Community-Based Recovery and Youth Justice

• In Event: Response, Rehabilitation, and Reconciliation: The Normative Dimensions of the Offender’s Desistance Journey

Abstract

Four well-known delinquency intervention and prevention programs remain both publically and politically popular regardless of a large body of evidence-based research revealing their ineffectiveness in promoting a lasting desistance from youth violence and crime. Scared straight programs, D.A.R.E., youth boot camps, and large-scale, custodial juvenile correctional facilities overemphasize offender "risk management and maintenance" as opposed to individual, group-based, and/or collective wellbeing. This paper will identify the values that these current and dominant community-centered youth justice initiatives reflect, and it will explain how these values further (or forestall) offender desistance. Viable, evidence-based alternatives consistent with the value orientation of therapeutic and restorative programming will also be evaluated. The paper concludes by examining the efficacy of this alternative normative agenda to foster successful desistance from juvenile delinquency and crime.

Author

• Brian Gregory Sellers, Eastern Michigan University