Models for Change, a project designed to make juvenile justice more effective by creating reform models that both hold offenders accountable and provide for their rehabilitation, will receive an additional $60 million in support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The foundation recently announced that it is boosting its total support of the project to $100 million, including providing $10 million in funding to juvenile-justice reform efforts in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana, and Washington. Programs developed under Models for Change include reforms addressing racial and ethnic disparities, mental health, alternatives to incarceration, aftercare, indigent defense, transfers to adult court, and integration of the juvenile-justice, mental-health, and child-welfare systems.

Funding also will go to projects focusing specifically on mental-health needs of juvenile offenders and the overrepresentation of minorities in the juvenile-justice system. "A juvenile justice system that considers each young person as an individual, offers alternatives to incarceration for those who do not pose a threat to society, and emphasizes rehabilitative options is sensible public policy," said MacArthur Foundation president Jonathan Fanton.