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.

Keywords

childhood adversity incarcerated children juvenile justice recidivism social justice

Introduction

As of December 2019, over 48,000 youth in the United States are confined in a juvenile detention center, long-term secure facility, residential treatment center, group home, or some other facility away from home (Sawyer, 2019). Among these, 4,535 youth are held in adult prisons or jails (Sawyer, 2019). Of the roughly 43,000 young people confined in juvenile facilities, nearly 20 per cent are locked-up for technical violations or are confined for status offenses, such as running away from home or skipping school (Sawyer, 2019). To put these numbers on youth confinement into some perspective, across all age categories, the US confines over 2.3 million individuals, with nearly 1.3 million persons in US state prisons, 226,000 in federal prisons and jails, and another 631,000 in local or county jails (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). Hence, juveniles make up a relatively small portion of the total number of people locked-up in the United States. This does not mean that system-involved young people necessarily avoid carceral control, as community monitoring and control are widespread and expanding (Cate, 2016).

Nevertheless, the United States confines many fewer youth today than two decades ago. Since the turn of the 21st century, the number of young people held in US facilities has dropped by 54 per cent (Sentencing Project, 2017), paralleling a 70 per cent drop in the United Kingdom since 2009 (Ministry of Justice, 2019). Congruently, the total number of youth ages 0–17 arrested in the United States has declined by 68 per cent from nearly 2.7 million in 1996 to just 856,130 arrested youth in 2016 (Puzzanchera, 2018). Much of this decline has occurred quite recently, as the number of juveniles arrested in 2016 was 58 per cent less than the number arrested 10 years earlier (Puzzanchera, 2018). In comparison, the total arrests of adults fell 20 per cent during this same timeframe. After nearly 40 years of unrelenting increases in confinement numbers, there appears to be a ‘softening’ (so to speak) of the ‘tough on crime’, ‘do the crime, do the time’, philosophy that has guided the crime policy of the United States (and the United Kingdom) for decades.

Shifts in discourse have helped to motor these changes in how many young people enter the system and helped to change what happens to those who do, albeit with important limits (Cox, 2019). For one, policymakers have decried how expensive it is to lock up so many young people. Confining youth in juvenile detention facilities is exceedingly expensive. While it varies from state to state, and locality to locality, many US jurisdictions spend over US$100,000 to detain one juvenile for a single year, with some spending two or even three times that amount (Justice Policy Institute, 2014). For even the ‘toughest’ of policymakers, reducing the size of the youth correctional system was the right thing to do fiscally, particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis strained governmental budgets at the state and local levels.

While perhaps the most important factor, monetary considerations were not the only catalyst. Advances in brain science and technology have helped us better understand how the adolescent mind functions (Bessant, 2008). The US Supreme Court and prosecutors have increasingly acknowledged the differences between youth and adults when processing and sentencing court-involved youth. The Court, for example, decided in 2005 (Roper v. Simmons, 2005) and 2012 (Miller v. Alabama, 2012) to break with precedent and accept as legal evidence what these scientific advances were showing: that children do not have complete impulse control; nor do they have full understandings of the consequences of their actions; they cannot reliably resist peer pressure; and they have reactions that are often stronger or weaker than a situation merits, at least as compared to adults.

As the ‘teenage brain’ and fiscal arguments began to resonate, a third shift was the growing recognition by at least some policymakers that manyserious young offenders have lived lives marked by trauma, abuse, neglect, and tenuous or non-existent attachment to their primary caregivers (Fox et al., 2015). This moment, with its relative openness to social and psychological explanations for youth crime, along with a renewed recognition of the substantial fiscal costs of confining young people, created favorable conditions for reforming the juvenile justice system – a system that has been in perpetual cycles of crisis and reform since its inception (Cox, 2018).

