Evidence

Why we say evidence‑informed, and not evidence‑based.

Those two terms are not the same thing, and the difference matters. This page explains exactly what this program is built on, what the research behind each piece actually says, including the research on faith, what we measure, and what we do not claim.

The short version. Every component of this curriculum comes from an approach with established research support. The program itself has not yet been independently evaluated. Until it has been, calling it evidence‑based would be an overclaim, so we do not.

The distinction

One describes what you built from. The other describes what you proved.

Evidence-informed

What we are

The program is designed around components that research has repeatedly shown to work with justice-involved young people. The reasoning is transparent, the components are named, and the design can be examined by anybody who wants to.

Evidence-based

What we are not, yet

That term means this specific program has been studied against a comparison group by an independent evaluator, with results that hold up. That work has not been done here. It is on the roadmap below, with a timeline and a partner, and we will not use the term before it is earned.

Every number on this page is about somebody in a room on a Tuesday.

Five foundations

What each piece is built on, and what we did about it.

For each one: what the research consistently finds, and the specific design decision it produced in this curriculum.

01 Cognitive-behavioral principles

What the research finds. Across decades of meta-analysis on juvenile justice programming, approaches that work on how a young person thinks, decides and solves problems consistently outperform approaches built on deterrence, surveillance or discipline. Programs in the therapeutic and skill-building family show reductions in reoffending; programs built on fear and control generally do not, and several show no effect at all.

What we do about it. The curriculum teaches thinking patterns directly. Participants learn to catch the story their mind writes in the seconds before a decision, to identify the specific thought that precedes an escalation, and to work backward from an outcome to the four smaller decisions that produced it. This is taught as education and skill practice, not as clinical treatment.

02 Trauma-informed practice

What the research finds. Exposure to violence and loss in childhood is strongly associated with later health, behavioral and justice outcomes, and rates of exposure among justice-involved youth are far higher than in the general population. Federal guidance on trauma-informed approaches centers on realizing how widespread trauma is, recognizing its signs, responding by building it into practice, and actively avoiding re-traumatization.

What we do about it. The program teaches young people what their own nervous system is doing and why. Hypervigilance, numbing, sleep disruption and self-medication are explained as adaptations that once made sense, rather than as defects. Written reflection is never required to be shared aloud, several prompts are answered privately and never collected, and any disclosure of harm routes immediately to on-call staff rather than to a referring officer.

03 Social and emotional learning

What the research finds. Structured social-emotional learning shows measurable effects on behavior, conduct problems and academic outcomes, with effects that persist well after programs end. The widely used framework organizes it into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making.

What we do about it. Those five competencies map directly onto the twenty three weeks. Identity and self-awareness open the program. Emotional regulation, conflict and decision-making sit in the middle. Relationship skills, family engagement, mentorship and service carry the back half. It is sequenced deliberately, not assembled as a list of topics.

04 Sustained relationship and consistency

What the research finds. In mentoring research, the length and consistency of the relationship is one of the strongest predictors of whether it helps at all. Relationships that end early can leave a young person worse off than no match. Programs with clear structure, training and support for mentors produce better outcomes than informal arrangements.

What we do about it. Twenty three weeks, not a workshop. Mentors complete Level 2 background screening and training before placement, the same young person is expected to see the same faces, and the relationship is designed to continue past the final week. The program is explicit that consistency, not charisma, is what changes anybody.

05 Dosage, sequencing and fidelity

What the research finds. Two things separate programs that work from identical-looking programs that do not: how much of it a young person actually receives, and whether it was delivered the way it was designed. Weak implementation can erase the effect of an otherwise sound model, which is why implementation quality is measured alongside content.

What we do about it. Every session, every completed week and every documented hour is recorded per participant against an append-only ledger that cannot be edited after the fact. Attendance, progress and hours are separated by category. That produces exactly the dosage and delivery data an evaluator asks for first, and most programs cannot produce it.

06 Faith as a protective factor

What the research finds. This is one of the more consistently replicated findings in criminology, and one of the least discussed. A systematic review of forty studies found that most reported an inverse relationship between religious involvement and delinquency. A separate meta-analysis of sixty studies reached the same conclusion, and found that the studies with the largest and most representative samples were the most likely to find the effect, not the least. A more recent meta-analysis covering sixty two studies and over one hundred ninety thousand adolescents confirmed the same direction.

What we do about it. Faith is not an add-on at the end of this curriculum. Every lesson closes on it, because the research and our own years of doing this point the same way: what changes behavior durably is a change in who somebody believes they are, and that is the thing faith addresses directly.

Research tells you what tends to work. It does not tell you who showed up.

Design decisions

Six things in here that exist because of what the research says.

Duration

Twenty three weeks

Long enough for dosage to matter, structured so a young person who moves between custody, home and online does not restart.

Sequence

Identity before behavior

Self-awareness comes first because the later weeks on conflict, anger and decisions depend on it. The order is the intervention.

Practice

One action every week

Every lesson ends with a single specific thing to do before the next session. Skills that are only discussed do not transfer.

Privacy

Work nobody reads

Fifty four prompts across the program are answered privately and never collected. Honesty depends on knowing who can see it.

Safety

Disclosure routing

Anything indicating risk goes to on-call staff, never to a referring officer, and that routing cannot be switched off.

Consistency

Same people, same day

The relationship is the mechanism. Everything else is the reason for the room.

What we can prove, and what we are still measuring.

