The “New Interventionism” and the Contemporary Juvenile Justice System’s Approach to Intensive Community Supervision

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Crime and Punishment II

Abstract

In spite of the proliferation of punitive legislation in the 1990s and 2000s, the increase in youth incarceration during the “get tough” era was of much lower magnitude and was not as long lasting as the incarceration trends in the adult system. Through an in-depth study of discretionary decision-making in the Allegheny County Juvenile Court (Pittsburgh, PA), I analyze how juvenile justice officials responded to the greater fear of crime in a way that did not simply reflect the polarizing politics of this era and managed to keep the majority of delinquent youth living in the community. I contend that the contemporary juvenile justice system brought into practice a novel methodology for achieving the goals of treatment and punishment for a more public-safety conscious era, which I call the “new interventionism.” Court officials increasingly invested in intensifying community supervision, finding that community-based programs could be utilized to incapacitate as well as to offer therapeutic services. I show how the new interventionism reproduced and reconfigured the historic role of the juvenile court of avoiding the pure punishment and surveillance approach of the adult system, while also expanding the role of the state in the lives of the urban minority poor.

Author

• Michael Schlossman, William Paterson University