Obstacles to Developmental Youth Justice Practice

• In Event: Integrating the Science of Adolescent Development into Juvenile Probation Practice

Abstract

A growing consensus in the research and policy communities holds that the youth justice system should be organized to maximize developmental opportunities, family strengths, and youth assets. Known as the developmental approach, the new consensus is a vast improvement over deficit-based approaches that dominated justice policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Numerous jurisdictions across the U.S. are now working to implement the developmental approach, but the task may prove more difficult than expected. Practitioners will encounter resistance from agency leaders and elected officials because, while the developmental approach may be responsive to the crime-prevention motives of youth justice, it does not comport with either the professional-rehabilitative or retributive impulses of contemporary justice policy. In addition, the research foundation for a developmental approach lags far behind the evidence base for rehabilitative interventions. To understand and confront resistance to the developmental approach, practitioners must appreciate the true, historical foundations of juvenile justice which are not always obvious in the public statements of advocates and policymakers. This paper reviews the origins of youth justice policy in the United States and considers why youth justice systems may not easily and readily embrace the developmental approach. The paper then recommends strategies to build an evidence-based agenda that may be able to overcome either overt or passive resistance to the developmental approach.

Author

• Jeffrey Butts, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY