Reconnecting Youth: Beyond Individualized Programs and Risks

Abstract

Presently in the United States, cognitive behavioral approaches are thought to be one of the most effective ways to intervene in the lives of young people in trouble with the law. However, such individualized approaches to youth in trouble with the law, and the risk-based logics that accompany them, say some, often ignore the relationships that young people have with caregivers, as well as the broader social ecological, economic and political contexts within which those relationships develop. Once the individual change work is completed, young people must have productive roles and supportive relationships to return to, especially if we want youth justice practice to translate into justice for youth. Given that meaningful attachments with others serve as the primary context within which individuals learn to regulate emotions and behaviors, youth justice policy and practice ought to seek to repair the capacity to attach and relate –and broader social policy reforms must address the social and economic inequalities that make the adversity and harm that undermine that capacity more likely. In this article, we discuss the limitations of over-relying on skills-based therapies and examine how the neglect of social, material and relational contexts can undermine the meaning and effectiveness of youth justice interventions. Following this, we describe how a youth justice system that attends to relational needs and structural inequalities might better meet the needs of young people.

Child First and the end of ‘bifurcation’ in youth justice?

“…Almost inevitably, a particular practical model of punitive youth justice rose to prominence in England and Wales, namely, a neo-correctionalist risk management animated by the evidence-based” Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm (RFPP), an actuarial vehicle for crime prevention, driven by the identification, prediction and targeting of criminogenic deficits, typically psychosocial “risk factors” predictive of future offending (Case and Haines, 2021). Subsequently, risk management shaped westernised, anglophone youth justice policies and strategies, “effective practice” guidance and “what works” responses, in England and Wales (Case, 2021), North America (Myers et al , 2021) and Australasia, superseding previous bifurcation and conflict/ambivalence through its totalitarian reconstruction of (often) innocent, vulnerable children/young people who offend into a catchall category of risky and dangerous “young offenders”.…”

Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice

“…The inter-related neo-liberal strategies of responsibilisation and correctionalism enabled Western governments, working in tandem with a hegemonic group of developmentally minded academic researchers [2], to simultaneously blame children (often disproportionately) for their own exposure to criminogenic influences and to restrict the empirical lens of evidence generation to individualised factors. The corollary of this deliberate reduction of the explanatory evidence-base was the downplaying of the complexity involved in exploring the impact of a broader range of contextual criminogenic factors-structural, political, economic (to compound matters, there is also a history in criminological research and its associated "evidence-based" risk assessment tools of reconstructing and reducing macro influences such as socio-economic deprivation and social marginalisation as individualised risk factors [43,44], cultural, historical, interactional and situational influences [3,23,45] Therefore, a paradox of reductionism began to shape the application of EBP internationally-a necessary, yet potentially invalidating (over) simplification of explanations of offending that offered "an ostensibly neat and coherent approach to the messy and ill-defined complexities of practice" [33].…”

“…Breadth-RFR has perpetuated a decontextualised and responsibilising focus on individualised, psychosocial domains of life when exploring and purportedly identifying the origins of offending, rather than examining potential contextualised criminogenic influences such as situations, relationships, interactions, system contact, demographic characteristics, individual constructions of personal experiences and a multiplicity of economic, political and socio-structural factors [45,61,77]. This decontextualisation has been exacerbated in the past decade by the (re)emerging North American evidence-base of biological (quasi) positivism promoting the predictive and criminogenic influence of "low resting heart rate" as a key risk factor for offending, with the associated causal mechanisms identified as impulsive sensation seeking, fearlessness and the need for physiological arousal [78][79][80]; • Validity-when practice employs the RFPP, children are filtered and conceptualised through actuarial social categories or (latterly) emerging algorithmic data patterns [77], rather than explanations informed by individual, constructed identities [49].…”

The sociological landscape of youth confinement

“…The legacies of the post-war approach can be seen in contemporary juvenile justice institutions in the United States, which are largely dominated by a token economy system that employs rewards and consequences for young people's behavior, as well as a wide range of behavioral intervention programs (Sankofa et al, 2017). Contemporary systems in Australia, the US, UK, and Scandinavian countries largely employ cognitive behavioral change curricula which are organized around improving the executive functioning of young adults in custody via direct and targeted interventions, such as in their "thinking errors, " or minimization strategies (Gradin Franzén, 2014;Halsey, 2007a;Myers et al, 2020;Sankofa et al, 2017). These programs emerged in response to the prevailing sentiment that the psychoanalytic and group treatment strategies of the post-War era were not sufficiently leading to improved outcomes in prisons, and were time consuming and costly (Duguid, 2000;Morash, 1981).…”