Can Pre-Arrest Diversion Programs Reduce Recidivism of Youth Who Use Domestic Violence?: Findings from Longitudinal Data Analysis In Florida

Background and significance:

Florida’s juvenile pre-arrest diversion programs, called Prearrest Delinquency Citation (PDC) programs, are highly successful at reducing formal system contact for youth charged with first-time, misdemeanor offenses. Despite decades of its statewide implementation, utilization rates remain low for youth charged with domestic violence, who account for more than 10% of first-time misdemeanors in Florida. While statutes allow law enforcement agencies to use discretion in determining youth’s eligibility to be diverted, differences in agency-level acceptance, law enforcement perceptions, awareness and confidence in services available makes it difficult to exercise consistency in utilizing the potential of PDC. Thus, we analyze longitudinal data to gain insights on how the PDC affected recidivism rates in the state.

Methods:

Administrative records from Florida Department of Juvenile Justice from 2011-2024 were obtained. This data included youth demographics, neighborhood residence at the time of the offense, offense characteristics, referral history, and law enforcement agency responsible for PDC or referral. From the total number of youth provided with PDC services, 14.7% had a DV charge. Upon removing out-of-state and missing addresses, we derived the analytical pool (N=29,511) of youth charged with DV. Recidivism was operationalized three ways, including one that was aligned with DJJ’s definition i.e., adjudication or conviction within one year of PDC. Using quasi-experimental design, both entropy balancing and inverse probability weighting were used to construct balanced samples using the available youth and contextual controls for observed and unobserved differences in youth characteristics. High-utilization agency-years were defined as those administering PDCs in at least 95% of eligible cases, others as low-utilization agency-years.

Findings:

Receiving PDC was consistently associated with reduced recidivism, ranging from 32.2% to 49.5% reductions, across different definitions of recidivism. We compared predictions for formally referred youth (A) and those who were cited (B) in terms of committing newer domestic violence offenses within a year leading to adjudication or conviction cases (A: 8.19%, B: 4.61%). This corresponded with our predicted probabilities for the youth to have another contact with the system at any time (A: 14.44%, B: 10.26%). We also restricted consideration to all youth processed in high-and low-utilization agencies for domestic violence offenses to minimize selection effects introduced by unobserved youth and case characteristics. Magnitude of this effect varied; the largest reduction observed when estimating recidivism resulting in an adjudication or conviction (OR=.420***) and the smallest for system contact for any offense type (OR=.613***), but the coefficient difference was not statistically significant.

Implications:

Findings indicate that pre-arrest diversion significantly reduces general and domestic violence recidivism for justice involved youth, challenging the standard practice of formal processing for domestic violence cases. Youth domestic and family violence reflects a heterogenous set of behaviors including adolescent to parent, sibling violence and dating violence, shaped by developmental, relational, and contextual factors that are not captured by traditional IPV offense-based policies. Considering such complexity of youth involvement in FDV and the inconsistency of PDC implementation, policies must reimagine juvenile justice responses that expand access to diversion based on developmentally appropriate, person-centered criteria rather than categorical exclusions.