The emergence and implications of a mental health ethos in juvenile justice

Abstract

Study of the interaction of mental health and justice systems tends to focus on the ways that the respective realms inadvertently ‘capture’ each other's target populations. There has been little research into a system-level analysis that can answer questions about how styles, organising principles and institutional values of one system relate to and are sometimes incorporated by the other. This paper reconsiders juvenile de-institutionalisation in Massachusetts to document the emergence of a mental health ethos in the state's juvenile justice system of community-based treatment. The emergence of this ethos superficially bears out an influential thesis in the sociology of punishment that penal practice has now become charactised by an amoral actuarialism. A more sophisticated criminological awareness of developments in mental health and the sociology of medicine would show how a mental health ethos might instead be understood to challenge the actuarial thesis, by providing a framework that reconciles the traditional aims of retribution and rehabilitation in punishment.