Against evidence-based oppression: Marginalized youth and the politics of risk-based assessment and intervention

Abstract

Actuarial risk/needs assessments exert a formidable influence over the policy and practice of youth offender intervention. Risk-prediction instruments and the programming they inspire are thought not only to link scholarship to practice, but are deemed evidencebased. However, risk-based assessments and programs display a number of troubling characteristics: they reduce the lived experience of racialized inequality into an elevated risk score; they prioritize a very limited set of hyper-individualistic interventions, at the expense of others; and they privilege narrow individual-level outcomes as proof of overall success. As currently practiced, actuarial youth justice replicates earlier interventions that ask young people to navigate structural causes of crime at the individual level, while laundering various racialized inequalities at the root of violence and criminalization. This iteration of actuarial youth justice is not inevitable, and we discuss alternatives to actuarial youth justice as currently practiced.

Risk and punishment: The recent history and uncertain future of actuarial, algorithmic, and “evidence‐based” penal techniques

“…A number of scholars link the rise of risk techniques with the ascent of neoliberalism and its promotion of prudentialism and the application of “efficient,” market‐based logics to nonmarket relationships and social phenomena (Ewald, ; Garland, ; O'Malley, ; Rose, ; see also Cooper, ; Foucault, , De Giorgi, ). The rise of risk in criminal justice also reflects a turn towards technocratic, data‐driven governance—also referred to as evidence‐based policy—and the usage of algorithmic and “smart” technologies, trends witnessed in a variety of areas in the 20th and 21st centuries, including health care, education, transportation, and environmental planning (O'Malley, ; see also Goddard & Myers, ; Kehl et al, ; Rothschild‐Elyassi et al, ).…”

“…Further, critics contend that risk tools reinscribe-and possibly amplify-existing structural inequalities, including class, race, and gender ones (Angwin et al, 2016;Goddard & Myers, 2016;Gonzalez van Cleve & Mayes, 2015;Harcourt, 2007Harcourt, , 2010O'Neil, 2016;Mayson, 2019). In particular, risk assessments hold the potential of reproducing disparities that occur in other locations in criminal justice practices (Ferguson, 2017;Harcourt, 2007Harcourt, , 2010O'Neil, 2016), including the overrepresentation of poor and minority individuals in communities targeted for aggressive policing, in criminal prosecutions, and in imprisonment (Alexander, 2008;Gonzalez van Cleve, 2016;Wacquant, 2009;Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).…”

“…Proponents see risk technologies as a data-driven or "evidence-based" way to improve criminal justice: to make it more effective, diminish biases and inconsistencies, and reduce or even end mass incarceration and mass supervision (e.g., Bonta & Andrews, 2007b;Harris, 2006;Milgram, 2014). Skeptics and critics however contend that risk techniques have helped drive and legitimize mass incarceration (Feeley & Simon, 1992;Garland, 2001;Hannah-Moffat, 2013;Harcourt, 2007;Werth, 2018) and that they reproduce-and maybe amplify-existing social inequalities but under a guise of objectivity and science (e.g., Angwin, Larson, Mattu, & Kirchner, 2016;Goddard & Myers, 2016;Gonzalez van Cleve & Mayes, 2015;Harcourt, 2010;Starr, 2015;Mayson, 2019). Within these discussions and debates, this article offers another intervention in risk scholarship: It calls for greater attention to the performative effects of risk technologies.…”

Transatlantic ‘Positive Youth Justice’: a distinctive new model for responding to offending by children?

“…Advocates of PYJ assert that punitive (repressive justice), neo-correctionalist, interventionist, risk-based and offender-focused models dominate the youth justice of England/Wales, North America, Australasia and parts of Europe (cf. Goddard and Myers 2017;Winterdyck 2014;Dunkel 2014;Cavadino and Dignan 2006). These same advocates of PYJ also criticise the childfriendly justice movement for its restricted framing of 'positive' outcomes as simply the avoidance and prevention of the negative behaviours and outcomes (arguably neutral outcomes at best), rather than prioritising actual positive behaviours and outcomes (e.g., family cohesion, educational attainment, access to entitlements).…”

Validation of the Ceredigion Youth Screening Tool

“…ASSET was recently replaced by ASSET-Plus (circa April 2016); theoretically and methodologically updated, the latter tool aims to address some of the shortcomings of the 'scaled approach' (Baker, 2015;YJB, 2013). The key revisions were designed to take ASSET-plus into a more contextualised, holistic assessment paradigm, beyond the prescriptive scored domains of its predecessor (Almond, 2012), although notwithstanding some reservations about how this will manifest itself theoretically and practically (Bishop, 2012;Drake, Fergusson and Briggs, 2014;Goddard and Myers, 2016;Horney, Tolan and Weisburd, 2012). This paper outlines one such initiative -the Ceredigion Youth Screening Tool or CYSTEM -which is being used to 'screen out' low risk referrals to youth justice services with the aim of diverting young people from formal interventions and reducing case loads.…”