Juvenile Justice System Information-Sharing Tool Kit

Anyone concerned about sharing information about juveniles in the justice system -- and if you're a probation officer, evaluator, policy maker, or program developer, you should be -- will want to get hold of this new tool kit from the Models for Change initiative.
Authored by the Child Welfare League of America and the Juvenile Law Center and underwritten by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the tool kit articulates the "principles that govern information and data sharing including legal, constitutional and ethical concerns; and the use of aggregate data to best inform practice."
But what kind of information-sharing are we talking about? All kinds: you'll find the kit is covers information-sharing for three different purposes:

1. Individual case planning and decision-making
2. Data collection and sharing for law, policy and program development
3. Data collection and sharing for program evaluation and performance measurement

Although the tool kit is available in a printed form with a CD, you can now download the kit here -- it'll come in a Zip archive if you download the whole thing at once. But hold your horses: to get the actual tool kit, you'll have to fill out a form first. That's a good thing, because Models for Change will then send you information about a webinar series planned for the spring of 2011 based on the tool kit.
Once you download the kit, you'll find a huge amount of helpful material, including information on relevant federal law, mapping tools, examples of state statutes, memoranda of understanding, and parental consent and youth assent forms.
To get an idea of what you'll get, check out the table of contents here. You'll see very quickly that this tool kit is not for lightweights: doing it right takes time. So while you're at it, here's a few more resources on the topic of information-sharing in the juvenile justice system you might find useful:

• A post where you'll find a link to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Information Sharing to Prevent Juvenile Delinquency Project.
• A guest post from Lourdes Rosado of the Juvenile Law Center (and one of the authors of the Models for Change Tool Kit) on protecting juveniles from self-incrimination - you can even download a guide from the Juvenile Law Center.
• Watch a recorded webinar with Ms. Rosado on protecting youth in the juvenile justice system from self-incrimination. 
• A post discussing types of information to be shared with youth and their families -- and some consequences of leaving an information gap.