Despite these endless waves of crisis and reform, since its founding, the system has consistently, almost exclusively, aimed its resources at the children of the poor – and the supposed pathologies and deficiencies of their families (Platt, 1977). The total number of youth arrested and detained is indeed down, but race and class disparities in system-involvement remain stark (Gottschalk, 2016). While the United States arrests and confines youth of all races at lower rates than a decade ago, Black youth continue to be overrepresented in these statistics. According to the US Department of Justice’s own FBI data, in 2016, despite representing only 17 per cent of the total population between the ages of 10–17, Black youth accounted for 53 per cent of all juveniles arrested for violent offenses, including 69 per cent of those arrested for robbery, and 38 per cent of those arrested for property offenses (Puzzanchera, 2018). In 2017, Black children made up over 54 per cent of youth transferred to adult court, even though they accounted for just 35 per cent of delinquency cases (Sawyer, 2019). What is more, 42 per cent of the boys in juvenile facilities are Black and 35 per cent of girls are Black (Sawyer, 2019). While the number of juveniles in detention has decreased across the board, racial disparities remain glaring and may be worsening in some cases (Sentencing Project, 2017).

Beyond the stark racial disparities in arrest and confinement, in the midst of this current round of reforms, other stubborn problems remain in the US youth justice practice (Goshe, 2015) – and new challenges have appeared on the horizon as well. Young people housed in county- and state-run juvenile institutions in the United States continue to experience punitive conditions of confinement, high levels of violence, and many are subjected to solitary confinement (Cate, 2016). The overuse of pre-trial detention, confinement for status offenses, and the over-criminalization of select identities and characteristics remain concerning trends (Sawyer, 2019). Furthermore, as locked facilities continue to shrink, there has been a rise in less visible policies and practices that do not rely on locking people up to contain and control them (Gottschalk, 2016; Kohler-Hausmann, 2018; Natapoff, 2018; Selman et al., 2019). As the number of youth in the deepest end of the juvenile system has declined, long-standing problems in conditions of confinement remain, and new mechanisms of control in the community appear to be on the rise in the United States (Selman et al., 2019).

Still, much has changed in US juvenile justice in recent years, at least when it comes to stated policy; and these changes go beyond the steep declines in the number of young people arrested and confined. Over the last decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in developing and instituting rehabilitative practices with young people who find themselves in the rapidly contracting the US juvenile justice system. At present, in the United States (and throughout the Western world), skills-based approaches, like cognitive behavioral therapy, are thought to be one of the optimum ways to intervene in the lives of young people in trouble with the law. Lists of proven programs continue to grow, and their adoption has been advocated for by influential non-profit organizations, and welcomed by lawmakers across political divides, albeit in uneven ways. Not only do we know more about which approaches reduce recidivism, but there appears to be increasing openness from politicians and practitioners to adopt such practices.

However, such individualized approaches to youth in trouble with the law, and the risk-based logics that so often guide, motor and justify them, have been subject to critical scrutiny from multiple disciplines (e.g. Goddard and Myers, 2017; Goshe, 2015; Hannah-Moffat, 2016; Harcourt, 2007). Such actuarially driven behavioral approaches, say some, ignore the broader social ecological, economic, and political contexts that give rise to risk factors (Goddard and Myers, 2018). Risk assessment instruments, which often determine placement and what type and dosage of corrective programming youth ‘need’, continue to be widely used in the United States – despite concerns of race, class, and gender bias (Goddard and Myers, 2017; Van Eijk, 2016); and despite concerns about the accuracy of actuarial tools, and the soundness of risk-based logics generally (Haines and Case, 2008; Hannah-Moffat, 2019; Werth, 2019).

What counts as evidence of success in determining ‘what works’ for young people in the justice system has also been questioned. Success in juvenile rehabilitation is often measured in the short-term and the negative, with the label of ‘what works’ often reserved for programs that reduce recidivism in the relatively short-term (Currie, 2013). While undoubtedly important, a fixation on short-term reductions in recidivism excludes other dimensions of ‘success’ – dimensions which may be just as important for personal well-being and related to recidivism and individual change in the longer term – to be measured or given appropriate weight when considering whether a program is effective or not (Currie, 2013). While a young person leaving a facility may be destitute, struggling in school, unable to find work, have no meaningful access to mental health or medical care, and living in a community with a host of social problems, as long as they are not arrested (or re-confined to a facility) the program has ‘worked’ for them, by most current measures.

