Time to stop and smell the roses: On ‘rushing headlong’ into service delivery without really knowing what it is we are doing

Day, Andrew

doi:10.1002/cbm.2171

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…When successionist understandings are applied to youth justice, for example, we can see some emerging problems for understanding and responding to youth offending. Although a unified practice management model has promoted a more professional and accountable approach to the delivery of youth justice, evidence does not confirm the logic that preventing offending is linked to reducing measurable levels of risk [48,85]. Generative understandings can help to reveal the influence of other important contextual factors, observable features (space place people things) that trigger or block interventions and context as relational and dynamic features that can shape the mechanisms through which interventions work [41].…”

Section: The Potential Of Realist Youth Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

et al. 2022

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This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context-sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk-based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence-base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk-based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.

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Section: The Potential Of Realist Youth Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

et al. 2022

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“…However, as a young Indigenous person with a significant personal stake in this field, choosing the most urgent and unresolved of these is simple, that of equity across Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals in our criminal legal systems, and particularly in relation to rehabilitation efficacy. It is becoming clear that, for a number of reasons, we appear to be reaching an impasse in the ability of our interventions to reduce reoffending (summarized neatly in Day, 2021). The risk paradigm, which underpins the large majority of rehabilitation-focused research, does not seem to be delivering as we would expect.…”

Section: Com M En Ta Ry # 4 By Str Aus S -H Ugh Es: a Ddr Es Si Ng Cu...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Urgent issues and prospects in correctional rehabilitation practice and research

Ward

Arrigo

Barnao³

et al. 2022

Legal Criminol Psychol

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The aim of this paper is to identify some of the urgent issues currently confronting criminal justice policymakers, researchers and practitioners. To this end a diverse group of researchers and clinicians have collaborated to identify pressing concerns in the field and to make some suggestions about how to proceed in the future. The authors represent individuals with varying combinations of criminal justice research, professional training (e.g. social work, criminal justice, criminology, social work, clinical psychology) and clinical orientation, and experience. The paper is comprised of 13 commentaries and a subsequent discussion based on these reflections. The commentaries are divided into the categories of explanation of criminal behaviour, clinical assessment and correctional intervention, and cover issues ranging from the role of clinical expertise in treatment, problems with risk assessment to the adverse effects of social oppression on minority groups. Following the commentaries, we summarize some of their key themes and briefly discuss a number of major issues likely to confront the field in the next 5–10 years.

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“…. has unified the field [of youth justice], provided significant impetus to attempts to implement evidence-based practice, and generally resulted in a more professional and accountable approach to service delivery" [46] Across westernised youth justice systems, risk has become the main conceptual lens through which evidence is generated to fulfill neo-liberal responsibilising and correctionalist objectives, with "risk factors" becoming the central "explanatory" concept for the hegemonic, risk-focused youth justice evidence-base. Risk factors constitute quantified representations of problematic and criminogenic experiences, characteristics and "deficits", primarily located in the psychosocial domains of a child's life [47]-the psychological (e.g., emotional, cognitive, attitudinal) and the immediate social (e.g., family, education, neighbourhood/community, peer group).…”

Section: Evidence-based Neo-correctionalism: the Risk Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm (RFPP) is founded on an evidence-based central preventative premise: "Identify the risk factors for offending and implement prevention methods designed to counteract them" [54]. Taken together, RFR and the RFPP have provided the field of youth justice with an evidenced framework (i.e., "paradigm") and "foundational scientific body of knowledge" [46] for governing the work of practitioners [55] a set of theories, assumptions and ideas about why children offend and what the purpose and content of youth justice professional practice should be (ibid). The evidence-bases of the risk paradigm have proven very attractive to youth justice policy-makers, who have readily accepted the deterministic explanations of artefactual RFR as "universal truths that are stable and reliable" [31].…”

Section: Evidence-based Neo-correctionalism: the Risk Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice

Case

2021

Sustainability

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The generation of empirical evidence to explain offending by children and young people has been a central driver of criminological and sociological research for more than two centuries. Across the international field of youth justice, empirical research evidence has become an integral means of complementing and extending the knowledge and understanding of offending offered by the official enquiries and data collection of professional stakeholders and an essential tool for informing ‘evidence-based’ policy, practice and ‘effective intervention’. However, it will be argued that the hegemonic empirical evidence-base created by youth justice research over the past two decades has been generated through methodological reductionism - the oversimplification of complexity, the restriction of conceptual lens and the relative exclusion of competing explanatory paradigms and empirical methodologies, which in turn, has reduced the scope and validity of the policy and practice recommendations derived from it.

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Time to stop and smell the roses: On ‘rushing headlong’ into service delivery without really knowing what it is we are doing

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

Urgent issues and prospects in correctional rehabilitation practice and research

Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice

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