By Andrew Day, Catia Malvaso, Carolyn Boyd, Katherine Hawkins, Rhiannon Pilkingto

Youth justice services around the world are under increasing pressure to find new and more effective ways of working with young people. One way forward is to implement a more compassionate approach to service delivery that embraces the idea of 'trauma-informed practice'. And yet, substantial variation has been observed in how a trauma-informed approach has been defined and understood by practitioners, with idiosyncratic implementation evident across different systems and only limited evidence that this results in reductions in subsequent re-offending. In this paper we argue that the success of efforts to work in more trauma-informed ways cannot be judged using recidivism data alone and that there is a need to identify key indicators of the effectiveness of any trauma- informed approach. We present the case for implementing trauma-informed youth justice and outline key features of the approach. We then present a logic model that articulates key components and identifies short- and longer-term outcomes that can be measured to assess the overall performance of a service. The article concludes with a discussion of the current evidential status of trauma-informed youth justice, identifying areas of current strength and those where further work is needed to develop the evidence base, including the need to demonstrate the hypothesized association between short-term trauma-informed practice outcomes and the longer-term goal of preventing re-offending.

 Front Psychol. 2023 Sep 8;14, 10p.

Rehabilitation Over Retribution: Rethinking Juvenile Justice for Traumatized Youth 

By Brian L.Traub 

  A foundational understanding within society is that “bad actors” should be punished as a way of bringing justice to those who have been hurt, deterring future criminal conduct, and rehabilitating the perpetrator.This concept appears, at least facially, as a valid premise for an institutionalized criminal justice system. The problem, however, manifests when the bad actor is merely a child. The complexity of this problem expands when that child has suffered countless amounts of abuse, neglect, sexual violence, and various other forms of childhood trauma at the hands of an abuser. The reality is that the U.S. criminal justice system, having been designed to punish bad actors, cannot adequately address the rehabilitative needs of juveniles who are themselves victims of violence. Instead, it merely subjects them to more of the same trauma they suffered prior to their first criminal act. The current punishment-focused regime of the U.S. criminal justice system is incompatible with, and incapable of, providing real rehabilitative opportunities to juvenile actors who have suffered substantial traumas during their childhood. The current sentencing scheme in the U.S. desperately requires change that could give juvenile  criminals an opportunity to escape the incessant cycle of reincarceration that it perpetuates.This Comment examines the tension existing between the philosophical understanding of criminal justice in the U.S. and the reality that criminality is often linked to trauma experienced during childhood. To illuminate the tension that exists between the U.S. punishment focused criminal justice system and its cardinal goal of rehabilitation, Section II of this Comment first explains the philosophical foundation for justifying punishment. Next, Section II discusses the current statutory framework for U.S. federal sentencing. Then, Section II illuminates and discusses the statistically significant role that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) play in the current legal system. Finally, Section II outlines the historical development of the U.S. criminal justice system. Section III argues that the next step toward a system that more effectively facilitates rehabilitation is congressional reform of 35 U.S.C. § 3553 (§ 3553), and through trauma-informed sentencing practices. Section IV will conclude by reemphasizing the harsh realities of childhood trauma and its connection with the criminal justice system, recognizing the system’s underlying intent to rehabilitate juvenile defendants while advocating for necessary conceptual transformation.   

93 U. Cin. L. Rev. 236 (2024), 35p.