While some proven programs, for justice-involved young people take a social ecological approach – working with youth to improve their relationships with others on the outside – particularly for youth in the deep-end of the system, the focus of many programs, proven and otherwise, is for youth to improve themselves (Cox, 2018; Goodkind, 2009; Goshe, 2015; Myers, 2013). By changing their thoughts and behaviors, they can more capably face an unchanged world on the outside: to feel more adept and empowered to confront a highly unequal society with weak social safety nets, the world’s largest prison system, often with no meaningful access to healthcare or social services, while living with families often struggling economically and interpersonally (Cox, 2018). Serious discussions of broader policy reforms that would eliminate the structural sources of the ‘risk factors’ that actuarial youth justice tries to assess and address have been few and far between during this round of reform (Goddard and Myers, 2017).

Rather than policies that view human behavior in a larger social and relational context, with the overarching goal of addressing inequalities, strengthening communities and improving lives, much of this current wave of juvenile justice reform has focused on multiplying rehabilitative programs that put the responsibility for crime and desistance squarely on young people themselves (Goshe, 2015; Phoenix and Kelly, 2013). And while the adoption of rehabilitative programs is certainly welcomed, discourses about the social and economic conditions that give rise to the risk factors that programs attempt to address have been relatively muted in this latest wave of reform (Currie, 2013; Goddard and Myers, 2017). Rather than being one aspect of a rational, just and effective way to combat crime, individual-level change programs have become the beginning and end points in discussions of what a reformed youth justice system ought to look like. This is short-sighted and, ultimately, potentially harmful – not only because it is these broader social and economic conditions that mark safer societies from more dangerous ones (Currie, 2016), but because these broader conditions play no small role in the long-term efficacy and meaning of rehabilitative interventions for the young people who go through them (Cox, 2018). It is this latter point that we take up in this article.

If our work in youth justice is to address the root causes of crime – rather than equip young people to better withstand the lived reality of those root causes – broader social and economic policy change must accompany and support individual-level change programs. As we discuss below, there is good reason to believe that these broader, often material concerns matter for the lived experience of treatment – and relate in no small way to the efficacy, meaning, and ethicality of youth justice programming. In addition to addressing material concerns, a greater emphasis on the quality and state of young people’s relationships with adults in their lives could be beneficial for the efficacy of individual-level interventions. For instance, so many system-involved young people experience high levels of adversity and harm in their early years, which undermines their capacity to form meaningful attachments, particularly if the maltreatment they experience is at the hands of their caregivers. Given that meaningful attachments with others serve as the primary context within which individuals learn to regulate emotions and behaviors, juvenile justice policy and practice ought to seek to improve young people’s capacity to attach and relate – and to address the economic conditions that make such attachments more or less likely.

While these broader concerns with social and economic inequality are certainly not addressable at the level of an individual program, our point here is that limiting reform largely to designing and multiplying proven behavioral change programs – and failing to nest programs aimed at individual change within a broader attack on the social and political forces that ‘create’ risk factors related to crime – unnecessarily restricts what is conceived as possible and works against the success of system-involved youth, particularly in life domains beyond recidivism. In this article, we describe different dimensions of how the current iteration of the US juvenile justice falls short, illustrate some of the consequences of not attending to basic material and relational needs for the efficacy and meaning of treatment, and conclude by discussing some ways to move forward.

The Shortfalls of Individualized Intervention

Youth and juvenile systems must do (and not do) what is necessary to keep young people from hurting themselves and others. This needs to take place no matter how angry we may be at them. Currently, many of the reprimands and punishments in the US juvenile justice system express our anger at young people, but do so in ways that work against them establishing stable and meaningful lives on the outside. While the juvenile justice system is generally characterized as less punitive than the adult system, many of the consequences of involvement with this ‘less punitive’ system can forever alter their life chances – and not for the better. It can change their self-concepts, put them closer to delinquent peers, disrupt their schooling, and make them more susceptible to being watched (and caught) in the future. While it varies from state to state and depends on the offense, entanglement with youth and juvenile justice – or even a single arrest – can come with a host of direct and collateral consequences. And for young people who make it into the deep-end of the system, we know that many locked facilities put young people at-risk for physical, psychological, and pharmacological harm, experiences that may compound earlier traumatic experiences.

