Ten Years of
Balanced and Restorative Justice
in Pennsylvania
A Juvenile Justice Research, Policy and Practice Series
PENNSYLVANIA PROGRESS
Patrick Griffin
National Center for Juvenile Justice
M
arch 16, 2006 was a red-letter day
especially juvenile crime—was on people’s
for Pennsylvania juvenile justice: it
minds that year, and had been a decisive issue
marked the 10th anniversary of the
in the previous fall’s gubernatorial campaign.
effective date of Act No. 1995-33 (SS1), a
piece of legislation better known to most of
Public fear was fueled by more than just
us as Act 33. Act 33 amended the “purpose
anecdotes: the nation had just experienced a
clause” of the Juvenile Act—the part at the
historic surge in juvenile violence. Juvenile
beginning that says why we have a Juvenile
murder arrest rates doubled between 1987 and
Act, and a separate set of courts, procedures,
1993.2 Juvenile arrests for other violent
“index” crimes—rape, robbery and
and institutions for young people who break
aggravated assault—had been rising sharply
the law. From here on, Act 33 declared, the
for years as well, along with drug and
Juvenile Act was to be “interpreted and
weapons arrests.
construed” in such a way as to aim at
achieving the three broad goals of balanced
“It was a huge issue at that time,” recalls Jim
and restorative justice: “the protection of the
Anderson, Executive Director of the Juvenile
community, the imposition of accountability
Court Judges’ Commission (JCJC), and one of
for offenses committed and the development
the key
of competencies
architects of Act
to enable
33. Given the
children to
public
become
How 29 little words transformed
dissatisfaction
responsible and
Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice
that came to the
productive
members of the
surface during
system.
community.”
the fall
campaign, he
This issue of
says,
Pennsylvania
maintaining the
Progress will explore the ways in which
status quo was not an option. “There clearly
Pennsylvania’s juvenile system—starting
were deficiencies in the public protection
with those simple words—has been remade
provisions of the Juvenile Act. We knew
things had to change.”
over the last decade.
Act 33 was just one of 37 measures enacted
during a special legislative session called by
then-Governor Tom Ridge upon taking office
at the beginning of 1995, as part of what he
promised would be “a swift and far-reaching
attack on crime.”1 The anti-crime session
lasted ten months, and ran concurrently with
the General Assembly’s regular meetings—
the “special” designation being a holdover
from the days when legislatures met
infrequently, and sometimes had to be
convened solely to deal with problems that
couldn’t wait. And it’s true that crime—
But most prominent reform proposals at the
time began and ended with “adult time for
adult crime”—that is, the prosecution and
sentencing of serious juvenile offenders in
adult criminal courts. Anderson and others
were skeptical of that approach. “During the
campaign,” he says, “we at the JCJC
concluded that it was essential to convince
the Governor and the legislature that, given
the deficiencies of the criminal justice
process, the focus of reform couldn’t be the
adult system. What I saw was the need to get
the focus on the juvenile justice system.”
1
That meant shifting the debate a little.
Introducing new ideas. “We very methodically built a way to talk about the
concepts that came to be called balanced
and restorative justice,” Anderson
remembers. “We worked very closely with
the Governor’s policy office, and I met
individually with virtually every legislator
that was involved in this process, to
explain what we wanted to do…. Most of
1995, I spent on legislative issues. That
was what my job was.”
“Looking back, it was time well spent.”
Eventually, a simple but durable compromise—a product of what Anderson calls
“the hard work of many, many committed
people”—was reached. It had the support
of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys’
Association—whose original transfer
proposal served as the legislative vehicle
for what became Act 33—as well as the
JCJC, the Pennsylvania Council of Chief
Juvenile Probation Officers, and the
Governor himself. Under the compromise,
the century-old separate system of justice
for youth would be preserved. But its
jurisdictional boundaries would be
redrawn to exclude certain categories of
serious offenders, at least initially. Its
proceedings would be opened up to
greater public scrutiny. And its purpose
clause would be broadened to reflect
interests beyond those of the young
offenders themselves—including the
legitimate interests of those they had
offended.
