Juvenile Justice Realignment: A policy analysis of California Senate Bill 823

New legislation (Senate Bill 823) in the State of California, to realign the serious felony juvenile offender population from state facilities to county facilities, will go into effect July 1, 2021 (SB823, 2020). County probation departments will now be faced with determining how to provide adequate programming to a new population type of serious offender that includes adults in the age range of 18 to 25 years old. This places pressure on smaller county agencies to either find a cost-effective solution to modify their current facilities and programs or send this population to other county agencies. This research project analyzes the impact of SB823 on a sample of smaller counties.

Learning from the Experiences of Other Organizations through Cross-case Analysis

Chapter 4 of Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model offers examples of practice research that employ cross-case comparisons in order to identify practice implications and enable senior managers to identify innovations for application to their own organizations. The key steps are described, including the dialogue and negotiation process that involves the university researcher with the practice community of agency administrators. The first study described in the chapter examined welfare reform implementation by county agencies, based on interviews with social service agency staff and consumers, as well as documents relevant to each program or practice. The second study focused on organizational knowledge-sharing processes in county agencies, while the third study explored organizational growth and resilience among nonprofit organizations. Practice research principles generated by the projects relate to generalizability limitations, data source triangulation and timeliness, and case study context.

Zouping Revisited

This book describes how one local government in China has governed a much larger and vastly more complex market economy without any outward changes in the formal institutions of government. The chapters document the subtle but profound changes in the way that established governing bodies operate in practice. Drawing on local fieldwork conducted over many years in a single county, the chapters describe the ways that county agencies have evolved through ad hoc bureaucratic adaptations that have profoundly altered the way that government organs operate. This was not a locality that enjoyed remarkable resource endowments or geographical advantages, yet it advanced from average levels of development to become one of the nation’s wealthiest counties. Economic progress was fragile and far from unilinear, however: some townships that made the most rapid early progress have fallen behind, while some of the poorest townships are now among the richest. Chapters on administrative financing, business-government relations, and the non-judicial interpreters of “legality” and the development of law provides new insights into the way that local government has both shaped and responded to these developments. The picture that emerges is one of institutional agility and adaptiveness in a political regime that has proven to be highly resilient in support of local economic advancement.