Most youth who come in conflict with the law have experienced some form of trauma, yet many justice professionals are ill-equipped to deal with the effects trauma has on youth and instead reinforce a system that further traumatizes young offenders while ignoring the needs of victims. By taking a trauma-informed perspective, this text provides a much-needed alternative—one that allows for interventions based on principles of healing and restorative justice, rather than on punishment and risk assessment. In addition to providing a comprehensive historical overview of youth justice in Canada, Judah Oudshoorn addresses the context of youth offending by examining both individual trauma—including its emotional, cognitive, and behavioural effects—and collective trauma. The author tackles some of the most difficult problems facing youth justice today, especially the ongoing cycles of intergenerational trauma caused by the colonization of Indigenous peoples and patriarchal violence, and demonstrates how a trauma-informed approach to youth justice can work toward preventing crime and healing offenders, victims, and communities. Featuring a foreword written by Howard Zehr, case stories from the author’s own work with victims and offenders, questions for reflection, and annotated lists of recommended readings, this engaging text is the perfect resource for college and university students in the field of youth justice.

Most youth who come in conflict with the law have experienced some form of trauma, yet many justice professionals are ill-equipped to deal with the effects trauma has on youth and instead reinforce a system that further traumatizes young offenders while ignoring the needs of victims. By taking a trauma-informed perspective, this text provides a much-needed alternative—one that allows for interventions based on principles of healing and restorative justice, rather than on punishment and risk assessment. In addition to providing a comprehensive historical overview of youth justice in Canada, Judah Oudshoorn addresses the context of youth offending by examining both individual trauma—including its emotional, cognitive, and behavioural effects—and collective trauma. The author tackles some of the most difficult problems facing youth justice today, especially the ongoing cycles of intergenerational trauma caused by the colonization of Indigenous peoples and patriarchal violence, and demonstrates how a trauma-informed approach to youth justice can work toward preventing crime and healing offenders, victims, and communities. Featuring a foreword written by Howard Zehr, case stories from the author’s own work with victims and offenders, questions for reflection, and annotated lists of recommended readings, this engaging text is the perfect resource for college and university students in the field of youth justice.

Most youth who come in conflict with the law have experienced some form of trauma, yet many justice professionals are ill-equipped to deal with the effects trauma has on youth and instead reinforce a system that further traumatizes young offenders while ignoring the needs of victims. By taking a trauma-informed perspective, this text provides a much-needed alternative--one that allows for interventions based on principles of healing and restorative justice, rather than on punishment and risk assessment. In addition to providing a comprehensive historical overview of youth justice in Canada, Judah Oudshoorn addresses the context of youth offending by examining both individual trauma--including its emotional, cognitive, and behavioural effects--and collective trauma. The author tackles some of the most difficult problems facing youth justice today, especially the ongoing cycles of intergenerational trauma caused by the colonization of Indigenous peoples and patriarchal violence, and demonstrates how a trauma-informed approach to youth justice can work toward preventing crime and healing offenders, victims, and communities. Featuring a foreword written by Howard Zehr, case stories from the author's own work with victims and offenders, questions for reflection, and annotated lists of recommended readings, this engaging text is the perfect resource for college and university students in the field of youth justice.

Fifty years ago, David Matza wrote Delinquency and Drift, challenging the ways people thought about the development of criminals. Today, Delinquency and Drift Revisited reminds criminologists that they ignore Matza's writings on culture and criminality, human agency and offending, and propensity and peer influences on criminal involvement at their own intellectual peril. This volume was not written to pay homage to Matza, but to show how his ideas remain relevant to criminology today by continuing to question conventional wisdom, by making us pay attention to realities we have overlooked, and by inspiring us to theorize more innovatively.

In this report, the authors present the results of a process and outcome evaluation of a trauma-informed pilot program run by the Colorado Division of Youth Services (DYS) in one of their residential youth facilities.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

The Cycle of Juvenile Justice takes a historical look at juvenile justice policies in the United States. Tracing a pattern of policies over the past 200 years, the book reveals cycles of reforms advocating either lenient treatment or harsh punishments for juvenile delinquents. Bernard and Kurlychek see this cycle as driven by several unchanging ideas that force us to repeat, rather than learn from, our history. This timely new edition provides a substantial update from the original, incorporating the vast policy changes from the 1990s to the present, and placing these changes in their broader historical context and their place within the cycle of juvenile justice. The authors provide a provocative and honest assessment of juvenile justice in the 21st century, arguing that no policy can solve the problem of youth crime since it arises not from the juvenile justice system, but from deeper social conditions and inequalities. With this highly-anticipated new edition, The Cycle of Juvenile Justice will continue to provide a controversial, challenging, and enlightening perspective for a broad array of juvenile justice officials, scholars, and students alike.