The “adult time for adult crime” part of the
compromise got top billing, of course,
when Act 33 was eventually enacted into
law. The “balanced attention” mandate
was pretty much overlooked by the press
and the public. “There was virtually no
publicity about our issue,” Anderson
admits. Yet the reorientation of
Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system
toward balanced and restorative justice
goals has arguably had more far-reaching
consequences. In fact, it was to alter the
trajectory of juvenile justice in Pennsylvania dramatically over the next decade, and
seems likely to continue to do so for years
to come—largely because, instead of
being treated as a mere rhetorical formula,
it was aggressively implemented by the
state’s juvenile justice leadership and
2
enthusiastically embraced by the system’s
rank and file.
Act 33 stimulated a
rethinking of the whole
system.
“I had a front-row seat,” says Rick Steele,
former Chief of Northumberland County
Juvenile Court Services, speaking of the
early history of Act 33 planning and
implementation. “I watched it evolve right
from the beginning.”
Actually, Steele did more than watch: he
served on the Executive Committee of the
Council of Chief Juvenile Probation
Officers, and chaired the Council’s
Balanced and Restorative Justice Implementation Committee during the critical
early years 1996 and 1997. As he remembers it now, it was clearly recognized
among the Chiefs at the time that
Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system
was about to change significantly. “If we
weren’t part of the change,” he says, “we
were going to be the victims of change.”
“Maybe there were some things that
needed to change,” he adds.
Steele began his career in juvenile
probation back in the 1970s, and he freely
acknowledges the old system’s chronic
weaknesses—including a focus on youth
needs that, while often well-meaning,
seemed to ignore other issues that were
important to the community, like culpability and public safety. After all, the
purpose of juvenile justice—as the law
prior to Act 33 put it—was simply “to
remove from children committing delinquent acts the consequences of criminal
behavior, and to substitute therefor a
program of supervision, care and rehabilitation.” Period.
“It was almost irrelevant what the kid did,”
Steele remembers. “And the system was
just so secretive.” It was natural that
members of the public, and especially
victims, would come to lose confidence.
“It’s not that we didn’t care about
victims,” Steele says. “It just was not our
job.”
“The problem with the old purpose
clause,” points out Ron Sharp, chairman
of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention Committee of the PCCD, “was
our lack of understanding that ‘supervision, care and rehabilitation’ needed to
include community protection and victim
restoration. As a juvenile probation
officer in the 60s and early 70s, victim
restoration and community protection
were not on my radar screen.”
“Act 33 incorporated a moral perspective
previously missing from the Juvenile Act,”
says Valerie Bender, JJDPC member and
restorative justice consultant. “The old
purpose clause completely missed the fact
that when you commit a crime, you hurt
somebody. As parents, we teach our
children from the time they are toddlers to
make amends for their mistakes. We make
connections between actions and how
they affect others, so our children grow
up to be thoughtful, caring adults. As a
system, however, we never connected the
impact of the crime with youths’
behaviors. We never stressed the moral
obligation to make things right when
they’ve done something wrong.”
“BARJ really challenges us to treat kids in
the juvenile justice system like we treat
our own kids,” agrees Philadelphia Deputy
District Attorney John Delaney, also a
longtime JJDPC member. “We want for
kids in the juvenile justice system what we
want for our own kids—that they be good
friends, good taxpayers, good citizens,
good neighbors.”
It took years of work to
weave the new ideas into
the fabric of the system.
Act 33 clearly imported into the law a more
coherent and compelling statement of
juvenile justice system values than what it
replaced. But changing the words was the
easy part. In recent years, a lot of states
have changed the way they define the
purposes of their juvenile justices
systems: about a third of them now have
purpose clauses that incorporate the ideas
and general language of the balanced and
restorative justice movement, some of
them in phrases virtually identical to
Pennsylvania’s. (See sidebar, “BARJ
Purpose Clauses.”) They haven’t all
changed their practice, though. Changing
practice—changing minds, really—takes
something else.
