Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

I went with the team to Elizabethtown, Tennessee, and we had just launched a program.

We got some grant funding from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which is a Department of Justice program.

And it's all about how can we create interventions in the development of youth that enable them to step onto and stay onto a path of positive development and achievement and not fall off of that path and end up making other choices.

So this meant youth mentoring program was really focused on central Appalachian communities that have been particularly hard hit by the opioid epidemic.

There's a lot of people in a lot of industries that have a lot to offer, but they don't realize it.

I was talking to somebody from OJJDP yesterday.

We're talking about youth incarcerated, incarcerated youth.

And we see our caring adults thinking they need to show up with this mask that kind of looks like the kid.

And so, um, it's an amazing task force.

Uh, and it's funded by, uh, OJJDP, and, um-

And tell everybody what that is

...

which I then transitioned into a position at the University of Arkansas.

Worked a lot with the different government agencies, including the Bureau of Justice, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, to primarily focus on community dynamics around how crime shapes both the reactions by law enforcement agencies and risk for different actors in those communities, whether that's religious organizations, retail industry leaders, hospitals, and civic organizations as well.

And then I took that expertise over to CAP Index a few years ago, where I became the vice president of crime risk modeling.

So again, very securitist route to get here.