Punishment Through Neglect…And an Alternative

• In Event: Challenging Actuarial Logics and Reconsidering Risk

Abstract

Many critical scholars have serious reservations about the ‘evidence-based’ approach to youth crime, as risk assessment instruments and the programs they align with, individualize and responsibilize offenders to change their behavior, while leaving intact the structural correlates of offending. Thus, evidence-based programming for young offenders, as currently understood and practiced, does harm through neglect, in part by leaving structural variables untouched—all in the name of doing good science. This paper challenges scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to think creatively about how prevention and intervention programs might also address the socio-structural factors that structure the lives young people most at-risk for crime and criminalization. Towards this end, we offer up recommendations from US-based social justice organizations that see structural risks as being very much ‘amenable to change’, and are actively working with young people to address the racialized root causes of crime and criminalization.

Authors

• Randolph R. Myers, Old Dominion University

• Tim Goddard, Florida International University