“I think the main thing was the degree to
which the leadership—the Chiefs’
Council, the JCJC and the PCCD, among
others—was committed to change,” says
Rick Steele.
Susan Blackburn of the Center for
Juvenile Justice Training and Research,
who served as the state’s first BARJ
Specialist, agrees: “The buy-in had to be
there from the people who have the
juice….That was key.”
Steele and Blackburn were among those
responsible for translating the changed
language of the new purpose clause into
change on the ground. They took a
leading part in the introductory meetings
at which balanced and restorative justice
concepts were unveiled and discussed
around the state, the key leadership
forums, the regional trainings, the
workshops, the demonstrations. And
they remember a considerable amount of
initial skepticism from the field—ranging,
as Steele puts it, “from ‘Yeah, right’ to ‘We
do that already,’ and even ‘This is
baloney.’” To which, he says, his
standard response was, “Yeah, but you
know what? It’s the law.”
“It was not easy,” Blackburn says, “but
we persevered.”
“Ongoing talk and discussion and
demonstration,” Steele sums up. “And it
didn’t go away. And it didn’t just become
jargon.”
“We created the buzz and then we didn’t
let the buzz go away.”
When real change finally began to
happen, Steele says, it happened here and
there, in pockets, not everywhere at once.
“The original idea was, when everybody’s
on board, the boat sails. Everybody’s
going to move forward at the same pace.
Eventually, there were too many people at
the dock, waiting for the boat to leave.”
So, he says, they stopped waiting: “We’re
leaving.”
In places like Allegheny, York, and
elsewhere—”seed counties,” Steele calls
them—key leaders inside and outside the
BARJ PURPOSE CLAUSES
As of 2004, the following states had statutory purpose clauses incorporating
some or all of the language of the balanced and restorative justice movement:
Alabama
Alaska
California
District of Columbia
Florida
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Kansas
Maryland
Minnesota
Montana
New Jersey
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Washington
Wisconsin
Source: Griffin, Patrick, Szymanski, Linda, and King, Melanie. 2006. “National
Overviews.” State Juvenile Justice Profiles . Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for
Juvenile Justice. Online. Available: http://www.ncjj.org/stateprofiles/.
system began to see balanced and
restorative justice as a historic opportunity. “There were people and counties
that really took it and ran with it,” Steele
says. In time, others followed their lead,
picked up on examples, adopted innovations. Ideas spread laterally. Culture
changed.
Now, Steele says, “I don’t believe there’s
anywhere you can go in this state and
mention BARJ to people involved in the
system, where they can’t give you a
pretty accurate description of the concept.”
“Juvenile justice professionals understand that victims and community are in
the mix,” says Blackburn.
“It’s been institutionalized,” adds Steele.
“People are thinking along those lines.”
And not just thinking, but working, every
day. As Ron Sharp puts it, “Pennsylvania
is different because we ‘get it,’ that
balanced and restorative justice must be
woven into the fabric of our juvenile
justice system.”
With clearly defined goals,
the system was able to
begin measuring its
per for mance.
To get an idea of what a difference ten
years have made, it’s enough to look at
the “Juvenile Justice System Outcome
Measures” reported by Pennsylvania’s
juvenile courts and probation departments
every quarter, and synthesized into an
annual “Juvenile Justice Report Card” by
the Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission.
Actually, you don’t even have to look—
the fact there is something called a
“Juvenile Justice Report Card” is a
striking instance of the public accountability, openness, and clarity regarding
goals that have come to characterize
Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system in
the wake of Act 33.
“The first time I can remember talking
about intermediate outcomes,” Rick Steele
says, “it was about measuring BARJ.
That was new to the system—the whole
concept of measurement, outcomes.
Before that, there was a lot of gut-level
decision-making. ‘This has to be good
because it feels good.’ I think it’s all
related.”