To be sure, many of the young people in secure facilities have done very harmful things to other people – often altering the lives of victims and victim’s families, as well as their own communities, in ways that can never be fully undone. Given the precipitous decline in the number of youth held in secure juvenile facilities, this is likely truer than ever, as youth with less serious offenses have been diverted out of the system and fewer young people are being arrested overall. While the harmful acts that some system-involved young people have committed cannot be excused, they can be understood in the context of the profound trauma and pain that many of them have experienced in their homes and communities – and the economic conditions that make these traumatic experiences more likely (Farrell et al., 2017). We know that many, if not most, of the young people who currently find themselves in secure facilities have been harmed by their parents or other adults in their lives – and many have histories of abuse and neglect that stretch back to early childhood (Baglivio et al., 2014).

Poverty and economic distress are at the root of many of these adversities and instances of abuse. We know from research that child abuse and co-occurring problems such as addiction and untreated mental illness, are concentrated in, though certainly not confined to, families exposed to acute economic strain (Pelton, 2015). We also know that it is the children of these most strained families that attend the least-resourced schools in the United States (Kozol, 2005), including alternative schools that have adopted troubling practices that often mirror the practices of – and have close ties with – the justice system (Selman, 2017). Moreover, youth from the most stressed and strained schools and families are very likely to live in economically oppressed communities where serious violence, from fellow citizens and law enforcement, are common occurrences, at least by international standards and as compared to other less-economically deprived US communities (Currie, 2016).

For the young people who exit secure facilities, these traumas not only mark their pathway into the system but, very often, await them upon release (Cox, 2018). Many young people leave facilities – where they may have worked on themselves, sometimes with no small amount of success – to the same exact social circumstances that explain why they were in ‘the system’ to begin with (Myers, 2013). Many return to homes where they will not receive the sort of emotional or economic support needed to build on the personal gains that they may have made while in facilities. For those aging out of the system, they are unlikely to have solid leads on employment or have attained the sort of skills or credentials that would allow them to separate (or at least get some emotional distance) from what are often challenging home lives. Many leave youth facilities without housing set-up, at least not beyond vague plans to stay with family or friends or enrolment in a residential treatment or reentry program that extends only briefly into the future. Trauma, disconnection and uncertainty mark the paths into and out of detention for many young people.

Currently, in addition to informal personal and material supports that vary widely across jurisdictions, one main way that the system helps young people to overcome the numerous (often formidable) barriers that they confront is through individual-level behavioral change programs that work to address the recidivism-related risk factors that assessments identify in youth. While these programs are at the heart of the much-welcomed renaissance in rehabilitation, ethnographic research conducted inside juvenile facilities reminds us that these formal interventions, evidence-based and otherwise, are but a small part of the day-to-day life in locked facilities, often sitting alongside more problematic and coercive facility practices and cultures, which may in fact undermine the potential benefit of any formalized rehabilitative programming on offer (Cox, 2018).

Nevertheless, most of us would agree that individual-level interventions – when done well, in the context of a reasonably supportive facility environment – can play a role in changing people’s thought patterns, reducing their aggression, and increasing their resilience to life’s stressors. When done correctly, such programs can be extremely effective in reducing recidivism (Andrews and Bonta, 2010; Cullen and Jonson, 2017; Landenberger and Lipsey, 2005). However, there are clear limits to solely – or mostly – addressing crime at the level of behavioral or cognitive change. If we want programs to be at their most effective and ethical, basic human needs must be met on the outside and broader investments in creating meaningful work and expanding and improving social welfare provisions must be made. Once the individual change work is completed – be it in the community or in a facility – 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.

