This study seeks to identify the effects of travel distance on treatment noncompletion for juveniles attending community-based offender programs.
Methods:
A population of more than 6,000 juvenile offenders adjudicated in Philadelphia’s Family Court is analyzed using hierarchical linear models. Distance to treatment is operationalized with Euclidean distance. Treatment noncompletion is disaggregated by type to distinguish between noncompletion due to dropout and expulsion.
Results:
Results indicate that distance to treatment influences noncompletion due to dropout, but not due to expulsion. In the cross-classified models, an increase of approximately 3 miles to treatment is shown to increase the odds of treatment noncompletion due to dropout by nearly 100 percent.
Conclusions:
Implications of this research suggest that Euclidean distance is an appropriate measure with which to estimate the travel of young offenders in urban space and that juvenile justice policymakers should consider distance to treatment when matching young offenders to treatment facilities.
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