Keeping Kids for Profit: A Cautionary Tale of Public Service Corruption and "Slumcare" within the Expanding Juvenile Crime Control Industry.

• Author: Cruz, Kenneth A.

IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY--IN BOTH THE UNITED STATES and the United Kingdom--the progressive state provided healthcare for the poor, rehabilitation for the incarcerated, and education for the general public in the name of social welfare. Toward the end of the century, however, the neoliberal state began to hand these tasks over to private entities that compete for contracts and limited funding sources in the name of cost-efficiency (Garland 2001, Miller & Rose 2008, Simon 2007). As the public sphere was opened to the free market, we--wittingly or not--have entrusted these private organizations to produce public goods and provide public services.

In the realm of criminal justice, Garland (2001,170) argues that these shifts in responsibility have led to the emergence of a "third 'governmental' sector." Positioned "between the state and civil society," this third sector is composed of diverse private actors--including for-profit, non-profit, and charitable--who have taken on the responsibility of crime control "at a distance" from the state (Garland 2001,170; see also Garland 1996, Tomczak & Thompson 2019). This "responsibilization strategy" has been viewed as a "new mode of exercising power" that activates the crime prevention capacity of the private sector while extending the crime control reach of the state (Garland 1996,452-454). Consequently, the infusion of market-based logics into crime control has helped produce a growing industry that promises to "minimize costs and maximize security"(Garland 2001,175; see also Feeley & Simon 1992).

In this case study of a for-profit violence prevention group home for adolescent males in the southwestern United States, I show how an attempt to merge market-based logics with a therapeutic logic of care has resulted in what I call slumcare (Cruz 2019). Specifically, I will demonstrate how this third sector institution, which is premised on cost-efficiency and therapeutic rehabilitation, provides substandard care that is cost prohibitive and harmful for Indigenous youth in particular when it places them far from their homes and keeps them longer than necessary. Before presenting the methods and findings of this study, I will provide a historical and theoretical context for understanding the research site.

Netting Lives and Profits

According to Garland (2001), it was the marriage of free market neoliberalism with socially conservative politics that gave rise to the third sector. In theory, this novel form of governing was fostered by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, guided by a culture of control, and developed to manage the risks of social problems, such as crime and insecurity, instead of addressing their underlying causes (Rose 2000, Simon 2007).

Within the third sector, crime prevention efforts are purportedly informed by a "criminology of the self" that seeks to manipulate our behaviors by tapping into rational tendencies in everyday situations, while a "criminology of the other" taps into populist outrage for the dangerous--often racialized--criminal to maintain the punitive practices of the state (Garland 1996, 461-62). As these distinct approaches become "increasingly polarized," Garland (1996,461-62) suggests that the "once-dominant welfarist criminology" that viewed the criminal as "disadvantaged or poorly socialized" would obsolesce. Under these circumstances, he hypothesized that the lives of those caught in the crime prevention net would become decontextualized as a rehabilitative ideal concerned with social conditions was replaced by a more cost-efficient vision of rehabilitation that targets behaviors and instills self-control (Garland 2001,175-88; see also Abrams 2013, Goshe 2019). In addition, he argued that the "embrace of the private sector" would create incentives for the expansion of this market in social control (Garland 2001,117).

Feeley (2002, 325-33), however, notes that the introduction of market principles into modern Anglo-American crime control dates back to the ascendance of capitalism. While the novelty of this exercise of power may have been overemphasized by Garland, he appears to have been correct about its current tendency to expand (Feeley 2002; see also Mears & Montes 2019). As entrepreneurs branch out to innovative release centers, specialized halfway houses, and niche residential treatment facilities, their ventures in crime prevention are steadily and simultaneously netting more lives and more profits (Feeley 2002).The net result--in terms of social harm and social good--that is produced by this expanding market has yet to be determined (Mears & Montes 2019).