Unmet Material Needs and the Efficacy and Meaning of Treatment

The degree to which physiological and basic safety needs are met clearly matters for the effectiveness of treatment. But they also change the meaning of rehabilitative treatment – and state intervention more generally – for young people. They help us to understand why so many young people are unwilling to invest too deeply in making the sort of personal changes that many system-involved youth (though certainly not all) feel that they should, in fact, make. After having done countless groups, workbooks, and therapy sessions – perhaps completing academic coursework or even earning a degree while detained – many young people exit back to the same material and interpersonal circumstances that pushed them into crime in the first place (Myers, 2013). This can stir bitterness and resignation in young people. And, ironically, it may be the young people who most fully invest in the personal change work who may feel the most let down by what fails to happen on the outside. Having put in the work, only to be placed back into the same circumstances that pushed them into system to begin with, can be extremely disheartening and frustrating (Cox, 2018; Currie, 2004; Phoenix and Kelly, 2013). Having seen that personal change rarely translates into change in the ‘real world’, many young people wall themselves off from the various iterations of ‘change yourself’ as a protective mechanism of sorts (Myers, 2013). Much of the cynicism that young people express about rehabilitation may very well come from having cycled through facilities multiple times, only to be placed into subjugated economic and interpersonal positions on the outside, where all the hard work they have done has very little currency.

This is likely to undermine their inclination to buy in to therapeutic mantras of empowerment and cognitive change the next time they find themselves in a treatment facility or custodial setting, be it for adults or juveniles. And because young people often cannot or do not draw distinctions between the multiple social welfare and justice-related entities that intervene in their lives, cycling between juvenile justice facilities and unchanged lives on the outside may change how they orient to any agency of care or control (Cox, 2018). This fatiguing cycle leads many young people to conclude that what happens in these places meant to assist, correct and change them is of little consequence to their post-facility lives. Many young people come to the realization that they are responsible for their own lives, and their expressions of self-reliance are level-headed survival strategies more than anything else (Myers, 2013; Phoenix and Kelly, 2013). In their less-rehearsed moments – at least outside of formalized therapy programs – frontline staff in secure facilities may acknowledge this as well. As the frontline custodial staff in Cox’s (2018: 117) ethnographic study of secure juvenile facilities in New York State regularly told their charges: ‘you come here alone, you leave here alone’.

The abandonment of young people at the point of release replicates what many young people, especially in the deep-end of the US youth justice system, have experienced throughout their lives: social and emotional disconnection in the context of economic deprivation. These disconnections from the social world – deprivations in interpersonal supports and material resources – are at the root of why many young people harm themselves and others to begin with (Maté, 2011). If we want treatment to be its most effective and meaningful, repairing those connections and addressing those material needs must inform how we situate and support individual-level therapies. A developmental perspective might be a useful framework for organizing our efforts to address the residual emotional and behavioral effects of abandonment, disconnection, and deprivation.

The importance of safety, stability, and social support to overall adaptive functioning cannot be overstated. The capacity to regulate our own emotional reactions and behaviours develops in infancy and early childhood and requires the context of a secure attachment relationship to be effectively consolidated (Bowlby, 1969[1982], 1973; Fonagy et al., 2010; Mikulincer et al., 2003). Indeed, it has been proposed that the primary function of the attachment system is to regulate emotional experience (Sroufe, 1996). Infant and parent temperament and other environmental conditions influence the individual nuances of these interactions, but our understanding from at least two decades of research is that infants and children learn to regulate their emotions through the experience of attuned and responsive caregiving within a safe and predictable environment (Fonagy et al., 2010). Children whose early environments have not been responsive, safe, and predictable have deficits in attachment and self-regulatory capacities. Many system-involved young people present with a complex posttraumatic syndrome that reflects a combination of having been exposed to worse than average stressors, while simultaneously being deprived of a ‘good enough’ early environment within which to develop self-regulation and coping skills (Gold, 2000; Winnicott, 1960).

