The Renewing Arizona Family Traditions program responds to the needs of Arizona's youth and families by providing intensive, family-oriented services to court referred youth. This report reviews the successes as well as the opportunities for growth within the RAFT program and examines the program through a presentation of the data collected by the Administrative Office of the Courts through its contract providers and other sources. The data is recorded by provider agencies and their respective regions and includes intake and discharge/outcome information.

The data for this report are extracted each year from fourteen juvenile courts’ Juvenile On-Line Tracking Systems. JOLTS is the automated juvenile court information management system. After using JOLTS for more than 25 years, July 1, 2008, Maricopa County upgraded to their new Integrated Court Information System. Each juvenile court actively participates in collecting and maintaining the data to ensure quality and accuracy. This report provides an overview of the juveniles processed at various stages of the juvenile justice system statewide.

By February of 1998, the Deloitte Consulting firm was under contract with the State of Arizona and had embarked upon what would become an extensive ten-month evaluation of the primary components of Arizona’s Juvenile Justice System. The main focus of the audit from the beginning was the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Juvenile Justice Services Division, the juvenile courts and their probation departments, and the Department of Juvenile Corrections. As part of the audit, both financial and program audits were conducted related to prevention, diversion (early intervention), probation and treatment. In December of 1998, Deloitte Consulting issued its final report to the Committee. The report, which consisted of hundreds of pages of detailed findings, concluded that “It is our assessment that the Arizona Juvenile Justice System is one of the best in the nation.”

In the Valley, developing viable long-term transit from where we are currently will be very difficult if key
components continue to remain unaligned. Thus, before getting to the primary purpose of this report, it is important to first establish the players and basic considerations relevant to the effectiveness of a transit system.

Few would dispute that the Phoenix metropolitan area is severely lacking in terms of mass-transit compared to other similarly sized and configured cities. The Valley’s fleet of roughly 400 buses is about one-third of the service found in San Diego, Atlanta, and Seattle. In addition, most of Phoenix’ peer regions either already have, or are planning rail systems. Of the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., only six -- Phoenix included -- do not currently have or are not planning to add rail to their transit system.

Believing that voters might support transit if they felt like an integral part of the transit proposal decision-making process, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce's Valleywide Transit Task Force set out in early 1995 to initiate a bottom-up process which would enable people to say, "here's what we want." The Task Force agreed that the first step in the process was to initiate a new dialogue. the Morrison Institute for Public Policy was asked to write a briefing paper, which would re-invigorate the transit debate. The resulting report, "Transit in the Valley: Where Do We Go From Here?" painted a bleak picture of the Valley's existing transit system and challenged many long-held conventional wisdoms. The dialogue had begun. The report was then presented to the citizens of 17 Valley cities and towns for their consideration in 16 public meetings sponsored by cities and their local Chambers of Commerce. In community forums conducted between October 1996 and February 1997, more than 500 Valley residents discussed the Valley's transit future. This document summarizes the questionnaire responses by 501 people who attended the forums.

This report brings together the results of a survey of 1100 homeless people living in and around downtown Phoenix in 1996 with the results of a similar survey conducted in 1983. In addition to providing a snapshot of the homeless population in Phoenix, the data and comparative information presented in this report also reveal the complex and intractable nature of the homeless problem in general.

Despite several early attempts in the Arizona Legislature to modify the framework for where the newly-passed Proposition 200 money would go, the four accounts established in the original voter-approved Tobacco Tax and Health Care Act have been maintained as intended since 1995. However, large sums of Proposition 200 revenue – on average $90 million annually – have gone unallocated and unspent by the Legislature.