Group items tagged

The Smart Defense Initiative, administered by BJA, is part of BJA's "Smart Suite" of criminal justice programs including Smart Pretrial, Smart Policing, Smart Supervision, and Smart Prosecution. BJA established the Smart Suite over 5 years ago with the creation of the Smart Policing Initiative. The Smart Suite supports criminal justice professionals in building evidencebased, data-driven criminal justice strategies that are effective, efficient, and economical. BJA's smart programs represent a strategic approach that brings more "science" into criminal justice operations by leveraging innovative applications of analysis, technology, and evidence-based practices. In many states, the public defense delivery system is in crisis, with too many defendants lacking access to quality advice and representation. In addition to being a matter of constitutional concern, this void can contribute to over-incarceration, reduced confidence in the justice system, and other inequities. Without quality effective representation, a defendant may not be treated fairly, may not understand the process, and may not get the benefit of available alternatives to incarceration for first-time or low-level offenses. Additionally, ifthese issues are not addressed, victims are ill-served and the criminal justice system's shared goals of justice and public safety go unmet. To help jurisdictions strengthen state and local public defense delivery systems, BJA is releasing this competitive grant announcement. Under Smart Defense, BJA is seeking applicants who are interested in developing innovative, data-driven approaches to improve their public defense delivery systems guided by the Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System. This program is funded under the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014 (Pub. L. No. 113-76).

ection 101 of the Second Chance Act authorizes the Department of Justice to award grants to counties and states to improve reentry outcomes for incarcerated youth. The Second Chance Act Program supports counties and states in refining and implementing improved collaborative strategies to address the challenges that reentry and recidivism reduction pose. Implementing a cooperative and wide-ranging plan for reducing recidivism is challenging for even the most sophisticated juvenile justice agencies and requires an intensive systemwide realignment to address gaps in programs and services to improve outcomes for youth in contact with the juvenile justice system. This program will provide grants to support counties and states that have developed a recidivism reduction plan to better align juvenile justice policy, practice, and resource allocation with what research shows works to reduce recidivism and improve outcomes for youth in contact with the juvenile justice system. OJJDP expects that a committee, task force, or working group will designate an agency to act as the legal applicant for this grant program. This solicitation will support counties and states that illustrate their readiness to implement a planning strategy developed and coordinated among multiple systems, to track implementation progress, and to show progress toward sustainable changes.

BJA, in a public/private partnership with The Pew Charitable Trusts, launched the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) in 2010 as a multistaged process in which a jurisdiction reduces unnecessary incarceration, increases the cost-effectiveness of its criminal justice system and reinvests savings into high-performing public safety strategies.  JRI jurisdictions reinvest these cost savings into high-performing initiatives that make communities safer. In addition to reducing prison populations, justice reinvestment encourages states to embrace a culture of greater collaboration, data-driven decisionmaking, and increased use of evidence-based practices. While the full impact of justice reinvestment reforms is not yet known, the policies enacted in JRI states hold great promise to reduce prison populations, achieve substantial cost savings, and avert future growth.  However, many of the states found similar factors driving populations and costs for example, parole and probation revocation rates; sentencing policies and practices that favored incarceration of low-risk offenders over alternatives and that resulted in long lengths of stay; insufficient or inefficient community supervision, services, and support; and parole system processing delays and denials. The policy responses to these issues also overlapped, sharing themes of evidence-based practices and data-driven decisionmaking, including risk and needs assessments; accountability measures such as performance and outcome measure reporting; earned credits to encourage compliance with conditions of community supervision; sentencing changes; swift, certain and fair responses to technical probation and parole violations, mandatory post-incarceration supervision requirements; problem-solving courts; streamlined parole processes and expanded parole eligibility; and re-entry programs to reduce recidivism.

BJA, in a public/private partnership with The Pew Charitable Trusts, launched the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) in 2010 as a multistaged process in which a jurisdiction reduces unnecessary incarceration, increases the cost-effectiveness of its criminal justice system and reinvests savings into high-performing public safety strategies.  JRI jurisdictions reinvest these cost savings into high-performing initiatives that make communities safer. In addition to reducing prison populations, justice reinvestment encourages states to embrace a culture of greater collaboration, data-driven decisionmaking, and increased use of evidence-based practices. While the full impact of justice reinvestment reforms is not yet known, the policies enacted in JRI states hold great promise to reduce prison populations, achieve substantial cost savings, and avert future growth.  However, many of the states found similar factors driving populations and costs for example, parole and probation revocation rates; sentencing policies and practices that favored incarceration of low-risk offenders over alternatives and that resulted in long lengths of stay; insufficient or inefficient community supervision, services, and support; and parole system processing delays and denials. The policy responses to these issues also overlapped, sharing themes of evidence-based practices and data-driven decisionmaking, including risk and needs assessments; accountability measures such as performance and outcome measure reporting; earned credits to encourage compliance with conditions of community supervision; sentencing changes; swift, certain and fair responses to technical probation and parole violations, mandatory post-incarceration supervision requirements; problem-solving courts; streamlined parole processes and expanded parole eligibility; and re-entry programs to reduce recidivism.

