| Description |
Official policy narratives in the juvenile-justice system have historically vacillated between orientations to punish and rehabilitate. Yet research suggests that despite dramatic policy changes, the primary narrative of the juvenile-justice system is one of continuity. This dissertation examines how day-to-day interactions between youth and staff in a juvenile secure-care setting express public policy in ways that account for slippage between official articulations and their implemented versions. Using policy documents along with field research that includes ethnographic observations, indepth interviews, and case file reviews, this study both investigates the local setting as a site of politics and reaches across levels of analysis to offer recommendations for juvenile-justice policy implementation and service-delivery practice. It identifies insights into how policy and practice affect conceptions of identity at personal and collective levels. In secure care, interactions between youth and staff occur in an environment that is highly disparate in terms of power and yet is still one of mutual influence. Interactions have important consequences for policy, treatment services, and identity. They affect both youth-identity formation â€" a central part of the adolescent-development project â€" and staff professional identity. The quality of interactions in secure care can affect program outcomes, including youth openness to treatment, legal socialization, and recidivism. Further, I show staff behaviors and professional identities to be at risk due to the contagious influence of youth street mentalities. Key recommendations seek to enhance developmentally-appropriate and evidence-based efforts to treat delinquency, including: 1) the fostering of a productive pluralism in secure care; 2) the incorporation of procedural-justice approaches to improve the quality of interactions at multiple organizational levels; and 3) the import of a critical consonance between what we teach youth and how we teach them. |
