A Treatment-To-Prison-Pipeline? Scoping Review and Multimethod Examination of Legal Consequences of Residential Treatment Among Adolescents

The critical case file approach: A novel tool for critically analyzing mixed-method data as exemplified in a juvenile legal setting.

“…Specifically, a preliminary CCF codebook was first created before any coding sessions. This was informed by an initial CCF codebook used in a case file review to understand girls' legal involvement within a single system point (court; see Javdani et al, 2023). The final codebook built off of this single system point codebook, but was expanded to allow us to systematically collect and analyze data informed by multiple system points.…”

“…Many of the above indicators were initially generated from the deductive analytic approach completed from existing national scholarship on girls’ legal involvement (e.g., treatment-to-prison pipeline, school-to-prison pipeline, abuse to pipeline, child welfare involvement, homelessness; Baumle, 2018; Epstein et al, 2017; Javdani et al, 2023; Sherman & Balck, 2015; Vafa & Epstein, 2023). A smaller subset of indicators (e.g., family and peer involvement, immigration status, gang involvement) were included following our inductive analysis of the full case file data available across each jurisdiction.…”

“…For example, case file data have been used to examine attributions of behavior among JLS stakeholders (Bridges & Steen, 1998); trace pathways between concentrated disadvantage, perceptions of risk, and confinement for youth (Pasko & Chesney-Lind, 2010; Pasko & Mayeda, 2011; Rodriguez, 2013); and understand inequities within the family court system to create an alternative girls court (Javdani et al, 2023). These studies highlight the potential of case files to be an analytic tool that examines structural precarity and systems’ partners’ attributions by elucidating the ways in which poverty is criminalized among youth (Pasko & Chesney-Lind, 2010; Rodriguez et al, 2009) or to identify a treatment-to-prison pipeline for youth in residential treatment centers (Javdani et al, 2023). However, case files have even greater potential to interrogate the legal system itself and its feeder systems to bolster our understanding of how youths’ structural realities and subsequent system responses confer disparities.…”

“…We illustrate the six-step CCF process by describing how this mixed-method approach can be applied to reduce legal contact for girls and TGNC youth of color across three jurisdictions in the United States. Specifically, the proposed six-step process was first created following a case file analysis of a census of all court cases filed over an 18-month period (January 2016–June 2017; Javdani et al, 2023) in one jurisdiction. This was then modified and refined following a case file analysis conducted on two samples of detention files across two jurisdictions (one county and one state level).…”

Quality Care in Residential Care and Treatment Settings in North America: From Complex Research to Four Everyday Principles for Practice

“…Thrown into the mix often without much theoretical framing are additional process and experiential items such as child and youth participation and voice, family engagement, educational outcomes, outcomes with respect to social participation, and avoidance of youth criminal justice systems, to name a few. More recently (perhaps over the past ten years) in North America, quality discussions have incorporated, but not always meaningfully integrated, a combination of outcome-focused and experiential factors related to equity-seeking identity groups, with particular attention to Black youth, Indigenous youth, and young people identifying outside of gender binaries and as part of LGBTQ2s+ communities [21]. Of note here is that young people with disabilities continue to exist primarily at the margins of these discussions, perhaps symptomatic of the societal and political hesitation to confront ableist norms and practices.…”