Criminal and Juvenile Justice

Current and Recent Projects

Training and Technical Assistance for National Innovations to Reduce Disproportionate Minority Confinement

The goal of this 3-year, multiphased project is to help State and local jurisdictions reduce the overrepresentation of minority children and youth in secure detention and correctional facilities, jails, and lockups by providing the jurisdictions with information, training, and technical assistance that will enable them to successfully address the factors that contribute to the problem. The project focuses on innovative practices and successful communitywide programs that have proved to be effective in other jurisdictions or that hold significant promise to ameliorate the problems based on research or evaluation findings.

In the first 2 years, the project will

• Review and synthesize the existing knowledge base and research on disproportionate minority confinement (DMC), including State and local practices and policies designed to address the reduction of DMC.
• Develop an intensive, interactive core training curriculum for juvenile justice system policymakers, decisionmakers, and practitioners on effective intervention and impediments to successful action, and initially deliver this training to a select group of senior juvenile justice policymakers and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) grantees.
• Develop a highly innovative system of technical assistance, focusing on the impact of police practices and community development on DMC, and begin delivery to key OJJDP grantees involved in other training and technical assistance projects that incorporate DMC issues, practices, and policies.
• Assist the existing group of DMC demonstration grantees in implementing local program interventions to better manage, institutionalize, and sustain their programs over the long term.
• Collaborate with other OJJDP divisions and their technical assistance contractors in developing effective approaches and strategies for assisting States in improving DMC compliance plans.
• Develop and implement a national dissemination and education effort that builds on the training and technical assistance system.
• Establish an advisory group to support project implementation.

In the third year, the project will build on the initial efforts described above, expanding the national dissemination and education effort and developing other appropriate products and resource tools to help OJJDP's key constituencies improve their abilities to assess and effectively address DMC.

Peer Review of Bureau of Justice Assistance Competitive Grant Programs

The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) submits its competitive grant programs for review by outside experts. In June 1992, Cygnus was awarded a 3-year contract to facilitate application reviews for five BJA corrections and drug enforcement grant programs. In 1997, Cygnus was awarded a second, short-term, sole source contract to support the 1997 discretionary grant program. This contract was extended through FY 1998. In 1998, Cygnus won another 4-year contract through full and open competition to continue this project through the year 2002.

Under the original contract, Cygnus arranged for the review of approximately 900 applications by more than 300 reviewers. Program topics included community policing, boot camps, drug courts, firearms trafficking, and Weed and Seed program evaluation. In 1997, we arranged for the review of almost 1,800 concept papers by approximately 200 reviewers. Because grant awards had to be made by September 30, Cygnus was asked to complete the review process in 6 weeks, despite the large increase in workload. The reviews were successfully completed on schedule. Because of the need to expedite funding decisions and notification of applicants, this project consistently requires quick turnaround. Cygnus usually receives less than 6 weeks to complete a program review.

Cygnus is responsible for all stages of the grant reviews:

• Receiving all grant applications sent to BJA, checking them for completeness (appendixes, letters of support, etc.), entering application information into a tracking database, and making photocopies for distribution to reviewers.
• Forming a pool of consultants; selecting potential reviewers whose expertise corresponds to each program's focus; writing brief biographies of the potential reviewers; and submitting the biographies, along with the reviewers' resumes, to BJA for approval.
• Developing scoring forms, review procedures, and report formats in cooperation with BJA staff.
• Calling approved potential reviewers to confirm availability and notifying program managers of progress made in locating reviewers.
• Making panel assignments.
• Preparing a complete set of materials for each confirmed reviewer, including consultant agreements, invoices, application lists, and confirmation letters, and mailing these materials, along with copies of the applications, to the reviewers.
• Verifying the receipt of materials and checking reviewers' progress at least once to ensure that all materials are returned on the agreed-upon due date.
• Contacting the program manager if any conflict-of-interest situations arise and, if necessary, locating replacement reviewers.
• Notifying reviewers if materials have been omitted from the return packet or if forms have not been completed correctly.
• Creating scoring and ranking reports based on reviewers' scores.
• Entering reviewer comments into the final report format, editing the comments, and submitting the final reports to BJA.
• Writing summaries of grant applications by following a uniform format that provides information about the applicant and an idea of how the applicant proposed to carry out the grant and what outcomes are expected.
• Preparing rejection letters and comment summaries for proposals that are not funded.
• Preparing letters and instructions for program finalists.

