Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

Charlie E Sutton,Judy Wright,Stephen Case,Mark Monaghan,Joanne Greenhalgh

doi:10.3390/su14020854

Charlie E Sutton, Judy Wright + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14020854

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Abstract

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’.

Highlights

When the New Labour Government came to power in 1997 in the United Kingdom (UK), the prevention of youth crime became the primary aim for the Youth Justice System (YJS) created in the
A cause and consequence of this simplistic understanding has been that preventative interventions have been increasingly evaluated using frameworks that prioritise Randomised Controlled Trial’ (RCT) and associated experimental designs, which ignore wider contextual features that might shape the effectiveness of these interventions
Synthesis evaluation methodology by the youth justice field to enable a more holistic understanding of how criminogenic influences and intervention programme theories have been conceptualised in youth justice

Summary

Introduction

Sustainability 2022, The ‘What Works’ framework for evaluating intervention ‘effectiveness’ has dominated youth justice prevention practice in both the US and UK since the 1990s. The risk-led, preventative interventions prioritised by the ‘What Works’ evaluation framework are increasingly the subject of critique on the grounds that they privilege a narrow range of ‘evidence’ generated through rigid, experimental measures of ‘quality’, often based on explicit randomisation into control and treatment groups. We explore these ideas in this paper, starting from the premise that such approaches fail to appreciate how context influences the way interventions operate and are, premised on a limited understanding of causality. We envisage the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions, which could mitigate the decontextualization embedded in current approaches to intervention selection and evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’

The Evolution of Intervention in Youth Justice

Modernising Youth Justice Intervention

Precautionary Prevention

The Hegemony of ‘What Works’ in Youth Justice Intervention

The Potential of Realist Youth Justice

Conclusions