Forest? Trees? Overview of OJJDP Re-org

In an interview posted on the OJJDP website, Robert J. Listenbee, the adminstrator for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, highlighted the organizational changes taking place. (See below)  Re-organization can simply be a way that a new manager mixes things up so that they can get more control, a way to encourage innovation and leadership (and signal to others that it is time for them to find new opportunities elsewhere), or a way to better deploy resources around specific goals. Listenbee emphasizes that this re-organization will better allow OJJDP to provide services to states and fulfill its functions.


In thinking about the set of policy priorities driving the office, it's not clear how they are getting incorporated into this organizational structure. For example, does distributing policy experts across the divisions makes sense? They've got a broad set of policies to pay attention to from reducing racial disparities to domestic child sex trafficking to school discipline. If policy staff don't have the chance to work together they may end up seeing the trees...but forget the forest.  Perhaps Listenbee is a manager that emphasizes cross-division collaboration. If that's the case, this may be a way to deploy resources effectively. 

It would be really helpful if next time OJJDP publishes overviews of their work if they could show how the organizational structure is aligning with priorities. OJJDP can be a truly catalytic organization to further advance the important policies and practices across our country that reduce racial disparity, ensure young people receive developmentally appropriate interventions, and eliminate the school-to-prison pipelie once and for all.

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From the OJJDP website:

A major change at OJJDP is the reorganization of the Office. How will the reorganization benefit the juvenile justice field? 

OJJDP’s reorganization truly reflects the full breadth of the work we do every day: state and community development; audit and compliance; juvenile justice system improvement; youth development, prevention, and safety; and innovation and research. The new structure will enhance OJJDP’s ability to support states, the District of Columbia, the territories, tribal nations, and the broader juvenile justice community in their efforts to serve our nation’s children and their families.
I won’t go into all the details of the reorganization here, but here are a few ways in which the reorganization will have a positive impact:

• The new State and Community Development Division will position OJJDP to have a more sustained and closer working relationship with the states. Staff will function not only in their traditional roles as managers of formula and block grants, but as ongoing consultants to the field. Staff assistance will include dialog regarding the needs of states and emerging practices, the identification of helpful resources and sources of funding in the federal government and the private sector, and better coordination of the Office’s training and technical assistance (TTA) resources with states and localities.
• We have separated the audit and compliance functions from the programs side and placed these functions in the Budget and Administration Division. We now have a small, highly skilled group working only on audits and compliance to fulfill the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act’s core requirements. These changes will help us expedite our work with the states in audit and compliance and offer a range of specialized assistance and expertise.
• The Juvenile Justice System Improvement Division oversees programmatic grants and policy initiatives that promote juvenile system reform and improvement, a key priority at the Office and throughout the juvenile justice field. Many projects related to law enforcement, the courts, corrections, and other justice system components are now coordinated and managed together in this division. Examples include the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, National Center for Youth in Custody, reentry projects, and drug courts.
• The new Youth Development, Prevention, and Safety Division includes not only the Internet Crimes Against Children program, AMBER Alert program, and Children’s Advocacy Centers, but also all of our mentoring programs. In addition to child protection, the new division highlights the priority the Office places on prevention and positive youth development.
• The new Innovation and Research Division brings together and coordinates OJJDP’s research, TTA, performance measurement, and communications efforts. This coordination will help ensure that the latest research findings more effectively inform TTA, best practices, and the Office’s communications outreach to the juvenile justice field.

OJJDP used to have a separate Policy Division. We now have policy experts working in every division. This more accurately reflects the way we work at OJJDP: policy informs every aspect of our operations and programs, and it’s central to everything we do.