It’s for Your Own Good! Discussing the (Non) Impact of Juvenile Justice Interventions

• In Event: Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services for Youth

Abstract

At the centre of this paper stands the criminological reflection on the impact of juvenile justice interventions. In a first step we will give a critical assessment of existing perspectives on the criminological issue of “impact” and/or “effect” of judicial interventions, by analysing the classical what works tradition as well as more recent desistance literature. In a second step, we will discuss the issue of “impact” based on the results of our research into trajectories of juvenile justice clients. More specifically we will present results from empirical research on the trajectories of former juvenile justice clients born at the beginning of the 1960’s. Through a qualitative analysis of the judicial files of former juvenile justice clients we want to tackle the question of impact in a long-term and life history perspective.

Author

• Jenneke Christiaens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel