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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Article
Policy Briefs (2021)

In 2016, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors permanently repealed fees charged to youth in the county’s juvenile justice system. Unlike other types of monetary sanctions, like fines and restitution, fees are not intended to punish defendants or repair survivors. Instead, fees are imposed to recoup administrative costs. Increasingly, advocates are highlighting the harm that monetary sanctions can inflict on justice-involved youth and their families, and are calling for fees to be repealed. This study examines whether removing these fees has an appreciable effect on families’ overall financial burden by applying a rigorous causal-inference approach to data on 2,401 youth placed on probation before and after the fee repeal.

This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grants MRP-19-600774 and M21PR3278.

    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2022)
    Initial child welfare screening decisions, traditionally made by an individual worker, determine if a family will receive further intervention by child protective services. A multi-disciplinary team (MDT) decision-making approach for child welfare referrals aims to provide a more thorough assessment of needs and strengths and to connect families to appropriate community-based providers. This study examined 159 child welfare referrals handled by MDTs compared to 331 referrals handled via the traditional screening approach. The study used a pseudo randomization procedure to assign referrals to the study conditions: Referrals logged on 2.5 days of the week were assigned to the treatment group; all others were assigned to the comparison group. Referrals handled by an MDT were more than four times as likely as those not handled by an MDT to be referred to community-based organizations (OR = 4.32, p < .001). There were no statistically significant differences in families' engagement with community-based organizations or child welfare outcomes. MDTs are a promising step in the initial process of connecting families to services, although they did not affect this study's longer-term outcomes.
      Cover page: Safely Increasing Connection to Community-Based Services: A Study of Multidisciplinary Team Decision Making for Child Welfare Referrals
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