For these individuals, the context within which skills are learned, and the process of how they are engaged in treatment, makes all the difference regarding whether the skills are internalized and generalized, or applied in a superficial way with no subjectively experienced sense of the degree to which they are worthwhile or relevant to real problems in living. The value of skills and behavioral control notwithstanding, we must have loftier goals for these young people. We must want for them to develop an integrated sense of self with the kind of firm and clear internal reference points that constitute a compass from which more adaptive ways of living can consistently and reliably derive. We must also target the disconnectedness these individuals may feel from themselves, from others, and from society. If we truly want these young people to ‘turn it around’ and succeed, we must begin to identify and provide at least a minimum level of the essential conditions required for them to be able to utilize therapy productively. We must provide the equivalent of what Winnicott (1960) termed a ‘holding’ environment – but it is a very different kind of holding than that performed by correctional systems.

Skills to tolerate distress, regulate emotions, and communicate effectively are acquired most successfully when people are stable and not under severe stress (Herman, 1992; Linehan, 1993), and the optimal environment for self-regulation to develop is one that is safe and predictable, and made and kept so by caregivers who are reliable, attuned, and responsive. If the home environment is not able to offer these things, helping young people includes helping them create environments that do offer these things. By creating comprehensive treatment programs that offer stability and predictability, we are placing these youth in a better position to benefit from all interventions, skills-based and otherwise. And let us not forget that these young people are part of family systems that also need support to achieve and maintain equilibrium. Family systems that are stable are better able to hold their members.

Thus, we must move beyond the individual to the family and broader social systems, and beyond narrowly defined notions of evidence-based practice to include evidence-based relationship variables (Norcross and Lambert, 2019), like the therapeutic alliance, cohesion in group therapy, and goal consensus and collaboration. We must give these young people and their families opportunities to authentically connect with providers and with each other, to collaborate in the clarification of their treatment goals, and to envision and manifest their own new developmental trajectories. We must aspire to help young people meet these higher order needs, but first, we must address the basic needs required to support them.

What Is to Be Done: Beyond Individualized Risks and Expanding Definitions of Success

Changing what awaits young people after their time in the youth justice system is a necessity if we want the personal change to be sustainable for individuals in the long run. To limit our reform efforts to instituting proven programs that alter thoughts or self-concepts, albeit in ways that matter for recidivism, unnecessarily limits the potential of youth justice policy to foster true and lasting change at the individual, community, and societal levels. Yet, much of what we count as ‘success’ in the US crime policy equates to lives marked by precariousness, harm, and hopelessness (Currie, 2013).

For individual-level interventions to be their most effective and ethical, they must first be accompanied by the sorts of basic material supports that would allow the personal gains made in custodial or supervisory institutions to be sustained and built upon. Material supports that would allow young people exiting the system to feed, clothe, and house themselves are crucial for achieving success on the outside, in ways that include, but are not limited to, reduced recidivism. If our goal is desistance from crime, this is not going to be accomplished as a result of individual-level intervention alone, though an individual-level program could aid the process (McNeill et al., 2012). Cognitive programs that change thinking patterns may be useful in many cases, but they are not sufficient in most – and this is especially so if we think of outcomes as stretching beyond recidivism toward the broader outcomes that we know scientifically are at the root of most serious youth offending. For individualized interventions to work in the long run, they must be placed within a broader attack on the roots of youth offending (McAra, 2017). Evidence-based programs offered to young people should, therefore, feed into broader services that expand educational, workforce, and enrichment opportunities (Harvell et al., 2019).

Currently (but inadequately), a young person who leaves a secure facility to work a low-wage job with no security, goes back to live with a family where problems remain, still depends on a coercive or abusive partner, struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or crippling anxiety or acute depression on their own, often counts as a ‘success’ as long as they remain out of the system. Thus, as a second reform, reentry, and diversionary success must move beyond the end goal of recidivism, and instead be measured along a continuum of degree of stability and well-being as they relate to the whole of someone’s life. In addition to basic economic stability, overall well-being must be the target goal (or dependent variable), rather than not getting caught by a government agent while doing something illegal. Is a homeless young person without a high school degree, who struggles with unaddressed mental health problems a resounding success because they somehow did not recidivate after 1-year post-release or post-arrest? We think not; however, many evaluations of programs at this moment in time would mark this down as a success.

