By Samantha Harvell, Chloe Warnberg, Andreea Matei, and Eli Mensing

Over the past several decades, the knowledge base about how to address juvenile delinquency and improve outcomes for youth and families has grown considerably. The documented benefits of well-designed community-based programming over residential facilities have spurred a movement away from the outdated institutional-youth-prison model and toward more effective community-based solutions. States and localities are exploring how to support a new juvenile justice approach that builds continua of care and opportunity in communities disproportionately impacted by youth incarceration and prioritizes fair, equitable, and effective treatment for all youth. This is the next frontier of juvenile justice reform, and effective strategies for closing youth correctional facilities and redirecting resources to community-based solutions must be identified. Juvenile justice administrators are uniquely positioned to lead facility closure efforts as part of broader system reform

By Linda Mussell, Jessica Evans

In early 2021, half of the youth detention centres in Ontario, Canada, were abruptly closed. We ask how this development can be understood in relation to broader explanations of youth detention closures in Canada, which cite the success of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) and the best interests of youth, and the broader international context. Using a process tracing methodology to analyse existing data, we demonstrate that these closures had less to do with the interests of youth, and were primarily a cost-effective calculation. We demonstrate this by pointing to three key developments: (i) the transference of institutionalised carceral logics onto community service providers; (ii) an undermining of the principle of ‘relationship custody’; and (iii) a focus on high-capacity and high-security detention centres, over smaller, locally situated open detention centres

Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 2023.