3
Indeed, by publicly setting targets—
broad goals that the juvenile justice
system would be responsible for achieving—Act 33 created the essential conditions for the systematic measurement of
juvenile court and probation performance.
Without goals and a clear line of accountability, after all, why would you measure?
How could you measure? What would
you measure against?
Allegheny County was a pioneer in the
area of juvenile justice performance
measurement and reporting, issuing the
state’s first county report card to the
public—a synopsis of outcomes for all
cases closed in 2002. According to
Russell Carlino, Assistant Administrator
of Allegheny County’s Juvenile Probation
Department, BARJ and BARJ
measurement have become a way of life
there. And they’ve yielded a series of
benefits that go far beyond quality
monitoring, he says. “Restorative justice
principles have focused our operation on
specific goals and specific outcomes.
Protecting communities, restoring victims,
and developing youth competencies are
not abstract ideals—they’re built into the
day-to-day activities of POs. Every
aspect of the PO’s job, from the
conditions of supervision to the case
closing document, has been redesigned…
“During the last ten years, the court has
done a much better job of defining
‘success’ and measuring it. We hold
ourselves accountable to achieve clearly
stated goals. Measuring outcomes has
enabled us to focus and refine our efforts
internally. Reporting outcomes to the
public has further clarified our focus and
fostered in POs a sense of accomplishment and pride.”
In turn, not only in Allegheny but across
the state, performance measurement and
reporting have contributed to public
understanding and support for the work
of juvenile justice. As Steele says, it’s all
related: “It’s so much easier to sell the
system now. There’s something for
everybody. Who can argue with this
stuff?”
Imposing “accountability
for offenses committed” is
now at the heart of what
juvenile courts and
probation departments
do.
Some of the most striking figures in the
JCJC’s 2005 Juvenile Justice Report Card
are reported under “Synopsis of
Accountability Data”—including a grand
total of more than two and a half million
dollars in victim restitution and Crime
Victims’ Compensation Fund payments
collected from Pennsylvania juveniles
whose cases were closed that year, and
more than half a million hours of
community service performed. Key
observers agree that those numbers
reflect a deep change in juvenile justice
since pre-Act 33 days. “The system has
changed the most in offender
accountability,” says Ron Sharp.
But Russell Carlino adds that the change
has been more than a simple shift from
“rehabilitation” to “punishment.” It’s
been more like raising expectations
regarding juveniles who come into the
system—and thus demanding more of
them. “Under the old purpose clause,
youth were passive recipients of
‘supervision, care, and rehabilitation,’”
Carlino says. “The new clause requires
that youth actively participate in the
process, that they consider the harm they
have caused and that they take
measurable steps to restore victims and
communities.”
As Valerie Bender explains, “While the
[Juvenile] Act still offers the treatment and
supervision many youth need, the
accountability goal recognizes the
potential of youth as human beings. They
aren’t just kids the system needs to fix.
They are people capable of facing their
mistakes and taking action to repair
whatever harm they’ve caused.
Accountability is an expression of how
much hope and faith we have in the youth
entrusted to us.”
As a long-time participant in the
movement to shift the system’s focus
towards teaching accountability, Bender
4
knows that the change has taken lots of
work, and a series of substantial
investments. “Pennsylvania put money
on the fact that youth could learn about
how they harmed people and how they
can repair that harm,” she says. “They
funded the victim/community awareness
curriculums. They’ve paid to have
facilitators and trainers trained in their
use. They measure how many youth go
through victim awareness sessions.” And
that measurement indicates that victim
programming has now become one of the
system’s most basic tools: of 18,083 cases
closed in 2005, nearly a third (5,706)
involved probation-directed or courtordered participation in victim awareness
programming.
