Intake & Assessment

The Intake and Assessment Center is the product of a collaborative effort between the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office and the Clackamas County Juvenile Department.

The Intake and Assessment Center is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The primary focus is to accept youth that police have in custody, assess their immediate needs, and arrange for their release to a parent, guardian, responsible adult or other community agency. The assessment of the youth's needs include finding out if the youth has a prior juvenile record, has mental health issues, is a victim of child abuse or has drug and alcohol problems. When the youth is released from the Intake and Assessment Center, the family typically knows whether the matter is being referred to the Juvenile Department, assigned to a Diversion Counselor or being diverted to a community agency.

Other important functions that occur at the Intake and Assessment Center are:

• Referrals to community resources - when parents pick up their youth, the counselors always try to refer them to a resource that best fits the needs of the youth/family, such as counseling, mediation or drug/alcohol assessment.
• Given that the Center is open on a 24 hour basis, the counselors are also available to answer phone calls from both youth and parents and provide consultation/referrals to agencies for all segments of the community.
• The Center also provides a central information system for police agencies. The police can call any time to find out whether a particular youth is active, at any level, with the juvenile justice system and if so, who the juvenile counselor is, what the conditions of the youth's release or probation are, etc.
• The law mandates that all youth who are taken into custody for a law violation must be fingerprinted and photographed. The Center has state of the art equipment and provide this service for all Clackamas County police agencies.