State Court Improvement Program (Child Protection) - Current Projects

Crossover Youth

State Court Improvement Program sponsored a multi-disciplinary team consisting of members from three state agencies to participate in Georgetown University’s Crossover Youth Fellowship at the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR). Following the program, the team has been working on various reform efforts to better serve crossover youth who are dually involved in our juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

The project has initially focused on identifying the prevalence of crossover youth in Connecticut because this data was not readily available and national trends reflect that approximately 40% of children involved in the juvenile courts are crossover youth.

The Judicial Branch and the Department of Children and Families entered into a legal agreement to match data for the birth year cohort of this study across the three large automated systems in these agencies that contain juvenile justice and child welfare data. The matched datasets are being provided to our contracted researcher, the Center for Applied Research at the University of Connecticut for data analysis. Following the completion of the study, the team will work with the UCONN researchers to provide recommendations to the juvenile justice and child welfare communities regarding promising best practices and strategies to improve outcomes for crossover youth.

Crossover Youth Study Results