“It’s also made a difference that victim
services were invited into the juvenile
justice world,” Bender adds. State-funded
victim advocacy and support, victim
representation in planning bodies,
formalized victim notice procedures, and
especially the widespread use of victim
impact statements in disposition decisionmaking have revolutionized the juvenile
justice system—and made it stronger. “It
wasn’t just the right thing to do,” Bender
points out. “It was politically savvy. The
system made the move just as victims and
victim advocates were gaining national
attention. Including victim advocates
insured that victims would receive the
attention they deserved without
stretching the resources of the juvenile
justice system.”
Act 33 has helped keep
the system’s focus on
community protection.
Another unmistakable change in the
juvenile justice landscape over the last
decade concerns juvenile crime itself,
especially violent crime. At the time of
Act 33’s passage, the trends looked
terrifying, even to the soberest observers.
Since then, in Pennsylvania as in other
areas of the country, juvenile crime rates
have dropped dramatically. Nationally,
juvenile arrest rates for violent crimes
have fallen every year since their 1994
peak, and recently reached levels not seen
since the 1970s.3 In Pennsylvania, violent
juvenile arrest rates fell about 23% from
1994 through 2004.4
Obviously, there’s no sense in attributing
any of this drop to Act 33. Scholars are
debating the possible causes, but the fact
that serious juvenile crime seems to have
fallen everywhere at once, under all kinds
of systems, suggests that no one juvenile
justice approach or orientation did the
trick.
BARJ IMPLEMENT
ATION MILESTONES
IMPLEMENTA
A short list of the steps taken over the last ten years to make balanced and
restorative justice a reality in Pennsylvania:
1996
A statewide policy forum entitled “Community, Victim and
Offender: Changing Roles in Juvenile Justice” was held to
explain the balanced and restorative justice philosophy to
practitioners and policymakers. It was followed by a series
of regional forums for county teams of judges, probation
officers, district attorneys, public defenders and victim
advocates—the first of numerous training events offered over
the years by the Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission’s Center
for Juvenile Justice Training and Research, and eventually
supported by the Balanced and Restorative Justice
Implementation Grant and the Juvenile Justice Enhancement
Training Initiative.
Still, Act 33 did clearly, explicitly, and for
the first time focus Pennsylvania’s
juvenile courts on the goal of community
protection. That may not have magically
made crime rates fall, but it did change
attitudes and expectations. Now one of
the most closely monitored measures of
system performance in Pennsylvania
juvenile probation departments is the
proportion of youth who successfully
complete supervision without reoffending.
According to the 2005 Juvenile Justice
Report Card, about 87% of cases statewide were closed without a new offense
that year—which means that, in almost
nine of out of ten cases, juvenile courts
and probation departments succeeded,
through supervision, monitoring, and
enforcement of firm expectations, in
achieving this basic goal.
1997
A “Mission and Guiding Principles” for Pennsylvania juvenile
justice was created and disseminated statewide.
1998
The first PCCD-funded BARJ Specialist positions were created
at the JCJC.
1999
BARJ Coordinator positions were first funded at the county
level.
2000
Victims of Juvenile Offenders advocate positions were
created, and the “Bill of Rights” law for crime victims was
extended to cover victims of delinquent acts.
2001
A protocol for monitoring, measuring and reporting juvenile
probation departments’ performance in achieving the goals
of balanced and restorative justice was developed.
The goal of competency
development has proved
elusive.
2003
The JCJC issued a benchbook exploring what balanced and
restorative justice for Pennsylvania judges entails on and off
the bench.
2004
A statewide system of reporting case-closing data to the JCJC
was implemented.
2005
Advancing Competency Development: A White Paper for
Pennsylvania was issued.
Act 33 changed some things, but not
others. In the words of Bob Schwartz,
Executive Director of the Juvenile Law
Center and longstanding member of the
JDDPC, “It’s interesting that the Juvenile
Act, as amended, retained the goals of
supervision, care and rehabilitation.
Pennsylvania thus successfully introduced BARJ principles while keeping
other important Juvenile Act values.” In
fact, he adds, “BARJ took supervision,
care and rehabilitation to a new level, by
requiring our juvenile justice system to
engage in skill building, even as it works
to eliminate negative behavior.”
