Reconnecting Youth: Beyond Individualized Programs and Risks

Youth Justice ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 147322542093286
Author(s):  
Randy Myers ◽  
Tim Goddard ◽  
Jennifer Davidtz

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.

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 126-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Creaney

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the benefits of participation for young offenders. It also explores some of the challenges giving young people “a say”. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews and critiques a number of published sources, including peer reviewed journal articles. By critically reviewing the literature, the paper intends to promote discussion and ignite debate on the topic of “offender participation”. Findings – This paper argues that if young people are given a voice and provided with the opportunity to influence how a service is implemented it is more probable that the child will be “rehabilitated”. Furthermore, participation has many benefits for the individual child. More specifically, not only does it increase levels of engagement and compliance with a particular form of intervention or programme, but by being involved in the process, the child's self-esteem increases, making “motivation to change” more likely. Originality/value – This paper argues that despite good policy and practice intentions, the involvement of young offenders in the design and delivery of youth justice services requires further development. Indeed, there needs to be greater opportunities provided to young people, across the Youth Justice System, to “share their views” and influence practice.


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.


Author(s):  
Mariya М. Odintsova ◽  

A lot of modern psychological studies point to the inextricable link between the real and the Internet space in the context of the process of socialization of the individual, structuring the life scenario, in particular in the field of professional development. However, the integration of various predictors associated with the characteristics of the modern labor market and, as a consequence of career planning, life scenario is a methodological problem. To solve it, research design was applied, based on a combination of theoretical and empirical, quantitative and qualitative analysis. The aim of the study was the desire to clarify the role of the content of social networks in the formation of the life model of the professional sphere in the personal life space. It is suggested that the components of life models in the field of the profession broadcast on the Internet may be similar to the constructs already available in young people. The empirical research was carried out in several stages. At the first stage, semantic and content analysis of more than 170,000 posts over the past 2 years from the 20 most popular communities of the social network was carried out using special computer programs. The results of the analysis were the identified features of the components of the life model in the field of the profession, broadcast in the information space. At the second stage, the peculiarities of personal ideas of young people about building their own professional path, as well as the perception of the experience of parents’ professional activities were investigated. The sample consisted of 166 respondents; the average age was 21 years. The results obtained confirm the assumption about the similarity of the characteristics of the components of life models in the field of the profession, presented in the posts of Internet communities and the characteristics of the constructed life scenario in the field of the profession by the respondents themselves. The ideas about professional life and its further construction are probably associated with intergenerational transmission and traditional family values, the personal interests of a young person, his/her abilities, as well as with the tendencies learned in the process of intergenerational transmission of values and certain ideas in the circle of contemporaries presented on the Internet.


Author(s):  
Pamela Ugwudike ◽  
Gemma Morgan

This chapter presents the findings of a study that examined supervision skills within three youth offending teams. The study focused on youth justice practice in Wales and its objective was to explore how best to integrate research evidence into frontline practice. It found that participating practitioners employed mainly relationship skills. This is a positive finding but there was limited use of evidence-based skills embedded in what is described as the ‘structuring principle' of effective interpersonal interactions (Bonta and Andrews 2017). The skills are change-focused and they impact on what young people learn during interactions with practitioners and the quality of the influence the practitioners exert over them. This chapter examines the factors that impede the application of structuring skills and concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gaps between research and supervision practice can be bridged to enhance the quality of youth justice practice.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Laura Newton Miller

Objective – The purpose of the study was to examine how librarian blogs are being used for communication within the profession. Design – The method used was content analysis and unstructured interviews. Setting - The researcher is based out of a state university in the United States of America. Subjects - Content of and communication within 12 librarian blogs were analyzed. Seven of the 12 bloggers were interviewed. Methodology – There were 15 blogs identified in a list by Quinn (2009) and reduced to the 12 best suited for the study. Over a 24-month period (January 2009-December 2010), random samples of posts with 2 or more comments were selected for each month from the 12 blogs and analyzed. All comments related to these selected posts were also analyzed. The researcher categorized the blogs overall, plus individual posts, into one of four predominant genres (social, professional development, political, and research). Content was coded based on previous coding methodology for blog content found in the research literature. Requests for interviews were sent to all 12 bloggers with 7 agreeing to be interviewed. Preliminary results of the content analysis for his/her own blog were shared with each blogger before the interview took place. Inter-coder reliability was pretested and found to be 83.33%. Main Results - Two hundred eighty-eight posts randomly chosen received 1936 reader comments. Bloggers responded to these comments 254 times. Blogs were categorized under the “social” genre most frequently (53%), followed by “professional development” (31%), “political” (14%), and “research” (2%; percentages were rounded to the nearest whole number by the reviewer). Professional development was the lead genre in two of the individual blogs. All seven bloggers interviewed stated that professional development is a large focus of their blogs. Reasons for blogging ranged from the importance of sharing information, contextualizing information, and (for some) satisfying personal ambition. There was a common personal enjoyment of writing and all planned to continue blogging despite increasing time constraints. Conclusion - Professional development is a major focus of content in librarian blogs. Blog posts and comments stay on topic throughout exchanges between bloggers and readers.


