Contested by the State: Institutional Offloading in the Case of Crossover Youth

Abstract

How do people become the responsibility of one state institution over another? Prevailing theory suggests that marginalized groups are funneled toward increasingly coercive control over the life course, yet more coercive institutions may not always assume responsibility for people sent their way. This article uses the unique case of crossover youth—children at the junction of child welfare and juvenile justice systems—to illustrate how state institutions negotiate and contest responsibility for marginalized groups. To explain this process, I advance a conceptual framework of institutional offloading, which contends that institutional actors seek to offload responsibility for eligible tasks or clients they perceive to unduly strain the resources at their disposal and expose them to blame. Drawing on ethnographic data from a California juvenile court and interviews with court actors, the analysis demonstrates how actors from Social Services, on one side, and Probation, on the other, attempt to offload responsibility for crossover youth. In this process, institutional actors construct and contest crossover youths’ status as dependent or delinquent. The findings highlight the importance of analyzing governance decisions as interlocking state processes and illuminate mechanisms by which the pipeline to prison for marginalized groups may be perpetuated and potentially disrupted.