scholarly journals Toward a Tailored Model of Youth Justice: A Qualitative Analysis of the Factors Associated with Successful Placement in a Community-Integrated Facility

Author(s):  
Fleur Souverein ◽  
Eva Mulder ◽  
Lieke van Domburg ◽  
Marcia Adriaanse ◽  
Arne Popma

Community-integrated facilities provide security and care for justice-involved youth, minimizing risks, while allowing youth to build on protective factors within their community. Literature on the specific factors that determine appropriate placement in a community-integrated facility, versus a more restrictive high-security setting, is scarce. Current screening and assessment tools for youth are mostly applied after placement and mainly focus on the reoffending risk. The current paper explored which youth, who would previously have been placed in a high-security setting, could be successfully placed in a less secure community-integrated facility. Through qualitative analysis, based on the perspectives of professionals, youth and parents, the current paper identified six distinct domains to guide appropriate screening and outlines guidelines for policy and practice. These domains include: motivation to comply, short and long-term perspective, current offense context, crime history, safety and support from youth’s network, and mental health and intellectual abilities.

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Goddard ◽  
Randolph R Myers

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 evidence-based. 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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 580-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mie B Haller ◽  
Torsten Kolind

Ethnicity has come to play an increasing role in contemporary Danish prison life. This development not only reflects the growing number of prisoners in Danish prisons with ethnic minority backgrounds. It also reflects changes in prison spatial policy and institutional classifications. Based on seven months of fieldwork in a Danish high security prison, we investigate how such changes at the institutional level and at the level of policy have affected prisoner’s everyday ethnic identifications. We focus especially on the way prisoners reinforce and essentialize ethnic differences by reference to institutional spatial divisions; particularly the division between regular wings and drug treatment wings. We find that ethnic Danish prisoners spending time in a treatment wing are often viewed as ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ by prisoners with ethnic minority backgrounds in regular wings, whereas these prisoners in regular wings are in turn perceived as troublemakers and chaotic by the ethnic Danish prisoners in drug treatment. We also show how ethnic categories are at times blurred in actual practice. We conclude by discussing the implication for policy and practice; especially, we debate whether new spatial prison policies may unintentionally partake in accentuating ethnic stereotypical thinking.


Author(s):  
Bill Whyte

Social work in youth justice is directed by international standards based on an implied socio-educative paradigm that conflicts with the dominant criminal justice paradigm in operation in most jurisdictions. This creates global challenges in establishing “child-centred” policy and practice for dealing with young people under the age of 18 years in conflict with the law. Social work practitioners, directed by international imperatives and professional ethics, operate between shifting and often conflicting paradigms. It is essential they are familiar with international obligations and operate as “culture carriers” providing an ongoing challenge to systems of youth justice. This chapter examines these issues and, in the absence of consensus or of a shared paradigm for social work practice across jurisdictions, considers what a socio-educative paradigm for practice might look like.


Author(s):  
Jill Duerr Berrick ◽  
Jaclyn Chambers

This chapter demonstrates how concerns about avoiding errors and mistakes have been at the centre of child protection policy and practice in the US for many years. In particular the chapter focuses on providing a summary of the state of the art relating to risk assessment tools and predictive analytics as strategies to reduce error in child welfare decision making. It also examines whether our understanding of ‘error’ needs to shift to account for the unknowns. When social workers make decisions based upon fundamental principles, and when they determine that it is in the interests of a child to privilege one principle over another, the result may appear in hindsight as an “error”, but when made as a decision guided by one widely-held principle which was in direct conflict with another. Examining child welfare decision making as a process of selecting and then privileging one principle over another narrows what we might otherwise think of as an ‘error’ and instead recasts some decisions as exceedingly difficult to get ‘right’.


2002 ◽  
Vol 83 (5) ◽  
pp. 508-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chipman ◽  
Susan J. Wells ◽  
Michelle A. Johnson

Though principles, guidelines, and procedures for assessing the quality of foster care in kinship settings have been introduced, research on the factors that mediate the quality and outcome of kinship care has been minimal. To provide insight into these factors from the perspectives of kinship stakeholders, this article presents findings from a qualitative study conducted with kinship caregivers, children living with relatives, and caseworkers of children in kinship placements. Their views on quality care in kinship homes, including factors to consider in the selection and evaluation of kinship placements and opinions of how kinship and nonkinship foster care differ, make unique contributions to the development of standards and measures for kinship foster care assessment. Findings confirm the salience of specific factors present in existing guidelines, build on existing recommendations for the selection and evaluation of kinship homes, and highlight important policy and practice issues for consideration with kinship families.


2018 ◽  
Vol 184 (5-6) ◽  
pp. e242-e247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Morrison ◽  
Patricia W Nishimoto ◽  
John B Kim ◽  
Carolina Medina-Dupaix ◽  
Erin O’Carroll Bantum

Abstract Introduction This 2015 study examined the use of art to express the experience of the cancer journey of military cancer patients/cancer survivors, family and friends, caregivers, volunteers, and staff members through a one-time art-making workshop, administered by non-art therapists. Using art to express a medical/cancer journey may give participants, who cannot express their feelings in words, the ability to articulate their experience through art that looks at the creative process rather than the end result – expressive art. Materials and Methods This mixed methods study examined the use of art to express the cancer journey of participants. Twenty-eight adults participated in a one-time expressive arts workshop conducted by non-professional art therapists at a military medical center. The five domains of the Emotion Thermometer were analyzed to determine if the pre-event and post-event assessment results would differ. The Silver Drawing Test and Draw-a-Story assessment tools were used to identify emotions and attitudinal stance on six separate five-point scales. A qualitative analysis was done using the phenomenological method of the post-interviews that facilitated open expression to identify themes. Results A significant difference was found between the pre-event and post-event analyses using the Emotion Thermometer, with post-assessment results revealing lower levels in the three domains of distress, anxiety, and depression. The Silver Drawing Test and Draw-a-Story were analyzed for six components using a five-point scale, with the highest scores being content/meaning, ability to combine, and creativity. A qualitative analysis was done using the phenomenological method; post-interviews provided information to categorize the experience into four key themes: environment, connection, emotions, and discoveries. Conclusions Using art to express one’s journey through cancer allows participants to articulate that journey “beyond language.” This mixed methods study was administered by five non-professional art therapists with three having no expressive arts background. This study established that an expressive arts workshop can effectively be conducted by non-professional art therapists. The team of non-professional art therapists, who facilitated this one-time art-making workshop, demonstrated that a military member’s stress can be decreased by giving them “a voice” through expressive art.


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