Section 3: Routine Assessment and Self-Evaluation

This section will help you understand the type of routine assessment and evaluations your agency should conduct to support your ongoing TJC initiative. You will also learn the steps needed to plan your evaluations.

What Is Routine Assessment?

Routine assessment is the process of regularly gathering, analyzing, and interpreting your data to help you and your partnering agencies improve and revise the TJC initiative and its components. An important aim is to use your data to answer key questions about your jail transition processes – e.g., who are you serving, what are the criminogenic risks and needs of those individuals, what programs and interventions are these individuals receiving and do these programs meet their identified criminogenic needs? – and to modify and strengthen the application of the TJC model in your community based on the answer to those questions. A quality assurance process uses similar data but goes beyond data analysis to include assessment of how services and programming are delivered and may also include client satisfaction measures

Here is how to begin:

Convene your TJC’s coordinating reentry council to determine the key outcomes that are of interest to partners and potential funders to show progress in achieving the TJC initiative.
Form a specific data or evaluation working group.
Jointly produce a theory of change model. This process will highlight the overall model outcomes, including immediate, intermediate, and long-term outcomes.
Develop a data collection procedure based on your consensus outcomes, ideally with different agencies helping with the data collection and analysis.
Analyze the data to answer agreed upon research questions designed to evaluate important outcomes identified by the coordinating reentry council.
Have reentry council members interpret analyses and results.
Disseminate the findings to stakeholders on a regular basis.

Feedback

We encourage you to establish mechanisms—such as forums, focus groups, routine reports from partner agencies and client satisfaction surveys—to obtain early and frequent feedback from partners and constituents.

Think of feedback as having the following components:¹

Data are used to objectively examine the TJC initiative, focusing on the model at the system and individual level.
Structured meetings are held to review the data and increase collaboration among the partners.
Use the analysis to make decisions and ensure that the TJC initiative is being implemented as expected and is improving.
Repeat the process on a routine basis.

Assessment and Evaluation Capacity

The TJC initiative recommends that at least one partnering agency has the capacity to plan and implement routine assessments and evaluations of the initiative. This agency will utilize this capacity to advance the overarching goals of TJC and will feedback its results regularly to stakeholder decision makers to inform decision making, organizational reorientation, and resource allocation. Building your internal capacities to make evaluation part of your agency, instead of using outside consultants or evaluators to analyze your TJC initiative, is important because it

Increases responsibility for competent data management and collection by the partnering agencies.
Decreases the likelihood that the TJC initiative and its outcomes will be opposed.
Influences organizational culture to accept data findings and resultant changes in policy or practice.
Teaches agencies to improve their TJC initiative without relying on outside help.
Allows for a system to make educated and targeted decisions on where they would like to allocate their resources.
Builds the necessary resources to sustain long-term assessment and evaluation.

In Jacksonville, Florida, the Sheriff’s Department analyzes risk screen scores to identify candidates for pretrial risk assessment and for risk and criminogenic needs assessment. After reviewing the data, Jacksonville changed their procedures and began releasing inmates to pretrial servies with risk screen scores below certain cutoffs.

However, if you don’t have in-house research staff, you may want to partner with local research organizations or academic institution to help you with your evaluations.

Field notes from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

Urban Institute researchers recently evaluated two Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Second Chance Act-funded reentry programs. Both programs use core correctional practices such as risk/needs assessment, coordinated reentry planning, and evidence-based programs and practices to reduce recidivism; one connects clients to a reentry case manager pre-and post-release (Reentry program 1), the other to a reentry probation officer (Reentry program 2). The evaluation found that both reentry programs reduced rearrest among participants and prolonged time to rearrest. These findings are supported by ample evidence of implementation fidelity. For example, both programs consistently targeted moderate-to high-risk inmates, conducted assessments, used coordinated case planning, and linked clients to EBPs including cognitive behavioral interventions.²Read the full report at http://www.urban.org/sites/ default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/413252-Evaluation-of-the-Allegheny-County-Jail-Collaborative-Reentry-Programs.PDF.

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¹ Miles, Mathew, Harvey Hornstein, Daniel Callahan, Paula Calder, and R. Steven Schiavo. 1969. “The Consequences of Survey Feedback: Theory and Evaluation.” In The Planning of Change, edited by Warren Bennis, Kenneth D. Benne, and Robert Chin (457–68). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

² Buck Willison, Janeen, Sam G. Bieler, Kideuk Kim. 2014. “Evaluation of the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative Reentry Programs.” Washington, DC: Urban Institute.