Workforce Management in Mississippi Juvenile Detention Facilities

The Mississippi Statistical Analysis Center (MS-SAC) is proposing a 12-month project to continue the efforts started under the FY 2018 SAC award to create an electronic repository of juvenile arrest data for the state of Mississippi. As the project determined, there is great disparity among the state’s juvenile corrections facility framework with regard to budgeting, expenditures, morale of officers, capacities for technological improvements, and training. The FY 2021 project will examine these issues and provide the data needed to make infrastructure improvements and improve the morale of staff. An assessment of Mississippi’s 15 Juvenile detention facilities will be conducted in three stages. The first component consists of an employee survey which collects demographic information pertaining to multiple variables that can be helpful in redefining workforce management strategies such as recruitment and employee turnover. The second component will convene a focus group of state juvenile detention managers and leaders in order to ascertain specific points of impact which are reflective of the issues uncovered in the 2019 funded grant, "Building Capacity: Creating a Repository of Juvenile Arrest Data in Mississippi". The third component is a site analysis of existing infrastructures with regard to technologies and training capacities. None of these research objectives have ever been undertaken with regard to juvenile detention facilities in the state of Mississippi, which the 2019 funded study identified as primitive and decentralized. Deliverables are expected to include multiple monograph publications supported by the university press and communications office, briefings, site-by-site technical reports, and a virtual town hall meeting hosted by MS-SAC.