Science advisory boards and policy organizations have called for adolescent brain science to be incorporated into juvenile probation operations. To achieve this, Opportunity-Based Probation (OBP), a probation model that integrates knowledge of adolescent development and behavior change principles, was developed in collaboration with a local juvenile probation department. The current study compares outcomes (recidivism and probation violations) for youth in the OBP condition versus probation as usual. Inverse probability weighting (IPW) and coarsened exact matching (CEM) were used to estimate causal effects of OBP’s average treatment effect (ATE). Results indicated clear effects of OBP on reducing criminal legal referrals, but no significant effects were observed for probation violations. Overall, results provide promising recidivism-reduction effects in support of developmentally grounded redesigns of juvenile probation.

中文翻译：

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重新设计青少年缓刑以符合行为健康和积极发展原则：一项准实验研究

科学咨询委员会和政策组织呼吁将青少年脑科学纳入青少年缓刑操作中。为了实现这一目标，我们与当地青少年缓刑部门合作开发了基于机会的缓刑（OBP），这是一种融合了青少年发展知识和行为改变原则的缓刑模型。目前的研究比较了处于 OBP 状态下的青少年与正常缓刑状态下的青少年的结果（累犯和缓刑违规）。逆概率加权 (IPW) 和粗化精确匹配 (CEM) 用于估计 OBP 平均治疗效果 (ATE) 的因果效应。结果表明，OBP 对减少刑事法律转介有明显的影响，但没有观察到缓刑违规行为的显着影响。总体而言，结果提供了有希望的减少累犯效应，支持基于发展的青少年缓刑重新设计。