In addition, Cygnus performs annual mass mailings to update reviewer information and to recruit new reviewers, prepares thank-you letters to all reviewers, generates monthly reports for program staff, and arranges for the storage of past program materials.

For the FY 1997 contract period, Cygnus completely redesigned and updated its application and reviewer tracking systems. These systems are based on linked databases composed of an experts section with information on approximately 750 available consultants and a program section with information on all grant reviews. Having a unified information management system written in a fourth-generation, relational database application eliminates redundancies and allows users greater flexibility in generating reports and merge files.

Technical Support Services: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

This cooperative agreement with a subagency of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is an 18-month technical support effort to advise and assist the agency with bringing approximately 1,800 law enforcement grantees into compliance with applicable Federal privacy laws governing the operation of criminal intelligence databases at the State and local levels. The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) is a new agency created by President Clinton to meet his mandate to put 100,000 new police officers on the street. The provisions of 28 Code of Federal Regulations Part 23, or "Part 23," require all DOJ grantees who have received Federal funds to acquire new technologies and equipment (hardware or software) that could be used to design, develop, enhance, or maintain computerized criminal intelligence databases; to comply with applicable privacy laws; and to respect the constitutional rights of individuals when gathering and sharing criminal intelligence information about them.

The COPS office administers several personnel deployment grant programs that allow State and local law enforcement agencies to apply for Federal funds to support the hiring of new police officers. The agency also administers several grant programs that allow local law enforcement agencies to acquire new technology--computers and peripherals, specialized software programs, telecommunications equipment--to assist them in carrying out their public safety responsibilities. If and when these "equipment grantees" use COPS funds to gather, store, retrieve, and/or share criminal intelligence information about unconvicted individuals and groups, their data systems may have to comply with the requirements of Part 23. To comply, the law enforcement agency must have in place detailed policies on and procedural safeguards for entering and accessing such information, as contained in a data systems operations manual.

Cygnus is conducting a one-time, retroactive Part 23 compliance review of all COPS office 1996 equipment grantees through a review of their grant files and their responses to a mail survey and self-report certification process. Other categories of more recent grantees will be assisted as well. Cygnus is also preparing and mailing the survey and certification forms. For those equipment grantees who the COPS office and Cygnus determine are affected by the terms of Part 23 and therefore must comply with its requirements, Cygnus will gather, review, and critique their existing operations manuals and then advise the COPS office and the local grantees on whether these documents meet all the requirements of the law. If and when a grantee does not have such an operations manual, Cygnus will provide the technical assistance to develop an operations manual and sufficient procedural safeguards.

Annual Reports to Congress and Other Publications Support

Over the past 4 years, Cygnus developed congressionally mandated annual publications for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), including the NIJ Annual Report for FY95, Searching for Answers: Drugs and Crime Evaluation Report, and Domestic Violence, Stalking, and Antistalking Legislation: Annual Report to Congress. The NIJ Annual Report describes the latest findings of NIJ projects and contains essays on criminal justice areas of interest to policymakers, legislators, criminal justice administrators and practitioners, researchers, and evaluators. Searching for Answers is a comprehensive document that reports on the findings of NIJ-sponsored evaluations and other projects related to the NIJ mandate to evaluate drug control efforts across the Nation. These reports were submitted to Congress and made available to other policymakers in Federal, State, and local government.

Cygnus is involved in all aspects of developing and producing these annual reports. We

• Develop workplans and schedules.
• Collect and synthesize information.
• Interview NIJ staff and grantees.
• Write the text.
• Edit for clarity, completeness, and consistency in style.
• Proofread editorial, reviewer, and author changes and revisions.
• Verify the accuracy of references.
• Prepare all front and back matter.
• Design the layout, covers, tables, charts, and graphs.
• Proofread the desktop-published text and graphics.
• Prepare electronic or hard-copy camera-ready artwork.

As requested, Cygnus also will check the blueline proofs to verify the accuracy and quality of type and the clarity of the graphic elements.

Cygnus also provides speechwriting services to NIJ staff and has undertaken other publications assignments, such as the development of the NIJ Annual Program Plan; the NIJ Handbook, an Institute-wide policies and procedures manual; and a Research in Brief summarizing all of NIJ's active grants.