Juvenile Justice in Context

This book highlights key contextual dimensions that shape dominant Western paradigms of juvenile justice while remaining attentive to global differences and comparative perspectives. It offers selected insights that help readers more deeply understand what juvenile justice means to those most directly affected: the children and their immediate networks. Topics explored include the varied forms of punishment and confinement globally and the often-harmful conditions of juvenile facilities; the importance of emerging trends including non-custodial monetary sanctions; and critical analysis of risk assessment instruments, emphasizing the extent to which the “data” that is used to predict future outcomes of system-involved youth are inseparable from contextual conditions. The book then turns to contributions that examine restorative justice and progressive, evidence-based alternatives to punitive and correctionalist approaches. These perspectives frame children first and foremost as children, and as active participants in shaping solutions to youth offending.

The edited collection provides thoughts for categorizing, analyzing, and comparing juvenile justice systems regionally and globally, emphasizing the ways in which contextual factors vary across places and over time. The book incorporates innovative and promising approaches emerging in the field, inviting consideration of how these developments may reshape the future of juvenile justice, in turn seeking to bridge scholarly, professional, and activist perspectives.