Category: Jesse Russell

The paper examines how different errors in justice settings can present problems for machine learning applications, the limits of computation for resolving tradeoffs, and how solutions might have to be crafted through courageous conversations with leadership, line workers, stakeholders, and impacted communities.

This paper explores how different ideas of racial equity in machine learning, in justice settings in particular, can present trade-offs that are difficult to solve computationally.

This paper examines how different models and different cutoffs combine to show the possibilities and limits of achieving machine learning fairness in an applied justice setting.

Machine learning to shape, for example, (a) consumer loan approval or rates, (b) job recommendations, (c) text translations, (d) credit decisions, and (e) justice decisions might all impel different conceptions of machine learning fairness.

For juvenile dependency judges to make an impact on racial disparities and disproportionality, they will need to move beyond the bench and bring together stakeholders and communities to talk about how they understand, hold, and weigh the full ecology of every child and family that comes before them.

Despite policies aimed at reducing or preventing maltreatment, the development of CPS systems across the United States, and a CPS workforce, the aggregate effects of the CPS system, services, and worker efforts are not well understood.

Results indicate receipt of CPS services had no observable effect on recurrence of maltreatment overall and among families with similar levels of risk of recurrence. Further inquiry into worker attributes, decision-making, types of and quality of services offered to families could help explain the effective, or ineffectiveness, or services.

The qualitative and quantitative evidence presented suggests that detentions, adjudications, and dispositions to out-of-home placements have decreased, and that there has been no upward change in the number of referrals from law enforcement, despite the increased numbers of youth in the community.

Practice and theory issues around removing children from their homes, placing them in foster care, and providing services to families are broadly discussed in the media, in trade publications, and in academic literature. Less commonly discussed, however, are how these themes inter-sect with the experiential accounts of children and young people who have lived with…

Interventions aimed at goals relating to who goes into foster care and how many children go into foster care might be most effective if they focus on culture and socioeconomic facts. Interventions aimed to change lengths of time in care, on the other hand, might be most effective if targeted at state child welfare policies…

This paper considers how predictive analytics might inform, assist, and improve decision making in child protection. Predictive analytics represents recent increases in data quantity and data diversity, along with advances in computing technology. While the use of data and statistical modeling is not new to child protection decision making, its use in child protection is experiencing growth, and efforts to…

This article explores the association between state-level child welfare expenditures and state-level foster care outcomes (placements, lengths of stay, and reentries).

This article examines how the amount of judicial personnel work hours available for each juvenile dependency case in a county may be related to the percentage of cases reaching key decision hearings in a timely manner.

This chapter outlines the expectations, legal constraints, and obligations of juvenile dependency courts.

This study finds that the training intervention was associated with more parent placements and fewer stranger foster care placements. However, this change appeared to diminish over time when it was not coupled with use of the benchcard. The training and benchcard together were associated with a greater change in placement outcomes, and this effect did…

The Journal of Socio-Economics, Volume 41, Issue 6 The Icelandic banking crisis provides a useful example of how the global economic downturn transformed into a domestic crisis and then transformed again into an international conflict. Rather than a strict economic analysis, discussion around the economic causes and potential cures surrounding the Icelandic banking crisis have…

Participation in a parent-to-parent program positively changed parents’ attitudes. Attitude change varied slightly by race and gender. Participation in a parent-to-parent program increased parental engagement. Parents who participated in the program were more likely to attend hearings.

Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines Recent years have seen a problematic upward trend in disequilibrium in the international balance of payments. What accounts for this trend? Three hypotheses for the rise in disequilibrium are tested in this paper: greater fixedness of the world exchange rate regime causes greater disequilibrium; greater flexibility of the…

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)  Disproportionality is defined as “the level at which groups of children are present in the child welfare system at higher or lower percentages or rates than in the general population.” Hill developed the “disproportionality index” as an indicator of the degree to which a given jurisdiction has…

OJJDP Journal of Juvenile Justice, Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 2011 Child protection mediation has been used for more than 25 years to improve case processing and outcomes in juvenile dependency cases. Prior research has been primarily descriptive, and has focused on the effect of mediation on efficiency measures and on parents’ perceptions of the…

Children and Youth Services Review, Volume 33, Issue 9 Individuals in the dependency system believe that it is important to have parties present at early decision-making hearings without much empirical support. This paper examines how involvement of mothers, fathers, and their respective legal representatives at early decision-making hearings (i.e., preliminary protective, adjudication, disposition, and first review) influences reunification in…

Rational herding, or information cascades, can explain why one factor becomes prominent for a period of time then suddenly drops off and is replaced by a better predictor

Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 How do states attempt to mitigate the pressures of financial globalisation? This article suggests that options can be understood in terms of monetary regime choice. These are best understood with their international component included – whether states integrate unilaterally, integrate multilaterally, or go it alone monetarily. But to understand the international…

Empirical Economics 40 There have been a number of empirical attempts to account for variation in exchange rate regime choice, but these attempts point in several directions and are not made sense of easily. One reason for the differences among studies is that standard statistical techniques are unable to identify the nonlinear and contingent relationships…