Juvenile Facility Staff: Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of staff members in juvenile facilities, particularly as they manage the core tensions between care and control. The chapter examines the function of staff in young people's lives, and the importance of understanding their role in terms of the consequences for young people's safety and well-being. Drawing from a piece of qualitative research about staff working in residential juvenile facilities in New York State, it also examines the ways that staff manage the demands of care and control, and looks at the practices of emotional labor that staff members engage in. Juvenile Facility Staff: Research, Policy, and PracticeWorkers arguably lie at the heart of our understandings of youth imprisonment. When a young person is removed from their homes and their families and detained in custody, the state assumes responsibility for their care and safety. In most youth imprisonment contexts, the state assumes the role of in loco parentis, or the "place of a parent," while a young person is incarcerated. Thus, the adults working in facilities for youth in trouble with the law, which includes juvenile detention, corrections, and residential facilities, serve as both custodians of a population that has been incarcerated beyond their will, but also carers who must ensure the well-being of a population of young people who are considered to be legally and socially