The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative

BACKGROUND
The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) is a long-term project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The foundation fosters public policies, human-service reforms, and community supports that more effectively meet the needs of today’s vulnerable children and families. The JDAI project is designed to demonstrate that jurisdictions can safely reduce reliance on secure detention for juvenile offenders and can strengthen their juvenile justice systems through a system of interrelated reform strategies. The project’s goal is to reduce the unnecessary detention of juveniles prior to the adjudication of their cases. After 15 years, JDAI is being replicated in some 80 jurisdictions across the United States.
JDAI Help Desk is a practice-based, informational resource for advocates, practitioners, policymakers, and others interested in improving the detention component of their juvenile justice system. It’s operated by the Pretrial Justice Institute of Washington, D.C. The JDAI Help Desk offers materials that have been generated from JDAI and other sites in the course of their detention reform endeavors to achieve fairer, more effective, and more efficient juvenile justice systems.
CHALLENGE
Participants in JDAI, as well as field experts and researchers, have generated hundreds of documents that they want to share with other jurisdictions through the non-profit as a basis for implementing juvenile detention strategies and best practices. The group had no effective way to share documents widely, however; and when sharing did occur, it was through e-mail in response to specific requests.
More than 600 documents, accumulated over 15 years, were stored across as many as 100 PCs within JDAI. To view a particular document, a participant had to e-mail one or more of the 15 team members to find it. The time lag between request and fulfillment, moreover, varied considerably. Often an individual outside the project had no way of knowing who to contact via e-mail, other than a single point of contact on the project’s Web site – a process that severely limited wide dissemination of the data.
Without better technology for sharing content, JDAI had difficulty in fulfilling its core mission: sharing best practices across a geographically and organizationally diverse set of stakeholders. Not only was content not readily available, but participants could not be sure that the document they did access was the most current version.
JDAI was seeking a much more flexible and timely way to make documents available, understanding that the content and structure of this library of resources would change over time. The organization needed an easy way for all jurisdictions to find and access the content.
SOLUTION
With extensive experience in leveraging solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint technology, SWC created a structured approach for JDAI’s document repository by developing an easy-to-use, publicly available Web site based on Microsoft Mid-Sized Business Case Study Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Together with JDAI, SWC analyzed the characteristics of the content that was to be shared and the way that visitors to the site would search for that content. With these scenarios in mind, SWC identified an information architecture that would make it possible for people to locate the content they needed most effectively.
The resulting document repository was created in SharePoint, with 14 “facets” that provide results for interrelated search terms. The facets support a dynamic navigation structure to direct users to the documents they are seeking. SWC even matched the precise graphic design that JDAI was using to make the document search operation appear even more seamless.
In addition to the customization of the document library, SWC was able to create three web pages that tie directly to the site. The pages provide another seamless experience to the user – supporting navigation between the document library and pages that allow users to submit comments, questions and even upload documents for consideration. Help Desk staff then utilize the document staging area, where administrators can review and publish documents directly to the library after approval.
RESULTS
With SharePoint now in place, thousands of users are accessing the JDAI Help Desk Web site at www.jdaihelpdesk.org, and all of them are able to find and download documents from a robust organizational structure accessible right on the main home page. This easy access means that jurisdictions that may wish to implement JDAI core strategies can now review all project material available through the Web site.
Today the JDAI Help Desk is showcasing more than 600 documents in a highly organized fashion. Advisors in the field report that the availability of these documents has enabled them to achieve faster and broader information sharing. They can point newcomers to the site and allow them to peruse the material as a way of deciding which strategies they may want to implement. Not only does the new format make information available to the jurisdictions directly, it also saves tremendous amounts of time for the advisors, as they previously would search for specific documents for each request. An added benefit, for jurisdictions that have been a JDAI site over the last 15 years, they can now visit the JDAI Help Desk to see what their colleagues across the nation are doing in relation to similar activities, policies or procedures.
“The feature of SharePoint we really appreciate the most,” reports justice management consultant Cherise Fanno Burdeen, “is the ability to assign multiple categories and values to the more than 600 documents we have in the system. This allows us to ensure that the right documents appear in the right areas of the site and appear multiple times without having to load them into multiple folders.”
The SharePoint solution has built a greater sense of team among more than 80 sites in 21 states. The JDAI Help Desk is enabling participants to innovate more rapidly, with a visible platform on which to display their individual practices and to gain recognition for their best ideas.

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