Our argument for expanding definitions of success stems from what the research tells us about most young people who routinely find themselves in trouble with justice systems. Emblematic of late market capitalism, these young people have disproportionately experienced poverty and material need relative to their peers, witnessed (or been the victims of) violence, attended underfunded, and overcrowded schools, were routinely watched with suspicion by law enforcement in their neighborhoods, had family members or close friends arrested or incarcerated, and experienced abuse or neglect (among other traumatic experiences). Adding to this, poverty-stricken families (even when loving and supportive) often face abrupt relocations because of employment, daily stress, poor physical health, bouts of hunger, and live in environments that tend to be noisier, more overcrowded, with less regularity in sleep and eating, factors which are fundamental to cognitive and emotional development (Baum et al., 2014; Evans, 2004; Jackson et al., 2018; Meldrum et al., 2015; Western, 2015). Children growing up under these stressed conditions are ‘at-risk’ for offending. However, only thinking about the relationship between these risks and offending (or re-offending) too easily leads to interventions that simply ‘patch up’ the consequences of systemic harm with skills-based programming. We are not alone in arguing this. Numerous scholars have made the point that, often, programs that intervene and rehabilitate focus on transforming behaviors and worldviews while leaving the material conditions unaddressed (e.g. Cox, 2015; Gray, 2016; Gray and Smith, 2019; Hannah-Moffat, 2016; Kramer et al., 2013; Miller, 2014).

Compounding the negative experiences common to individual young people and their families is the spatially concentrated nature of material deprivation and disproportionately high rates of juvenile arrests for racial and ethnic minorities in the United States (Kubrin and Weitzer, 2003). Moreover, this spatial concentration of negative experiences is typically generational. That is, this all happens to at least some degree to nearly all of the people in the same neighborhood, and the deleterious consequences of this cannot be overlooked when considering recidivism as a goal (and dependent variable). It is the spatial concentration of poverty – and the carceral approach to poverty management in the United States – that motors the cycle of early delinquency, serious offending, eventual capture, and re-offending after release.

Not surprisingly, a great many children born into severely disadvantaged neighborhoods develop a negative identity, and possess ineffective coping skills, poor impulse control, poor social problem-solving skills, and exhibit aggressive attitudes. But they also attend inferior schools (Kozol, 2005) and know well that they often cannot turn to (or are turned away from) meaningful, well-paying jobs (Bourgois, 2003). What is worse is that these young people (and their families and peers) know that so many others do not face these conditions; and this knowledge can generate psychological distress (Clark, 1965; see Currie et al., 2015). To borrow the analogy used by Stanley Cohen (1985), placing these young people into a program or therapy – without addressing the social ecological and structural sources of the stressors – is like trying to save drowning children one by one without looking upstream to stop the flow of young people falling into the water. While lifeguarding certainly has its place, governmental policies must also target the source, not just react to its consequences. Therefore, definitions of success should, in general terms, include the degree of ‘source-reduction’ that is accomplished (Goddard and Myers, 2018).

A few recent youth justice initiatives show how interventions can look beyond individual-level conceptions of risk and beyond recidivism as the sole end goal. In the United Kingdom, the Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS) model developed by Haines and Case (2015) is one example. The CFOS model rejects the risk factor prevention paradigm and its deficit-based focus and employs a more positive asset-based focus. The CFOS model emphasizes that ‘offending’ is but one aspect of a child’s life, and is something that most will age out of. At its core, the framework argues that their status as children, deserving of rights and respect, is much more important than their status as ‘offenders’. Moreover, the CFOS model values the input and perspectives of young people in shaping the intervention. Rather than a strict adherence to program models designed by adults to address so-called deficits and risks, CFOS works toward relationship-building, and input from the child guides the work (Case and Haines, 2015; Gray and Smith, 2019; Smith, 2014; UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2016). While the CFOS framework centers on supporting positive changes in children’s personal lives, it also acknowledges the importance of ‘source-reduction’ efforts by recognizing that positive outcomes ‘can also be systemic and structural, stemming from broader changes in the ways that children who offend are understood and worked with’ (Case and Haines, 2018: 219).

