Community-Based Recovery and Youth Justice
| Author | Brian G. Sellers |
| DOI | 10.1177/0093854814550027 |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Modes of Rehabilitation |
research-article2014
Community-Based ReCoveRy and youth
JustiCe
BRIAN G. SELLERS
Eastern Michigan University
Four well-known delinquency intervention and prevention programs remain both publicly and politically popular regardless
of a large body of evidence-based research revealing their ineffectiveness in promoting a lasting desistance from youth vio-
lence and crime. Scared straight programs, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.), youth boot camps, and secure
large-scale, custodial juvenile correctional facilities overemphasize offender “risk management and maintenance” as opposed
to individual, group-based, and/or collective well-being. This article will identify the values that these current and dominant
community-centered youth justice initiatives reflect, and it will explain how these values further (or forestall) offender desis-
tance. Viable, evidence-based alternatives consistent with the value orientation of therapeutic and restorative programming
will also be evaluated. The article concludes by examining the efficacy of this alternative normative agenda to foster success-
ful desistance from juvenile delinquency and crime.
Keywords: get-tough movement; intervention; juvenile corrections; juvenile offenders; prevention; rehabilitation; restora-
tive justice
The earliest attempts to develop social control mechanisms for youth can be traced to the
end of the 19th century with the child-saving movement, which was an effort by philan-
thropists and social reformers to alleviate the miseries of urban life resulting from the struc-
tural inequalities of unregulated capitalism (Platt, 1969/2009). However, the possibly
well-intentioned rhetoric of the child savers was really masking the development of a class-
based system of harsh punishment, which deprived impoverished youth of due process
while enhancing the role the state played in the everyday lives of the working class (Platt,
1969/2009). The underlying motivation of the child-saving movement was to promote
White middle-class moral values, which were threatened by a rapidly evolving and increas-
ingly complex urban life of the working classes during the industrialization at the turn the
century (Platt, 1969/2009). Therefore, child savers sought to properly socialize and nurture
government control over the movements and actions of working-class urban youth through
the development of a juvenile justice system that would decide what was in the best interest
of the child and society via new forms of control, restraint, and punishment (Platt,
1969/2009).
The child-saving movement was also an “attempt to regulate deviant behaviors of work-
ing-class men and women, using ‘panics’ to either establish new or re-instate fragile, social
authoRs’ note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brian G. Sellers,
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology, Eastern Michigan University, 712 Pray-Harrold,
Ypsilanti, MI 48197; e-mail: bseller3@emich.edu.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2015, Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2015, 58 –69.
DOI: 10.1177/0093854814550027
© 2014 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology
58
Sellers / COMMUNITY-BASED RECOVERY AND YOUTH JUSTICE 59
norms” (Evans, Davies, & Rich, 2008, p. 119). The movement directly affected the children
of the urban poor by recasting them as “sick,” “maladjusted,” “unsocialized,” “pathologi-
cal,” or “troublesome” youth, who needed to be confined “for their own good” (Platt,
1969/2009, p. 177). Thus, delinquent youth were stigmatized as dangerous “others” in the
political rhetoric during the movement (Mills, 1943). This political rhetoric thrived under a
media-influenced moral panic, which demanded the immediate control of what was per-
ceived to be an unmanageable problem with juvenile delinquency and crime (Platt,
1969/2009).
Over time, media-based “child saving” techniques have continued to be used to manu-
facture biased and misguided opinions about the need to regulate dangerous youth. For
example, rhetoric from John J. DiIulio, William Bennett, John Walters, and William Bratton
overstressed the reports being publicized by the mass media in the 1990s of youth “wilding”
and the growing legions of juvenile “superpredators” (Bennett, DiIulio, & Walters, 1996;
Welch, 2011, pp. 216-217). These characterizations of inner city juvenile offenders as being
criminogenic, valueless, and “new threats to public safety” received constant and sustained
media coverage (Welch, 2011, p. 216). As a result, minority urban youth were targeted as
threats to society, while racial and economic inequalities were reinforced by the state legis-
latures’ ever-increasing “get tough” responses to the perceived panic over youth crime
(Welch, 2011). Indeed, the moral panic, as driven by media framing of adolescent offend-
ing, served to unify a frightened public and public officials in a stance against marginalized
“folk-devils,” which threatened the normative standards and values of an older generation
(Cohen, 1972; Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2008). The reach of this media-based and pub-
licly re-enacted moral panic now even extends to school disciplinary policy (Sellers, 2013)
and immigration policy (Trull & Arrigo, in press).
