Faith‐Based Programs for Reentry Courts: A Summary of Issues and Recommendations

In 2002, the Bush Administration directed the Department of Justice to include faith‐based organizations in its distribution of funds earmarked for programs targeting the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency and substance abuse. Among the initiatives most likely to be affected by this new policy are reentry court programs that endeavor to reintegrate juvenile delinquents into their communities by placing them within local neighborhood‐based programs. However, reentry court personnel and leaders of faith‐based organizations are likely to encounter numerous challenges as they try to establish appropriate programming. In this article, we discuss the current understanding of First Amendment jurisprudence governing the federal funding of faith‐based organizations and summarize key issues identified by a National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges' workgroup on faith‐based programming that are necessary for including faith‐based organizations within a reentry court's continuum of care. We also discuss several concerns that reentry court personnel and faith‐based organizations should consider as they seek to maximize the impact of their programs.     

POLICY EVALUATION: INCORPORATING USERS’VIEWS

There is a growing recognition that obtaining feedback from users is a fundamental and integral part of measuring effectiveness and without such a perspective, policy evaluation will have limited legitimacy. There is still, however, widespread uncertainty about how best to carry this out or in what circumstances, given methodological and other constraints, such an approach is likely to be worthwhile. The aim of this article is not to rehearse in detail the merits and demerits of users as stakeholders, thereby providing a rationale for their inclusion in the evaluation process. This has been adequately covered elsewhere despite the subsequent paucity of empirical studies seeking to incorporate user perspectives. Rather, it is an attempt to suggest a set of co-requisites which would provide some guidance to would-be evaluators as to those conditions in which incorporation of user perspectives will be both methodologically sound and practically useful. In so doing, it suggests a referential rather than just an exclusively schematic approach to evaluation. It is hoped that the insights provided by the case studies described in the article will help those involved in evaluations to more quickly vet or validate desiderata in which inclusions of this stakeholder's group is desirable, expedient, permissible and authoritative.     

Social status,political priorities and unequal representation

Researchers on inequalities in representation debate about whether governments represent the preferences of the rich better than those of less affluent citizens. We argue that problems of high- and low-status citizens are treated differently already at the agenda-setting stage. If affluent and less affluent citizens have different priorities about which issues should be tackled by government, then these divergent group priorities explain why government favours high- over low-status citizens. Due to different levels of visibility, resources and social ties, governments pay more attention to what high-status citizens consider important in their legislative agenda and pay less attention to the issues of low-status citizens. We combined three types of data for our research design. First, we extracted the policy priorities (most important issues) for all status groups from Eurobarometer data between 2002 and 2016 for 10 European countries and matched this information with data on policy outcomes from the Comparative Agendas Project. We then strengthen our results using a focused comparison of three single country studies over longer time series. We show that a priority gap exists and has representational consequences. Our analysis has important implications for the understanding of the unequal representation of status groups as it sheds light on an important, yet so far unexplored, aspect of the political process. Since the misrepresentation of political agendas occurs at the very beginning of the policy-making process, the consequences are potentially even more severe than for the unequal treatment of preferences.