There are those who would argue that the
system has not been up to the task.
Indeed, competency development has
been called “the least understood of
Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice goals.”3
Everyone acknowledges its importance.
But the job of competency development
has proved difficult to define operationally, and even more difficult to quantify.
The Juvenile Justice Report Card for 2005
does report aggregate measures relevant
to competency development—indicating,
for example, that some “competency
development activity” was court-ordered
or probation-directed in three-quarters of
all cases closed that year, that a competency development activity was successfully completed in nine out of ten of the
cases in which it was ordered or directed,
and that more than 77% of juveniles were
employed or engaged in an educational or
vocational activity at case-closing. But
that doesn’t begin to tell us everything
we need to know about system performance in achieving this vital goal.
5
OFFENDER AND VICTIM: AN EXCHANGE
From a victim impact statement submitted last year, in connection with an
incident involving underage drinking, criminal trespass, and the theft of two
bicycles in a quiet Eastern Pennsylvania community:
The theft of our kids’ bikes left us feeling unsafe and angry….We struggle
financially to provide for our kids, and the new bikes cost us over
$200.00. Now we lock up every night….[I]t will take [our children] a
while to get past the fear of…going in the garage at night. Most of all
we’re disgusted at the poor behavior and the lack of parental control.
A 15-year-old boy admitted responsibility, and the case was settled by consent
decree. The youth was required to write an apology:
I committed a crime last summer when I was 15. This is a letter written
to the victims of this crime…to ask for you to forgive me for the effect
my action had on you and your family. I am very sorry for what I have
done….
Advancing Competency Development is
now being widely circulated and discussed in the field. It’s causing a stir. A
future issue of Pennsylvania Progress will
describe the reactions of practitioners and
policymakers to the principles it articulates, and lay out some of the plans being
made to translate them into practice.
While I knew that evening that what I was doing was very wrong, I did
not realize or think about how badly my actions would affect the people
who lived at these houses….I understand that my actions may cause
homeowners to be afraid and insecure in their own homes. I certainly
would not want to feel that way in my home….
Act 33 helped shape and
articulate Pennsylvania’s
response to a
fundamental challenge.
This has harmed my community, my friends, and family. These people
that care very much about me…cannot trust me anymore, though I am
working hard to regain this trust. I have to prove to everyone that I am
trustworthy. I have to prove to everyone that I am a better person after
this horrible event. This night has changed me….I lost friends and caused
shame to my family.
A decade ago, juvenile justice was a
system under siege. A combination of
factors had eroded public support for
juvenile courts and probation, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Fear of escalating
youth crime, and doubts about the
toughness of the system’s response, were
a big part of it—certainly the most visible
part. But a deeper cause of the public’s
gradual loss of confidence may have had
something to do with a lack of clarity and
consensus about the basic goals of the
system. What, if anything, was juvenile
justice aiming for? Was there any
connection between the system’s goals
and those of the community? Did people
in the juvenile justice system care about
the same things as people outside it? Did
they even seek “justice,” in a sense the
public could understand?
The youth went on to recount how he had changed schools since the incident,
taken a part-time job, and become more involved in organized sports, and
concluded by repeating his apology and promising to make better decisions in
the future. The victimized family received a copy of the letter and felt moved to
reply through the local Victim/Witness Coordinator:
Thank you for your apology note. We want you to know that it meant a
lot to us and that you are TOTALLY FORGIVEN!…
We admire your courage and are grateful for your remorse….From your
note it’s clear that you are making wise choices now, and that you are
working hard to earn back the trust you value….
We…hope that this crime will be erased from your record….
Take the freedom you’ve been granted and don’t look back!