Media-driven outrage over a social problem tends to mobilize popular support for
policy responses that will serve as “quick-fix, punitive solutions” to the threat of future
crime and violence (Finckenauer, 1982; Hirschfield, 2008, p. 85). As such, punitive-ori-
ented prevention and intervention approaches for juvenile delinquency and crime were
implemented with the intent of subduing juvenile offending by displacing public fear and
redirecting it through consequentialist forms of programs and institutional responses,
such as Scared Straight, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.), youth boot camps,
and secure juvenile correctional facilities focused more on custodial management rather
than rehabilitative goals. Consequentialism refers to an ethical approach in which actions
and decisions are prioritized according to interest-balancing, means/ends calculations,
and/or cost–benefit analyses (Arrigo, Bersot, & Sellers, 2011). While the intentions of
policy makers who supported these “get tough” approaches to youth crime may have been
deemed well-intentioned at the time of their implementation (Lipsey, Howell, Kelly,
Chapman, & Carver, 2010), years of evaluative research have found them ineffective and
left wanting (Lipsey, 2009; Lipsey & Cullen, 2007; Lipsey et al., 2010; MacKenzie,
Wilson, & Kider, 2001; Pan & Bai, 2009; Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, Hollis-Peel, &
Lavenberg, 2013). Regardless of the empirical findings of well-designed evaluation stud-
ies, which have ruled these prevention and intervention programs ineffective, these “get
tough” approaches to juveniles remain popular among political power brokers, who
largely dismiss evaluation evidence in favor of continued use of punitive policies and
practices in the juvenile justice system (Birkeland, Murphy-Graham, & Weiss, 2005;
Lipsey et al., 2010).
60 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR
This article will review the extant research on popular juvenile prevention and interven-
tion programs with regard to their effectiveness. In addition, the values that these “get
tough” youth justice initiatives reflect ethically will be identified, and how these values
further (or forestall) offender desistance will be explained. Viable evidence-based alterna-
tives consistent with the value orientation of therapeutic and restorative programming will
also be evaluated. Finally, the efficacy of this alternative normative agenda to foster suc-
cessful desistance from juvenile delinquency and crime will be examined via an ethical and
cultural critique.
Review of Punitive Juvenile PRogRams
During the 1990s, many state legislatures embraced the get-tough penal harm movement,
which ushered in several juvenile prevention and intervention programs with the aim of
appeasing “just deserts” advocates, while abandoning programming that reflected the tradi-
tional rehabilitative mission of the juvenile justice system (Bishop, 2006; Lipsey et al.,
2010). The underlying theoretical rationales for “get tough” punitive policies toward juve-
nile offending are rooted in deterrence and rational choice theories, which draw from clas-
sical criminological and economic theory (Cullen & Jonson, 2012; Lipsey et al., 2010).
Under deterrence theory, swift, certain, and severe sanctions are expected to reduce delin-
quency and crime, both specifically for the individual offender and generally for the vicari-
ously observing public (Cullen & Jonson, 2012). Basically, fear of severe punishment is
expected to suppress delinquency and deter youth from breaking the law (Cullen & Jonson,
2012; Lundman, 2001). Similarly, rational choice theory hypothesizes that perceived cer-
tainty and severity of shame, embarrassment, and legal sanction may deter potential delin-
quents if they engage in a cost–benefit analysis (Cornish & Clarke, 1986). Thus, by applying
Jeremy Bentham’s hedonistic calculus to mechanisms of deterrence theory, rational choice
theory assumes that delinquents are rational agents who weigh the costs and benefits of
engaging in delinquency before committing the act (Grasmick & Bursik, 1990). Thus, puni-
tive juvenile programs value coercion,...
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