The Juvenile Crime Control Industry

In the United States, the juvenile justice system has a long history of partnering with the private sector (Butts & Pfaff 2019, Krisberg 2005, Platt 1977). The extent of privatization has waxed and waned, but consistent with Garland's thesis, it is currently expanding: although juvenile crime rates have declined since the mid-1990s and the use of state-run juvenile correctional facilities has been reduced, there has been a notable increase in the privatization of juvenile corrections. In fact, in a span of less than twenty years, the proportion of youth in state versus private confinement reversed, so that by 2015 "42% of youth were confined in private facilities" while "38% were in state facilities" (Butts & Pfaff 2019,368).

As state-run institutions were being shut down, innovations in community-based crime prevention were beginning to spread across the country (Armstrong 2002a, Cox 2015, Myers & Goddard 2013). This embrace of private sector community-based alternatives and evidence-based practices (Abrams 2013) gained significant bipartisan support and was recently championed in the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018. (1) In fact, this legislation is intended to ensure greater access to third sector providers and to facilitate the growth of this industry. While the return to communities and the apparent "resurgence of rehabilitation" have recently been applauded, there has also been a resurgence of critiques (Goshe 2019,560).

For example, in Massachusetts, which has been recognized as a model for juvenile justice reform, Armstrong (2002b, 354) shows that private, nonprofit, community-based interventions have reproduced the coercive control of "the penal institution ... in a more invisible way" (see also Cox 2015). Similarly, in Texas, Cate (2016, 581) demonstrates that devolution from the state to local agencies and the "growth of privatization in the juvenile justice system" is actually "expanding punishment ... at the local level." And Goshe (2019, 560-61) illuminates how the adoption of evidence-based interventions has largely resulted in the widespread distribution of "pills and programs" that tend to ignore the "social conditions that cultivate and sustain delinquency" in the first place (see also Abrams 2013), while Cruz (2019) and Flores and Barahona-Lopez (2019) show how juveniles are all too often harmed in the process of receiving these therapeutic interventions.

Collectively, these studies show that the juvenile crime control industry (2) is expanding, but not exactly as Garland suggested. Instead of increasing polarization between punitive and preventive controls, there is evidence of the increasing fusion of the preventive and the punitive (Armstrong 2002b, Cruz 2019). There is also growing evidence that rhetorical appeals to community, non-profit, and therapeutic interventions often obscure their punitive and harmful aspects (Armstrong 2002b, Cox 2015, Cruz 2019, Flores & Barahona-Lopez 2019).

Interestingly, one of the most prolific and obscure sites of the growing juvenile crime control industry is within privatized public healthcare (Armstrong 2002a, Cook et al. 2004, Hutchinson & Foster 2003). Throughout the country, Medicaid managed care organizations contract with providers of therapeutic interventions to address the behaviors of impoverished youth in child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and many of them profit from whatever contracted funds are not used in the process, which can of course incentivize cheap services (Cook et al. 2004, Hutchinson & Foster 2003).

Although neoliberalism has advanced the use of market-based logics within juvenile crime control (Butts & Pfaff 2019, Cate 2016), it has also ushered in a logic of care, as many of these third sector providers are organizational hybrids that attempt to balance helpful and empowering public service goals with cost-efficient crime control (Armstrong 2002a, Muncie 2006, Myers & Goddard 2013, O'Malley 2000). In Massachusetts, for example, many of the community-based entrepreneurs that entered this space in the 1980s were committed to a "mental health ethos" (Armstrong 2002a, 614-16). Tellingly, in a study of three non-profit crime prevention organizations in the western United States, Myers & Goddard (2013,223) found that social justice oriented interventions can help at-risk youth understand the contextual roots of crime and injustice--including profound racialized inequalities--and they can assist them in becoming "part of the solution." (3) Neoliberalism may have expanded the juvenile crime control industry, but market purists--driven by a culture of control--are not the only ones occupying the third sector (Goddard & Myers 2011, Myers & Goddard 2013, Muncie 2006).

Research Gaps

Within this privatized space, Latessa and Lovins (2019) suggest, the profit motive, the lack of oversight, and the lack of quality control can lead to harm. Thus, they argue that more research is needed to explore these potential harms and to scrutinize whether privatization is cost-effective (see also Butts & Pfaff 2019). Phoenix & Kelly (2013,419-26) have also argued that additional micro-site studies are needed to explore on-the-ground experiences of the third sector. This is based on the recognition that research at the abstract levels of state...