The faith factor

This program is Christ-centered, and the research on that is stronger than most people assume.

We would run it this way regardless. But since the question gets asked, here is what the peer-reviewed literature actually shows, including the parts that cut against us.

The effect is strongest exactly where our youth live

The study. Johnson, Larson, Li and Jang, published in Justice Quarterly, analyzed interview data from 2,358 young Black men living in poverty tracts in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. Church attendance showed significant inverse effects on illegal activity, drug use and drug selling among disadvantaged youth.

The same team's work on what they called the invisible institution examined the Black church as an agency of local social control in neighborhoods where most other institutions had left.

Why it matters here. Much research on youth risk is drawn from general population samples. This one was drawn from young men in exactly the circumstances our participants are in, in cities that look like ours.

Showing up mattered more than saying you believe

The finding. In that same study, attendance produced the significant protective effects. Religious salience, meaning how important a young person said religion was to him, did not by itself.

Why it matters here. That is a finding we take seriously rather than skip past. It says that being in the room, in community, consistently, does something that stated belief alone does not. It is the single strongest research argument for a twenty three week program with the same people on the same day, rather than a message delivered once.

The mechanism appears to be identity, not rule-following

The work. A three year study inside Louisiana State Penitentiary examined a prison seminary and inmate minister program, published by Hallett, Hays, Johnson, Jang and Duwe with Routledge. Using survey data and life history interviews, it documented identity transformation and religiously motivated desistance, and found the religion and misconduct relationship was mediated by change in self-identity rather than by behavior management.

Why it matters here. It matches what this curriculum is built on. Behavior modification produces compliance while somebody is watching. A change in who a person believes he is produces something that holds when nobody is.

The federal juvenile justice office funded research on this

The context. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention funded a multidisciplinary program at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion specifically to study the role of religious practice, belief and congregations in promoting prosocial behavior among young people.

Why it matters here. The question of whether faith belongs in juvenile justice programming is not a fringe one. The federal juvenile justice agency itself paid to study it.

The honest part

What that research does not prove, and where it has been challenged.

Anybody can quote the studies that help them. Here are the limitations, because a page that only cites the good news is not worth reading.

Most of it is correlational

These studies establish a consistent association between religious involvement and lower delinquency. Association is not proof of cause, and researchers in this field say so themselves.

Selection effects are real

Young people who choose faith may already differ in ways that predict better outcomes. Good studies control for what they can. None of them fully solve it.

The best known faith-based evaluation was criticized on exactly this

A Texas prison program reported that its graduates reoffended at far lower rates than a matched comparison group. A prominent criminologist pointed out that the finding counted graduates rather than everybody who enrolled, and that any program measured only by the people who finish it will look effective. That critique is fair, and it is a reason we will report on everybody who starts, not only on the ones who complete.

Faith is not a shield against everything

At least one study of youth in highly disordered communities found the protective effect of religiosity was not strong enough to counter the environmental pressure around them. That fits what we see. It is why this program is faith plus consistent relationships plus skills plus documented structure, rather than faith alone.

None of it evaluates this program

Everything above is research on religious involvement and on other programs. It supports the design. It says nothing yet about whether the Youth Intervention Program works, which is the whole reason we do not use the term evidence-based.

Nobody is required to believe anything

Participation is never conditioned on a young person's faith, and nobody is penalized for having none. Every referring officer, school and family is told this program is Christ-centered before anybody enrolls.

Measurement

What we track now, and what comes next.

Collected today

Implementation and participation

Attendance by session and by delivery track
Weeks completed per participant
Documented hours, separated by category, on an append-only ledger
Time from referral to first contact, against a two business day standard
Disengagement flagged at seven and fourteen days
Completion and certification

Being built

Outcomes

Pre and post measures using public-domain instruments, given in week one and week twenty three
A recidivism definition agreed with the Department, with a shared start date and a data agreement
An independent academic evaluation partner
A written logic model and delivery manual so the program can be replicated and checked

Outcome measurement cannot be done retroactively, which is why the instruments go in before the claims do. When there are findings, they will be published here whether or not they are flattering.

Boundaries

What we do not claim.

Being clear about this protects the young people in the program, the agencies that refer them, and the credibility of everything else on this page.

This is not therapy

The program is non-clinical education and mentoring. Staff do not diagnose, treat or provide counseling. When a young person needs clinical care, we refer to a licensed provider and document the referral.

This is not CBT, TF-CBT or a certified model

The curriculum uses cognitive-behavioral principles in an educational format. It is not Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, not Trauma-Focused CBT, and not any trademarked or certified intervention. We do not use those names for what we deliver.

This is not evidence-based

No independent outcome evaluation of this program exists yet. Anybody who tells you a program is evidence-based should be able to name the study. We cannot, so we do not say it.

This is not a substitute for supervision or treatment

Participation does not replace probation conditions, court-ordered treatment, or any clinical service a young person has been referred to.

We do not promise outcomes

We do not tell a family that this changes a life, and we do not tell a young person that finishing means they are finished. What we can honestly offer is structure, skills, consistency and people.

This is Christ-centered, and we say so up front

The program is openly faith-based, and every referring officer, partner and family is told that before anybody enrolls. Nothing about that is hidden in the paperwork or discovered in week six.

Questions

Ask us anything on this page.

If you work for an agency, a school or a funder and you want to see the curriculum itself, the implementation data we collect, or the measurement plan, we will show you. Email [email protected] or use the contact page.