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Evan Elkin

Evan Elkin

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All Work by Evan

Where do innovative program ideas come from? Lessons from Ohio

Vera’s approach to innovation relies heavily on research and stakeholder involvement: surveying existing proven practices and consulting with government officials, service providers, and the people served by the system. Input from stakeholders is an especially critical source of the ideas and inspiration that drive innovation. However, in the corre ...

News

Evan Elkin
Leah Morgan

October 03, 2012

News

Measuring risk and need in juvenile justice decision making

For some people in the field of juvenile justice, the difference between “risk assessment” and “needs assessment” may seem overly academic or technical. They don’t realize that the lack of clarity about this distinction and the tendency to conflate risk of delinquency with treatment need are obstacles to establishing a more strength-based and thera ...

News

Evan Elkin

May 14, 2011

News

Scaring teens doesn't straighten them out

A&E’s new reality show—“Beyond Scared Straight”—which debuted in January, describes itself as a profile of “the new approach to keeping today's teens from becoming tomorrow's prisoners.” This approach—taking at-risk teenagers to prisons to experience the harshness of prison life first-hand—is certainly not too new to have been tested, and the r ...

News

Evan Elkin

February 16, 2011

News

What Time didn't tell about teen treatment programs

Time.com’s recent feature story, “Does Teen Drug Rehab Cure Addiction or Create it?” by Maia Szalavitz is a fascinating and disturbing report about drug-involved teens who fare poorly in treatment programs. It is also disturbing for the story it fails to tell—the advent over the past decade of innovative programs to address adolescents with substan ...

News

Evan Elkin

July 20, 2010

News

A Call for Innovation

The recently released report from Governor Paterson’s Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State contains some jarring and eye-opening information about a system in dire need of reform. It also outlines a set of carefully considered recommendations for how to go about rebuilding a system that government stakeholders now admit has ...

News

Evan Elkin

December 16, 2009

News

Least Restrictive Alternative?

Based on the original charter of the family court movement dating back to the 1960s, the decision to incarcerate a young person in the juvenile justice system is supposed to be based on a careful weighing of the risk that a youngster poses to public safety and the availability of less restrictive alternatives that meet that young person’s rehabilit ...

News