harden. In this project, the researchers studied the technical properties of promising concrete designs from their previous work. Results showed that the partial replacement of portland cement with limestone offered similar properties as portland cement when used in concrete. The new formulation reduced temperature of hydration, which implies lower cracking potential. Optimized aggregate gradation has potential to improve workability and to reduce temperature of hydration of fresh concrete. A benefit-cost analysis showed a potentially substantial reduction in materials cost and carbon dioxide emission of using reduced cementitious paste content in concrete. Based on the results of this project, the researchers recommended a mix design method to achieve concrete with a minimum paste volume. This method can help prevent over-design with excess cementitious content. Minimizing the paste volume and optimizing aggregate gradation in the designed mix can provide better workability, quality, and durability of the concrete – an additional long-term benefit of the new mix designs.

How we define rural affects how we design and execute the study, as well as what the findings mean and how they can be applied to policy and practice. This brief explains how this study defines rural counties and specific regions along with some key limitations to these definitions. The study examines several human services programs administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood; Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting; Health Profession Opportunity Grants; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as well as programs on early childhood development, family development, employment, and higher education and technical training. In addition to the non-metropolitan county designation defined by the federal Office of Management and Budget, the authors use the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural-Urban Continuum Codes to categorize non-metropolitan counties across two additional aspects of rural communities: the size of their urban population and whether it is adjacent to one or more metropolitan areas. To fully reflect the diversity of rural communities—including their distinct histories, cultures, and economic contexts—this study ensures key rural regions are represented in data collection and analyzed fully, including the U.S. Census Regions (Midwest, Northeast, South, and West) and four rural regions commonly defined in federal programs (Appalachia, Colonias, Delta, and Native Lands). Through categorizing rural counties into six distinct groups and multiple regions, the authors generated a range of rural contexts where human services programs operate that allows us to collect and analyze data.

Perinatal mortality (late fetal deaths at 28 completed weeks of gestation or more and early neonatal deaths under age 7 days) can be an indicator of the quality of health care before, during, and after delivery, and of the health status of the nation. The U.S. perinatal mortality rate declined 30% from 1990 to 2011, but was stable from 2011 through 2016. This report presents trends in perinatal mortality as well as its components, late fetal and early neonatal mortality, for 2017 through 2019. Also included are perinatal mortality trends by mother’s age, race and Hispanic origin, and state for 2017–2019. Key findings include that the U.S. perinatal mortality rate declined by 4% from 2017 to 2019, to 5.69 perinatal deaths per 1,000 live births and late fetal deaths in 2019. Late fetal and early neonatal mortality, the two components of perinatal mortality, each declined by 4% from 2017 through 2019. Perinatal mortality rates declined by 4% to 5% for the three largest race and Hispanic-origin groups (non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic White, and Hispanic women) for 2017 through 2019. The perinatal mortality rate declined by 10% for women under age 20, from 7.61 in 2017 to 6.86 in 2019; declines for other age groups were not significant. And compared with 2017, perinatal mortality rates declined in 3 states and were essentially unchanged for 47 states and the District of Columbia in 2019.

Psychiatric beds are essential infrastructure for meeting the needs of individuals with mental health conditions. However, not all psychiatric beds are alike: They represent infrastructure within different types of facilities, ranging from acute psychiatric hospitals to community residential facilities. These facilities, in turn, serve clients with different needs: some who have high-acuity, short-term needs and others who have chronic, longer-term needs and may return multiple times for care. California, much like many parts of the United States, is confronting a shortage of psychiatric beds. In this report, the authors estimated California's psychiatric bed capacity, need, and shortages for adults at each of three levels of care: acute, subacute, and community residential care. They used multiple methods for assessing bed capacity and need in order to overcome limitations to any single method of estimating the potential psychiatric bed shortfall. The authors identified statewide shortfalls in beds at all levels of inpatient and residential care. They also documented regional differences in the shortfall and identified special populations that contributed to bottlenecks in the continuum of inpatient and residential care in the state. Key findings from the report include that California faces an estimated 1.7% growth in its psychiatric bed need from 2021 to 2026. Synthesizing findings for bed capacity and bed need, the authors estimated that the state has a shortfall of approximately 1,971 beds at the acute level (6.4 additional beds required per 100,000 adults) and a shortage of 2,796 beds at the subacute level (9.1 additional beds required per 100,000 adults) or 4,767 subacute and acute beds combined, excluding state hospital beds. Separately, the state faces an estimated shortage of 2,963 community residential beds. A majority of psychiatric facilities at all levels of care reported an inability to place individuals with comorbid dementia or traumatic brain injury, non-ambulatory individuals, those requiring oxygen, and those who tested positive for COVID-19. Individuals involved in the criminal justice system—particularly those with arson or sex offense convictions—were reportedly difficult to place in community residential settings.

Most children in the United States will spend at least part of their childhood living apart from one of their parents; the child support system is designed to ensure that they nonetheless receive financial support. While the system is largely effective when noncustodial parents have substantial regular earnings, many noncustodial parents, including a disproportionate share of those whose children live in poverty, have limited earnings and ability to pay child support. The system's response to nonpayment is primarily sticks, that is, threats and punishments. Non-experimental evaluations of alternative approaches have shown promise. The National Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED), a large-scale random-assignment evaluation enrolling more than 10,000 noncustodial parents across 18 locations in eight states, was designed to test the effectiveness of an alternative approach—adjusting child support orders, reducing punitive enforcement, and offering employment and parenting services. This study found that CSPED, using carrots in place of sticks, substantially increased the satisfaction of noncustodial parents with child support services, lowered the amount of support owed, and increased noncustodial parents’ sense of responsibility for their children. However, CSPED had limited to no effects on child support compliance, child support payments, or employment outcomes.