The Criminalization of Trauma: Trauma-Informed Juvenile Justice Reforms as a project of Carceral Expansion

• In Event: Neoliberal Care as Punishment: Abolition Feminist Interrogations of the “Benevolent” Carceral State

Abstract

In an era defined by widespread carceral reforms, there has been a notable increase in juvenile justice initiatives prioritizing therapeutic approaches over punitive measures. Often rooted in “trauma-informed” practices, these initiatives frequently involve partnerships between juvenile justice (carceral) entities and community-based (care) providers. Abolition feminist scholarship has critically examined carceral care as public-facing efforts of reform that deflect the harms of punishment inherent to these partnerships, while perpetuating ongoing criminalization of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Disabled, Queer, Women, Trans, and Nonbinary folx (Rodriguez, Ben-Moshe, Rakes, 2020; Hwang, 2019; Musto, 2022; Ritchie and Kaba, 2022).

This paper uses abolition feminist perspectives to examine the adoption of trauma-informed principles that underpin community-based juvenile justice reforms, illustrating how notions of punishment extend into community settings, thereby perpetuating the criminalization of trauma as a project of carceral care. This paper derives from a qualitative study that explores community-based reforms in Chicago, which is seen as a microcosm of a national shift of community-based juvenile justice reforms perpetuated as trauma-informed care. This paper theoretically examines the contradicting nature of therapeutic interventions and court compliance, arguing that the nature of trauma-informed work is too nuanced to be standardized to a court order.

Author

• Kayla Martensen