Promoting Justice for Troubled Youth
Schools of Social Work
By Peter Craig
The American juvenile justice system, originating in English common law, began to take root in various U.S. states in the late 1800s. Driven by the Progressive movement, it was largely based on an ideal: that even the most troubled youth are a work in progress and more capable of true reform than adults.
It operates under different laws, regulations and language from the larger criminal justice system, says Dr. Sara Goodkind, professor of social work and PhD program director at the University of Pittsburgh. “For instance, young people in the juvenile legal system are not found guilty or innocent. They are just found to be ‘adjudicated delinquent’ or not. So it has a completely different functioning.”
Social workers have served in such juvenile justice-related areas as court or forensic social work—working with defense attorneys, law enforcement or court officers, and performing tasks like doing client risk-and-need evaluations, advising and even serving as expert witnesses.
Another key player is the school social worker, who “can be valuable in helping youth who are on probation or who are re-entering the community following incarceration to get readmitted into schools and to feel safe there,” says Dr. Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare at UCLA, who herself was a school social worker while getting her MSW. UCLA offers master’s in social welfare students the course “Juvenile Justice Policy,” which presents an “overview of the federal landscape and the history of youth justice policy,” says Abrams.
Rehabilitating the Process
In the end, the juvenile justice system can be quite punitive and harmful—involving isolation and depression, education deficits, racial inequity and injustice, or physical and sexual abuse—leaving social workers scrambling to provide proper support for young people and their families. That’s led to a broader, more holistic approach to helping marginalized youth, says University of Pittsburgh social work professor Dr. Jeffrey Shook, who has covered juvenile justice in courses like “Child and Family Policy.” Pictured at left: MSW students at Wayne State University’s School of Social Work interested in juvenile justice can take courses like “Youth, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice” and “Behavioral Health and the Criminal/Legal System.”
For instance, Shook, Goodkind and some Pitt MSW students have been working with a pre-arrest diversion program in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County called Caring Connections for Youth. The program connects young people and their family members to needed support services, including employment agencies. After all, “parents need good jobs,” points out Shook. It’s just one example of the “holistic, community-based approach.”
In another diversion scenario, says Dr. Megan R. Hicks, assistant professor, School of Social Work, Wayne State University in Detroit, a youth who has recently gotten into legal trouble “might be assigned to a community-based program where social workers can work directly with youths on whatever they need—mental health support, substance use support, trauma support.”
Widening the Juvenile Justice Scope
For young people more heavily involved in the justice system, one effective rehabilitative tool has been restorative justice, adds Hicks. “Social workers conduct juvenile justice conferences with victims and offenders to discuss and try to repair the harm that was done.” Wayne State offers MSW students such justice-related courses as “Youth, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice” and “Behavioral Health and the Criminal/Legal System.” Pictured at right: At UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, the master of social welfare program covers juvenile justice in foundation courses and in such electives as “Juvenile Justice Policy.”
At the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Jane Addams College of Social Work, associate professor Charles Hounmenou conducts research on human trafficking—a “covert criminal activity victimizing children and young adults,” he says. All forms of this crime are categorized into two main types: sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Unfortunately, law enforcement and prosecutors have difficulty differentiating victims from traffickers, and tend to treat victims as criminals, says Hounmenou, the Social Work within Justice Systems specialization chair, who teaches the nuances of helping trafficking victims in courses like “Social Work and Human Trafficking.”
Finding Alternative Strategies
Since at least the 1960s, social work practitioners and educators have been “really focused on trying to build programs for young people outside these traditional systems of control and punishment,” says Shook at Pitt. Unfortunately, there are still many youths of color who are “highly surveilled at school… and moved along through the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’ Yet in the vast majority of cases, you’re looking at kids just making mistakes. And they’re making mistakes because they’re young people.”
Hicks’ research has reaffirmed the importance of context in seeking justice and well-being for young people. “It’s really important to address the underlying issues, like mental health, family relationships, family trauma and substance abuse,” she says, “because those kinds of things are what put youth at risk for engaging in delinquent activity.”
Youth and the American Justice System: Key Research
Not surprisingly, important recent research on social work’s role in the justice system—whether criminal or juvenile—often focuses on results from holistic strategies and practices. Pictured at left: The University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work conducts a community meeting on youth safety and justice.
At the Florida State University College of Social Work, Dr. Stephen Tripodi, professor and doctoral program director, recently received funding from the college’s Florida Institute for Child Welfare to provide trauma programming for youth currently incarcerated in adult facilities in the Tallahassee area and in Seminole County, north of Orlando, and then study the outcome. “Almost everyone who has been in the juvenile justice system or the adult justice system has experienced trauma,” he points out. Working with the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, Tripodi hopes to soon expand the trauma programming to the juvenile justice system as well.
Meanwhile, California recently closed its major youth correctional facilities. As part of her current research, Dr. Laura Abrams, UCLA professor of social welfare, is creating models “for how counties can receive some of those young people and have the right types of institutions and rehabilitation programs [set up for them].” Abrams is also doing a follow-up study of a group of some 1,000 formerly incarcerated people who as teenagers had been sentenced to life without parole for murder but were released after federal and state laws were changed.
At Wayne State University in Detroit, Dr. Megan R. Hicks, assistant professor, School of Social Work—working with colleagues and MSW and PhD students—got approval from Wayne County to study its juvenile court processes. This ultimately resulted in some changes, says Hicks, such as “having defense attorneys meet with youths sooner in the process so they can collect more information and be better prepared when going to court.” The research team also helped merge varied information about marginalized youth from different data systems “to get a more holistic view and provide more information so we could better create services and policy change,” Hicks says.
Following are some published articles on juvenile justice research:
- “Achieving Juvenile Justice through Abolition: A Critical Review of Social Work’s Role in Shaping the Juvenile Legal System and Steps toward Achieving an Antiracist Future” by Durrell M. Washington, Toyan Harper, Alizé B. Hill and Lester J. Kern
- “Disparities at Adjudication in the Juvenile Justice System: An Examination of Race, Gender, and Age” by Michael Evangelist, Joseph P. Ryan, Bryan G. Victor, Andrew Moore and Brian E. Perron
- “From Child Welfare to Juvenile Justice: Race, Gender, and System Experiences” by S. Goodkind, J.J. Shook, K.H. Kim, R. Pohlig and D. Herring
- “An Observation Checklist for Use by Residential Social Workers in Juvenile Justice Institutions” by Kore G. Lampe, Eva A. Mulder, Robert R.J.M. Vermeiren and Oliver F. Colins
- “Racial Disparities in the Juvenile Justice System” by Henrika McCoy and Emalee Pearson
- “Youth Justice at a Crossroads: Twenty-First Century Progressive Reforms and Lessons to Inform the Path Forward” by Julia Lesnick, Laura S. Abrams and Elizabeth S. Barnert