Numerous scholars have observed that neo-liberal rationalities have resulted in the replacement of interventionist State-run welfare initiatives with community-based risk managing schemes in a process called responsibilization. These risk management policies have become influential in the domain of crime prevention and in the shaping of the future conduct of the 'at-risk' youth. This article details, ethnographically, the goals and activities of 10 responsibilized community-based organizations and the conceptualization of 'risk' by practitioners from these organizations. The findings suggest that social abandonment and surveillance-centered risk management schemes co-exist with welfarist notions. The findings have implications about whether crime prevention is as post-welfarist as some theorists maintain.

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.

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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.

This article offers a descriptive analysis of the youth crime prevention and intervention strategies of three community-based organizations in the western United States. The article first identifies shared philosophies and practices of organizations that orient to crime as a product of social injustice. It then casts light on the broader issues of cultural resonance and specific governmental hindrances faced by organizations, including how the tracking of performance measures and market-based funding schemes impact the actual operation of community approaches. Through this analysis, the article sketches some of the key elements needed for constructing a theoretical framework to explain how neo-liberal forces may lead to the proliferation or demise of organizations working to create a progressive alternative to United States-style youth justice.