The Community Corrections Partnership: Examining the Long-Term Effects of Youth Participation in an Afrocentric Diversion Program

Using Afrocentric techniques has recently emerged as a promising way of delivering services to African Americans. Briefly, a number of authors have argued that African Americans are better served, especially by substance abuse services, when service delivery utilizes Afrocentric techniques. This study reports an evaluation of an Afrocentric treatment program for male, juvenile, felony offenders in one city. The evaluation uses a two-group, quasi-experimental design to compare the 281 African American youths in the Afrocentric treatment program (called the Community Corrections Partnership) with a comparison group of 140 probation youths. Overall, the youths assigned to the Afrocentric treatment program performed slightly better than the probationers on 4 out of 15 measures of juvenile and adult criminality.