Centering justice: Transforming paradigms of approach, design and implementation

Abstract

This concluding article presents visions for future research, prevention, intervention, and policy. This paper positions existing research paradigms against social justice principles, problematizing the ideological underpinnings of the legal system and its disproportionate impact on oppressed groups, including via the persistent overrepresentation of youth of color and/or marginalized genders. Highlighting the areas of challenge suggested by each of the manuscripts within the themed issue, this paper encourages critical shifts in the approach, design and implementation of work with system-involved youth. Recommendations include: strengths-based, rights-based, systems accountability frameworks that account for structural forces and societal issues that produce oppressive contexts, amending and re-defining language to de-stigmatize youth, shifting the targets of this work up the power gradient to avoid victim blaming of youth, engaging participatory methods that provide direct benefit to youth, and critical discourse analysis alongside individual reflexivity to keep ourselves accountable in this work.

Policing Education: An Empirical Review of the Challenges and Impact of the Work of School Police Officers

“…These school-based processes have been linked to sustained pathways of criminal justice system involvement and contribute to the proliferation of mass incarceration for people of color (Javdani, Sadeh, & Verona, 2011). Thus, we echo recommendations for scholars to employ systems accountability frameworks in their research that directly assess the ways in which current approaches, such as SPO programs, can re-produce power structures that further marginalize disenfranchised groups (Jumarali, Mandiyan, & Javdani, in press), and underscore that rigorous experimental designs have an ethical imperative to be “blind to condition, but not to oppression” (Javdani, Singh, & Sichel, 2017). Toward these goals, it is hoped that the recommendations from this study can be employed to first limit, bound, formalize, and support the SPO role and, next, to re-imagine the role of SPOs even more boldly in the vision of school safety for all youth rather than with a lens of fear and social control that disproportionately impacts the lives of youth on the margins.…”

“Roses have thorns for a reason”: The promises and perils of critical youth participatory research with system‐impacted girls of Color

“…In our space, we invited different ways of contributing knowledge (verbally, through journals, photographs, group projects, informally, through sharing meals, in playing with children, through jokes, songs, and memes). This mirrored the feminist roots and emerging antiracist goals on which ROSES is founded (e.g., Bybee & Sullivan, 2002; Jumarali et al, 2019).…”

“…Yet, the system does not allow youth to be both victims and offenders, so survivors are labeled offenders to justify the ability of the court to (over)step in to protect youth who cannot protect themselves (e.g., as part of parens patriae ; Rendleman, 1971). Further, the tools of the courts rely on compliance over humanization; respectability over dignity; and blame narratives over agency (Jumarali et al, 2019).…”

Traumatic Incidents and Experiences of Racism and Sexism: Examining Associations with Components of Critical Consciousness for System‐Involved Girls of Color

“…Youth involved in the juvenile legal system represent an important and almost completely unstudied population with regard to critical consciousness scholarship (with the exception of Singh, Javdani, Berezin, & Sichel 2020). In particular, girls enmeshed in the legal system are at the nexus of multiple forces of structural oppression and face discrimination based on key features of their identity—they are overwhelmingly Black and Brown, more likely to identify as sexual minorities, and face sex‐ and race‐based discrimination interpersonally and at the hands of multiple state‐based actors (e.g., child welfare and juvenile justice systems, in addition to education; Acoca, 1999; Chesney‐Lind & Shelden, 2013; Javdani, 2019; Javdani, Sadeh, & Verona, 2011; Jumarali, Mandiyan, & Javdani, 2019; Miller, 2008; Sherman & Black, 2015). Moreover, according to a 2015 report, 40% of girls in the juvenile legal system across the country describe themselves as lesbian, bisexual, questioning/gender non‐conforming, or transgender (LBQ/GNCT; Sherman & Black, 2015).…”