2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 225-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie H. Levison

From biblical times to the modern period, leprosy has been a disease associated with stigma. This mark of disgrace, physically present in the sufferers' sores and disfigured limbs, and embodied in the identity of a 'leper', has cast leprosy into the shadows of society. This paper draws on primary sources, written in Spanish, to reconstruct the social history of leprosy in Puerto Rico when the United States annexed this island in 1898. The public health policies that developed over the period of 1898 to the 1930s were unique to Puerto Rico because of the interplay between political events, scientific developments and popular concerns. Puerto Rico was influenced by the United States' priorities for public health, and the leprosy control policies that developed were superimposed on vestiges of the colonial Spanish public health system. During the United States' initial occupation, extreme segregation sacrificed the individual rights and liberties of these patients for the benefit of society. The lives of these leprosy sufferers were irrevocably changed as a result.


Author(s):  
Philip M. Ferguson

This chapter uses the stories of three families, the ‘Kallikaks’, the Kennedys and the Fergusons, to narrate the key stages of the history of intellectual disability in the twentieth century. The so-called‘Kallikaks’ were used as part of the vicious eugenic libel against the intellectually disabled population that stoked the cruel mass institutionalization programmes of the early century. This section tells the story of Emma Wolverton, one of those on whose life stories the mythical Kallikaks were based and created to spread fear and drive segregational policy. The story of the famous Kennedy family shows the post-war journey of the intellectually disabled person from a hidden site of shame to the policy reforms of the community return. Finally, the story of the author’s own family shows some of the great post-reform liberating shifts towards a life of choice and inclusion that have taken place, and alerts us to the brooding threats that still lurk.


Youth Justice ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-205
Author(s):  
Ravinder Barn ◽  
Balbir S. Barn

This article draws on original, empirical research that focused on the use of an experimental mobile application developed by the authors and used in the domain of youth justice in England. Against a backdrop of the theory of the paradox of technology with ideas of the networked self and child rights, the article explores the use of social technology with vulnerable/marginalised young people. Given the dearth in knowledge and understanding, in this area of social technology and young people in conflict with the law, the article focuses on an important, original and fast-developing issue in contemporary youth justice. Principally, the article explores the experiences and views of practitioners to promote a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges in the adoption of social technology in working with marginalised young people. Practitioner perceptions on the use of social technology in their own practice and its associated risks and benefits are also revealed. Study findings indicate that digital opportunities and challenges are embedded in organisational and cultural structures and practices. The article discusses implications for youth justice and ultimately for young people in conflict with the law who are caught up in the system. The article raises important issues about the likely increasing use of technology as a tool in rehabilitation and desistance; and its key messages will be of considerable interest to practitioners, managers and policy-makers who will have little option, as time goes on, to enter this controversial field.


2020 ◽  
pp. 104346312096460
Author(s):  
Bertrand Crettez ◽  
Régis Deloche

In both the United States of America and the European Union, Member States are encouraged to prevent young people from starting to smoke by forbidding selling tobacco products to people under a certain age. By contrast, there are in general no legal minimum age requirements for consuming those products. Our aim is to address such discrepancy from a theoretical viewpoint by focusing on the case where people have time-inconsistent preferences. Specifically, we build a three-period (youth, adulthood, old age) model of smoking decision in which individual intertemporal preferences are present-biased. Then, using this model, we show that when agents are naive, that is when they are unaware that their intertemporal preferences are time-inconsistent, it may be worthwhile, from the individual viewpoint, to legally prevent young people from smoking. This conclusion does not always hold, because what is good for an agent in youth can be disputable in adult age (and conversely). When individuals are sophisticated, that is, not naive, a legal smoking age (either for buying, consuming or selling tobacco products) is pointless. This conclusion is also reached if one follows the continuing person approach advocated by Sugden. JEL Classification Numbers : I12, I18, K32, D15


2019 ◽  
Vol 585 (10) ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
Joanna Moleda

The article concerns the interests of socially maladjusted youth. Among others the social and demographic features of the pupils of the social rehabilitation facility were presented. Research was carried out to determine the differences between socially maladjusted youth and young people who do not conflict with the law in terms of the number of interests held, their type and commitment to implementation. It was established that among the surveyed boys from the Youth Educational Centre there is a great interest in craft professions such as: car mechanic, electrician, baker, construction worker, carpenter. In addition, the results of the research revealed the preferences of boys not socially adapted to perform in the future, among other things, the profession of teacher, social worker or educator.


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