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Organization
IJJTF Board
AIM Board
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History
The foundation for AIM was laid during the summer of
1995. At the time, Roger Jarjoura was teaching a service
learning course on juvenile justice at IUPUI. His students
were providing some programming to juvenile offenders at the Indiana
Boys’ School (now officially known as the Plainfield Juvenile
Correctional Facility) as a requirement of the course. He and
his students became aware of two facts:
1.
The boys were being released from the facility without having
developed a plan for their life after incarceration (How does that
saying go: those failing to plan are planning to fail!).
2. Many of the boys were coming back to the
facility within a relatively short period of time after getting back
into trouble. Modeled loosely after the Adolescent Diversion
Project, in which Michigan
State University undergraduate students provided assistance to
first-time offenders and realized a significant impact, AIM was
designed to use college students as mentors to facilitate the
successful transition of juvenile offenders back to the community
We took a year to plan out the program.
During that time, we:
A
designed, adapted and tested out a life skills curriculum with five
different groups of boys
A
identified two boys to pilot the mentoring component with, paying
careful attention to the kinds of issues and needs that would
present themselves in the post-release period.
A
formed an advisory
group comprised of IUPUI students and boys that had recently been
released from the Plainfield facility—this group was charged with
helping to ensure that the program would be attractive to both the
youths and the college students who would serve as mentors, and they
settled on the name of the program, AIM
By the fall semester of 1996, we had settled on a
model for the program, worked out a partnership with the Indiana
Department of Correction (DOC), and recruited our first group of
mentors. Beginning in August of that year, we had ten mentors
serving 15 young men being released from the Plainfield facility.
During the fall of 1996, we also designed and
implemented a rigorous evaluation of AIM. We created a process
to randomly assign the youths to one of three treatment conditions:
the full AIM program; only AIM support prior to their release, but
not after; or no contact with AIM at all. During the entire
calendar year of 1997 we maintained this strategy. This design
has served us well as we now have over four years of follow-up data
on hand that effectively demonstrates that AIM makes a significant
difference in the likelihood of reincarceration.
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1998, we
opened up AIM to all youths returning to the
Indianapolis area from the Plainfield facility—if they
were interested in having assistance, they were eligible
to receive services. In the summer of that year,
we introduced a new strategy of team mentoring.
Mentors were assigned to teams and so were the youths.
This
allowed for a somewhat more natural selection process to
take place, as the youths were able to figure out which
of several mentors they could best related to. It also
meant that there was more continuity for the kids, so
that if one mentor left the program, there would still
be the maintenance of a core personality among the
team. With this new strategy in place, we went from
maintaining a roster of about 20 mentees at a time to a
list of 120 at any given time.
In
October 1998, we hosted a luncheon at the
Madame
Walker Theatre to kick off a campaign to raise public
awareness about AIM and to raise money for the program.
The luncheon featured keynote speaker Judy O’Bannon and
the debut of our self-produced video on reentry from the
youth’s perspective. It was at this time that we also
entered into an arrangement with OAR (Offender Aid and
Restoration) to become the organizational home for AIM.
Over the next several months we would work closely with
members of the faith community to build up support for
the program.
In
the spring of 1999, we created a plan to expand AIM
throughout the state. During the summer of that year,
we entered into the first of several contracts we would
have with the DOC. This allowed us to hire our first
full-time staff member, our program manager. This also
led to the dissolution of our partnership with OAR.
In early 2000, we applied for funding from AmeriCorps.
We were successful in securing the funding and by
September of that year, we introduced our aftercare
coordinators into the facilities. It coincided with the
expansion of AIM to all 9 juvenile correctional
facilities. We also offered mentors to youths returning
to the Gary, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and Kokomo
regions. In the fall of that year, we also were
successful in our bid to secure a larger contract with
DOC. This allowed us to develop new staff positions for
recruiting, training, and our facility coordinators.
After a pilot effort at establishing a Support Center
earlier in the year, we opened our permanent Support
Center at its current location at the Lockerbie Square
United Methodist Church.
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