OJJDP seeks to award funding for assessing the effectiveness and/or cost efficiency of juvenile justice system reforms defined as systemic policy or practice changes within a locality or state that impact one or more segments of the juvenile justice system.

The Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau announces the availability of one grant to: (1) implement a multi-system approach among public and private agencies integrating community and faith-based to promote effective partnerships; (2) develop or enhance a navigator program to meet caregivers own needs and the needs of the children they are raising; (3) utilize intensive family-finding activities, including search technology, effective family engagement, collaboration with child support, and other means to identify biological family members for the target population to create a greater volume of relationships and connectedness within their families and establish permanent family placements when appropriate; and (4) implement family group decision-making (FGDM) meetings for children in the child welfare system. The project funded under this announcement will be implemented through strong collaboration between the grantee and the public child welfare agency. The successful applicant will facilitate cross collaboration and data sharing among relevant agencies, including the courts, child welfare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), aging and family caregiver support programs, child support, fatherhood programs, education, domestic violence, mental health and substance abuse in order to better identify, assess, and service kinship caregivers and at-risk families within the child welfare system.

Through this solicitation, NIJ will provide small planning grants to develop proposals for new and innovative criminal justice research projects involving federally recognized tribes (or tribally based organizations) and which represent a new tribal-researcher investigator partnership. The following research topics are of particular interest to the U.S. Department of Justice: (1) The impact of concurrent criminal jurisdiction on the administration of justice in Indian country and Alaska; (2) The effectiveness of the criminal justice response to the use and abuse of alcohol and other drugs [e.g., methamphetamine, heroin and other opioids including fentanyl, diverted pharmaceuticals, synthetic drugs, and analogues); (3) Crime prevention and intervention efforts; (4) Criminal offending; (5) Enhancing investigations and prosecutions; (6) Provision, role, and impact of forensic science services (including medico legal death investigation); (7) Murdered, missing, and trafficked women and girls; (8) Violent crime reduction; (9) Responding to and reducing victimization; (10) Strengthening tribal justice systems (e.g., evaluating tribal healing to wellness courts tribal-state collaborations, wellness court collaborations, technology-based court systems to improve court operations and outcomes, tribal-reentry programs); (11) Developing and testing tools and technologies to improve criminal justice policy and practice (e.g., unmanned aircraft systems, body-worn cameras, drug-detecting technology, location-based technology, digital devices or applications, victim technology-based services)

The State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) has been working with the Government of the Republic of Tunisia to enhance the capacity of Tunisia's criminal justice system since 2011. This includes efforts to improve the capacity of civilian law enforcement to provide citizen security; improve the capacity of the corrections system to provide safe, secure, and humane treatment of inmates; and improve the capacity of the justice sector to provide access to justice and maintain the rule of law throughout the country. The goal of INL's corrections reform project is to enhance the performance and capacity of Tunisia's corrections institutions. This includes the development of a professional and sustainable corrections system that provides humane, safe, and secure imprisonment.

Lebanon's current court archiving system is insufficient to meet the demands of the caseload of the justice sector. The goal is to support the Lebanese judicial system to establish and use a legal archival system for paper and electronic cases in order to process cases more efficiently and effectively and to have the ability to retrieve past court proceeding files. As part of this project, the implementer will train file attendants/court clerks (those responsible for this process) on proper filing conventions, document preservation, tracking of files released/returned (including tracking the individual documents contained in each file to ensure files are whole upon return) and other areas related to paper and electronic file maintenance identified as-needed.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) seeks an applicant to conduct the collection, analysis, and dissemination activities for the Annual Surveys of Probation and Parole (ASPP) for the collection years 2020 through 2024. The current funding is for the first 3 years of the award; the final 2 years will be funded upon successful completion of 2020-2022 data. The ASPP are two separate data collections, independently referred to as the Annual Probation Survey and Annual Parole Survey. Since 1980, the ASPP have collected aggregate data on the number of persons supervised on probation or parole (i.e., post-custody community supervision), together referred to as the community supervision population. The ASPP obtain aggregated data from administrative records maintained by state probation and/or parole agencies; local agencies (municipal, county, or court); and the federal system. The ASPP are core BJS data collections and are the only national data collections that describe the size, change, movements, outcomes, and characteristics of the community supervision populations at the national, federal, and state levels. Together with data from the National Prisoner Statistics (NPS) Program, which collects counts of persons incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and data from the Annual Survey of Jails, which collects counts of persons held in local jails, ASPP data are used to estimate the total number of persons supervised by the adult correctional systems in the United States. Collectively, these data collections are also critical for tracking the level and change in the correctional populations over time and enhancing the understanding of the flow of offenders through and eventually out of the criminal justice system.

