Critical issues for youth involved in the juvenile justice system: Innovations in prevention, intervention, and policy

Abstract

This introduction to the themed issue presents a targeted review of historical and contemporary trends in the prevention, intervention, and policy response to juvenile justice system-involved youth. These trends underscore often overlooked ideological assumptions that implicate individual-level problem definitions, a pattern of victim blaming tendencies despite having a workforce increasingly trained in assessing context, and a system whose rehabilitative mandate is at odds with the social demand to maintain itself and its structures through keeping youth system-involved. Further, contemporary trends point to efforts that redirect blame from individual youth to families, and which ultimately ignore the broader sociopolitical context of mass incarceration that has selectively disenfranchized those same families. These and other critical paradoxes are underscored, with particular attention to the dilemmas raised by the invited articles within this issue–which push interdisciplinary frameworks in a direction that concretizes and advances solutions for critical issues in youth justice prevention and intervention.