Research brief

Abstract

Background: Actuarial assessments have a longstanding history within the criminal legal system. These assessments provide important information about the individuals being served to practitioners, guiding evidence-informed decisions about treatment, supervision, and confinement. Detention assessments (one subset of criminal legal system assessments) provide court officials with an understanding of the risk an individual poses to the community, helping them make evidence informed decisions about community supervision or, if necessary, placement into a correctional facility. While various detention assessments exist, the North Carolina Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (NC JJDP) relies on the Detention Assessment Tool (DAT) to guide these decisions.

The DAT is an evidence-informed actuarial assessment designed to help juvenile justice and juvenile court counselors decide if a youth should be detained before, during, or after trial. The DAT relies on both static and dynamic factors to develop a detention recommendation. An example of a static factor, one not subject to change, is “prior adjudication for AE felony”, while an example of a dynamic factor, one that could be subject to change, is “currently under the influence