The justice system is an important target for HIV prevention and treatment, as an estimated 25% of all people living with HIV will pass through the justice system each year. As well, a high proportion of people with opioid use disorder (OUD) and people who inject drugs (PWID) pass through the justice system each year. OUD and injection drug use elevate HIV risk. Community re-entry from incarceration is a time of heightened risk for substance use relapse, opioid-related mortality, HIV risk behaviors, and discontinuation of HIV treatment. Justice involved people who have HIV, or who are at elevated risk for HIV, should have the opportunity to receive evidence-based HIV services appropriate to their level of risk. These include screening, initiation on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) or highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), and engagement in related substance use disorder treatment services. HIV treatment-as-prevention can help reach the goal of ending the HIV epidemic in the United States. This initiative aligns with the NIH-OAR priority of reducing the incidence of HIV, and with the President's objective to End the HIV Epidemic by 2030.

The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), U.S. Department of Labor announces the availability of approximately $4 million total costs for up to two cooperative agreements of up to $2 million total costs each to fund technical assistance project(s) in two different countries to improve implementation of social compliance systems that promote acceptable conditions of work and the elimination of child labor and forced labor in coffee supply chains. Each cooperative agreement will fund a project in one of the following countries in the Latin America/Caribbean region, where DOL's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor (TVPRA List) documents child labor and/or forced labor concerns: Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or Nicaragua. Project outcomes include: 1) Adoption of a robust and sustainable social compliance system by private sector stakeholders in coffee supply chains; 2) Strengthened capacity of private sector stakeholders to implement a robust and sustainable social compliance system in coffee supply chains; and 3) New social compliance tools on child labor, forced labor, and acceptable conditions of work piloted in the coffee supply chain. The duration of the project will be a maximum of 4 years (48 months) from the effective date of the award. Applicants may apply for one or two of the cooperative agreements listed above. No more than two applications per applicant will be accepted. If applying for two cooperative agreements, applicants should not combine countries in a single application, but must submit separate applications for each country. Each application should request no more than $2 million total costs in funding.

OJJDP envisions a nation where our children are healthy, educated, and free from violence. If they come into contact with the juvenile justice system, that contact should be rare, fair, and beneficial to them. OJJDP supports states and communities in their efforts to develop and implement effective and coordinated prevention and intervention programs and to improve the juvenile justice system so that it protects public safety, holds justice-involved youth appropriately accountable, and provides treatment and rehabilitative services tailored to the needs of youth and their families. This program will assist OJJDP in coordination and assessment of its juvenile justice reform programs.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) seeks to enhance the ability of the juvenile justice, child welfare, mental health, and education systems to share information that will facilitate the provision of services and ensure better outcomes for children, youth, and families. OJJDP will deliver training and technical assistance (TTA) services to build state, local, and tribal capacities to implement solutions to address this nationwide need. Through this program, OJJDP will build the capacity of juvenile justice, child welfare, mental health, and education systems and use existing information sharing standards, procedures, tools, and practices across agencies to improve services and outcomes for youth, families, and communities.

The National Institute of Corrections (NIC) is soliciting proposals from organizations, groups, or individuals to enter into a cooperative agreement for a 15-month period to begin no later than August 15, 2013. Work under this cooperative agreement will be an extension of the NIC's Evidence-Based Decision Making (EBDM) in Local Criminal Justice Systems initiative. It will require the coordination of jurisdictions receiving technical assistance under EBDM and review of work produced under other cooperative agreements that resulted in deliverables under EBDM.Work under this cooperative agreement will involve all activities necessary to plan for the successful implementation of EBDM in a statewide structure. Specifically, the awardee will plan a comprehensive structure for implementation, including development of a technical assistance (TA) plan and the tools required to build capacity to implement EBDM within local jurisdictions and state-level criminal justice planning committees. The awardee will also revise "A Framework for Evidence-Based Decision Making in Local Criminal Justice Systems" to include needed content changes and additions to support statewide implementation; develop activities and tools needed to select a state that, through an identified process, is determined to have the greatest potential for successful planning and implementation of EBDM at the statewide level; provide TA to current EBDM sites and their states' criminal justice coordinating counsels and executive administration in preparation for statewide planning for EBDM implementation. This project will be a collaborative venture with the NIC Community Services Division.