While less of a uniform framework than CFOS, in the United States, there are a number of grassroots, non-profit organizations that work with young people at-risk or involved in crime from a social justice perspective, often partnering with state agencies or progressive philanthropies to work as service providers (Goddard and Myers, 2018). Like the CFOS framework, these groups orient to young people as individuals and reject the practice of responsibilizing young people. While the exact content of their efforts varies, many organizations place relationships with young people at the center of their work and the content of programming is often driven by their interests and expressed needs. Many of these groups utilize popular education frameworks to help young people recognize how histories of racism, sexism, and other forms of social injustice have structured their lives, a practice which harkens back to earlier, socially conscious iterations of delinquency prevention (Currie et al., 2015). Moreover, some of these organizations also include young people in ‘source-reduction’ efforts by involving them in activism and advocacy on issues such as economic inequality and racialized patterns in law enforcement (Goddard and Myers, 2018).

Conclusion

We argue that many of the individual-level intervention programs that are now deemed ‘evidence-based’ set their sights much too low, place too much responsibility on young people and their families, and focus too little attention on structural conditions. Failing to address root causes puts too much weight on individual-level programs. Or as Graham and McNeill (2017: 446) put it, ‘individual change, and work to support it, can be too easily trampled by failure to attend to the social and political dynamics at play in re/integration’. As we have discussed here, not meeting the basic material and relational needs of young people likely compromises the effectiveness of programs and may change what such interventions – and the institutions that enact them – mean to young people.

While there is certainly clear value in helping young people to overcome material and interpersonal barriers to successful reentry through skills-based programming, the barriers themselves need to be eliminated – and our field needs a way to mark such broader efforts to eradicate poverty and lessen inequality as being ‘based in evidence’. Whether a program reduces the recidivism rates of those who go through it is, of course, an important question to consider. But focusing solely on that question can preclude the consideration and enactment of policies that directly attack the political and economic roots of crime. A needlessly constricted understanding of what counts as ‘evidence’ or ‘success’ works against putting some of our most important insights and findings into policy and practice. Our field needs to find ways to talk about broader attacks on the social and economic conditions that give rise to so many ‘risk factors’ as being based in research and science. We need a way to talk about public jobs programs, universal healthcare, paid family leave, and educational equality as policies that have direct bearing on crime – and to recognize that they have consequences for the efficacy of individual-level interventions.

We welcome recent advances in determining ‘what works’ for lowering rates of recidivism, especially because they debunk the myth of ‘nothing works’. But for programs to have maximum benefit, individual-level change programs need to run alongside the sorts of broader attacks on poverty and inequality that would allow young people to put the skills and insights acquired in such programs to use. As we have discussed here, this is not just a political consideration, but crucial to the efficacy and meaning of individual-level interventions. Doing the hard work that rehabilitative treatment so often requires is all the more difficult when basic human needs for shelter, food, and safe relationships are not satisfied. Moreover, the absence of such things changes the meaning of individual-level interventions for many participants, and likely dims the prospect that gains made in treatment will lead to better lives for young people post-release. Currently, we too often ask young people to change their behaviors and worldviews so that they can transcend the numerous, formidable barriers that stand before them and avoid the justice system. A more robust and just alternative remains possible.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tim Goddard

Author biographies

Randy Myers is an Associate Professor of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington Tacoma, Washington, USA. He holds a PhD in Criminology, Law & Society from the University of California, Irvine. He is the co-author, with Tim Goddard, of the book Youth, Community and the Struggle for Social Justice (Routledge, 2018).

Tim Goddard is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA. He holds a PhD in Criminology, Law & Society from the University of California, Irvine. He is the co-author, with Randy Myers, of the book Youth, Community and the Struggle for Social Justice (Routledge, 2018).

Jennifer Davidtz is a Psychologist and an Associate Professor and Director of Internship Training in the College of Psychology at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA. She holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She also maintains a private practice specializing in the treatment of complex posttraumatic and dissociative conditions, and disorders of emotion regulation.

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