Research and Reports
Hello Baby is a voluntary program for parents of new babies in Allegheny County designed to strengthen families, improve children’s outcomes, and maximize child and family well-being, safety and security. Hello Baby’s tiered prevention model offers a variety of supports designed to meet families’ varied needs and interests through the child’s third year. This series of reports describes the development and implementation of the program, including a methodology report, FAQs and ethical reviews.
Allegheny County, like many communities across the country, does not have sufficient long-term supportive housing to serve every person or family meeting the criteria for homelessness. As part of an ongoing effort to improve decisions at key points in its systems, Allegheny County worked with local stakeholders, research partners and data science ethicists to develop the Allegheny Housing Assessment (AHA), a decision support tool designed to help prioritize admissions to supportive housing services for individuals or families experiencing homelessness. Available documents include a methodology report, FAQs and independent ethical review.
This report describes women in the Allegheny County criminal justice system with a goal of better understanding the population by exploring their demographics and human services history. The analysis describes women at three stages in the criminal justice system: women who had criminal filings, women booked into the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ), and women released from the ACJ.
Throughout the United States, people experiencing behavioral health challenges are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and Allegheny County is no exception. To better understand the state of our current system and to learn more about promising approaches in other jurisdictions, Allegheny County sought an independent evaluator to conduct a study. From among a number of proposers, the county selected researchers from the University of Pittsburgh who interviewed dozens of stakeholders, analyzed justice system data, examined models from other jurisdictions, and solicited feedback through a series of workshops. Two new reports describe the researchers’ findings and Allegheny County’s summary of the key findings and recommendations.
