Actuarial risk/needs assessments exert a formidable influence over the policy and practice of youth offender intervention. Risk-prediction instruments and the programming they inspire are thought not only to link scholarship to practice, but are deemed evidencebased. However, risk-based assessments and programs display a number of troubling characteristics: they reduce the lived experience of racialized inequality into an elevated risk score; they prioritize a very limited set of hyper-individualistic interventions, at the expense of others; and they privilege narrow individual-level outcomes as proof of overall success. As currently practiced, actuarial youth justice replicates earlier interventions that ask young people to navigate structural causes of crime at the individual level, while laundering various racialized inequalities at the root of violence and criminalization. This iteration of actuarial youth justice is not inevitable, and we discuss alternatives to actuarial youth justice as currently practiced.

While the neo-liberal drift towards ‘responsibilizing’ youth justice programs and policies has been explored extensively in the literature, the lived realities of another aspect of the neo-liberal turn – welfare retrenchment – have been given much less attention. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with detained girls in the USA, this article explores what ‘welfare inaction’ means in the context of the lives of young women in trouble with the law. While gendered tropes about self-sufficiency and individualized empowerment may provide young women with the grammar by which to articulate self-reliance, the absence of welfare supports seemed the most important mechanism for offloading responsibility on to them and shaping what justice system intervention meant for them.

Criminologists around the globe are writing about the disproportionate criminalization of minority groups and-in the US in particular-about racial disproportionality in all aspects of the criminal justice system. This wealth of knowledge in progressive criminology rarely animates reform efforts: it has had little impact on formal policymaking, and has failed to animate the work of grassroots activists engaged in the fight for justice system reform. Yet given the increased criminalization of young people in poor communities-and the possibilities for change at this very moment-progressive criminological ideas have never been more important. We need to think about ways to make them public. Toward this end, this paper discusses possible partnerships between progressive criminology and social justice organizations struggling to transform the criminal justice system. While describing nine such groups, we detail a set of recommendations for bridging the gap between progressive criminology and social justice organizations.