 This purpose of this grant is to: educate, train, and produce materials for law enforcement, criminal justice practitioners, and treatment providers to reduce justice costs, reduce recidivism, improve access to services and service delivery, and reduce disproportionality of punishment in the criminal justice system. The grant recipient shall:* Use expert practitioners in the fields engaged in law enforcement, criminal justice systems planning, and drug courts, specifically law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, probation and parole officers, corrections officials, treatment providers, and criminal justice and public health policymakers. * Provide in-person training and jurisdiction-specific technical assistance to a variety of demographically-composed areas at the state, local, and tribal levels.* Include ONDCP policy priorities in the development and execution of training and technical assistance program and educational materials: o evidence-based treatment, medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorders, o overdose prevention, o diversion programming with comprehensive case management and service provision* Collect and analyze data from jurisdictions engaged in grantee programming on alternatives to incarceration to determine the effectiveness of the trainings and on-site assistance.

The Tribal Law and Order Act (TLOA), enacted July 29, 2010, requires the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to establish and implement a tribal data collection system (P.L. 111- 211, 124 Stat. 2258, § 251(b)). Coverage of Indian country crime and criminal justice statistics is an important priority for BJS and the Office of Justice Programs (OJP). BJS maintains more than 40 different data series, some of which provide information on crime and the criminal justice response in Indian country. BJS intends to expand its portfolio on Indian country to provide more useful and current information on crime and criminal justice response in tribal justice systems. Approximately every 4 years, BJS conducts the Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (CSLLEA). CSLLEA provides data on over 18,000 state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies operating in the United States. CSLLEA captures data on each agency's number of sworn and civilian personnel and the law enforcement functions each agency performs. The 2008 CSLLEA collected data from 178 tribal law enforcement agencies operating in Indian country and provided a profile of tribal law enforcement by type of agency, the number of full-time sworn employees, population and reservation sizes, operating costs per resident, and functions performed on a regular basis. The information was published in Tribal Law Enforcement, 2008 (NCJ 234217, BJS web, June 2011). The 2014 CSLLEA, which is currently in the field, will collect similar information in addition to data on race and Hispanic origin of full-time sworn personnel, employment and transitional services provided to military veterans, special recruitment efforts, the number of hires and separations by type, the number of civilian deaths by cause of death, types of technology used by the agency, and characteristics of the agency's dispatch center. These data will be collected from all of the more than 18,000 state, local, and tribal agencies nationwide; however

This project will develop research-to-practice resources to advance the understanding, translation, and application of research and research-based strategies across four primary components of the juvenile justice system: (1) prevention and diversion, (2) community-based alternatives to placement, (3) detention and secure confinement, and (4) reentry. The intent of this project is to assist OJJDP, practitioners, and researchers with the translation and dissemination of research findings to be more understandable, useful, and strategically targeted. This project will collect and analyze current research findings on effective juvenile justice practices and develop innovative and easily accessible, consumable resources and tools for juvenile justice practitioners, administrators, and policymakers. The project will assist OJJDP in identifying and synthesizing relevant research into actionable, evidence-based practice tools to improve public safety and the effectiveness of the juvenile justice system.

This project will develop research-to-practice resources to advance the understanding, translation, and application of research and research-based strategies across four primary components of the juvenile justice system: (1) prevention and diversion, (2) community-based alternatives to placement, (3) detention and secure confinement, and (4) reentry. The intent of this project is to assist OJJDP, practitioners, and researchers with the translation and dissemination of research findings to be more understandable, useful, and strategically targeted. This project will collect and analyze current research findings on effective juvenile justice practices and develop innovative and easily accessible, consumable resources and tools for juvenile justice practitioners, administrators, and policymakers. The project will assist OJJDP in identifying and synthesizing relevant research into actionable, evidence-based practice tools to improve public safety and the effectiveness of the juvenile justice system.

The Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program (JMHCP) supports innovative cross- system collaboration for individuals with mental illnesses or co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders who come into contact with the justice system. BJA is seeking applications that demonstrate a collaborative project between criminal justice and mental health partners from eligible applicants to plan, implement, or expand a justice and mental health collaboration program. This program is authorized by the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act of 2004 (MIOTCRA) (Pub. L. 108-414) and the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Reauthorization and Improvement Act of 2008 (Pub. L. 110- 416).

DRL/GP aims to improve the justice system and access to justice through innovative programs that strengthen key sectors within the police, military and/or local government. Strong proposals will include a regional pilot of a program that could be replicated nationally. Proposed programs should take a broader view towards long-term stability and proficiency of the justice system in the DRC.