Recently, with the issuance of Advancing
Competency Development: A White Paper
for Pennsylvania, the state took a big step
toward consensus regarding competency
development. Produced by a focus group
of state and local practitioners under the
auspices of the JJDPC, Advancing
Competency Development articulates
basic principles and identifies research6
tions, discusses the proper roles and
responsibilities of juvenile probation
officers and other system actors with
regard to these activities, and—most
important of all—begins to tackle the
subject of measuring system performance
and outcomes in competency development.
supported practices, outcomes, and
measures for competency development
that conform to the Juvenile Act’s
language and purposes. It defines and
describes basic domains or skill areas that
should be the focus of assessment and
competency-building, offers advice on
effective ways to impact these skill areas
through training and community connec-
“Juvenile justice is two words,” as John
Delaney puts it. “For too long, people
focused on the first and not the second.”
In the process of righting this imbalance,
Act 33 helped to strengthen both the
juvenile justice system itself and the
public’s understanding and support for
it—enabling Pennsylvania to lead what
has come to be a resurgence of juvenile
justice in America.
“It was easy to get lost, and frustrated,”
Rick Steele says, recalling the years in
which he and others worked to reorient
practice across the state. “But it helped to
see, when gathering together with
representatives of other states, that
Pennsylvania was leading the charge.”
According to Dennis Maloney, former
Director of the Department of Community
Justice in Deschutes County, Oregon, and
now one of the managers of the federal
government’s Balanced and Restorative
Justice Project, “I’ve been to all fifty
states, and there’s no doubt in my mind
that Pennsylvania has gone the farthest in
implementing balanced and restorative
justice. Pennsylvania has not only done
the work to change their system—they’ve
helped other states do the same. When
other states were doing serious damage to
their juvenile justice systems, Pennsylvania served as a beacon.”
That doesn’t mean the work of implementing Act 33 is done, Steele points out.
“Because it’s a process,” he says, “it’s
never over.”
Jim Anderson agrees: “We have a long
way to go. But we have a lot to be proud
of.”
ENDNOTES
Reeves, F. “Ridge is Sworn In as 43rd
Governor.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January
18, 1995.
2
Snyder, H. and Sickmund, M. (1999) Juvenile
Offenders and Victims: 1999 National Report.
Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention.
3
Snyder, H. and Sickmund, M. (2006) Juvenile
Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report.
Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention.
4
Pennsylvania Electronic Juvenile Justice
Databook, on-line at http://ncjj.servehttp.com/
padatabook/.
5
Torbet, P. and Thomas, D. (2005) Advancing
Competency Development: A White Paper for
Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, PA: National Center
for Juvenile
1
Visit the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency’s website
at http://www.pccd.state.pa.us to download previous issues of
Pennsylvania Progress and learn more about juvenile justice initiatives
in Pennsylvania.
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of the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ)–
the research division of the National Council of
Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
This issue of Pennsylvania Progress features a new look.
More changes may be coming soon. For instance, while the
Pennsylvania Progress has for some time been downloadable
from the PCCD’s website, future issues may come to you
electronically rather than by mail—so you’ll be able to read
them on-line, print out as many copies as you like, forward
them to colleagues, etc. An on-line Pennsylvania Progress
could feature direct links to sources of further information as
well. Because there would be no printing costs, it would be
cheaper to produce, and there would be fewer limits on content and graphics.
National Center for Juvenile Justice
3700 South Water Street, Ste. 200
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
412-227-6950
412-227-6955
www.ncjj.org
As a Pennsylvania Progress reader, you can help us with
this transition by answering the brief survey that accompanies
this issue. Just fax or mail in the completed form using the
contact information provided on the form—or go to http://
www.ncjj.org/survey/ and take the on-line version of the survey. Thanks!
Production Editor: Kristy Connors
Date of Publication: June 2006
 National Center for Juvenile Justice
This project was supported by subgrant #01/02-J05/04-12753 awarded by the Pennsylvania
Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD).
The awarded funds originate with the Office of
Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points
of view or opinions contained within this document
are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
represent any official position, policy or view of
PCCD or the U.S. Department of Justice.
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Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency
P.O. Box 1167
Harrisburg, PA 17108-1167
ATTENTION: RECIPIENT
If label is incorrect,
please make corrections and
return label to PCCD.
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