Prevention and Criminal Justice Reform

Abstract

Jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers, and probation officers’ caseloads are increasingly populated by racial and ethnic minorities, youth with educational disabilities, mental health and substance use disorders, and individuals with histories of child maltreatment. Calls for justice system reform acknowledge that primary prevention is fundamental to any successful plan. A focus on prevention grounded in principles of social ecology provides an ideal conceptual framework to help guide systemic change away from a traditional backward-looking retributive model toward a more forward-looking, proactive system aimed at both reducing recidivism and racial and ethnic disparities within the system and keeping people out of prison in the first place. Therefore, this chapter takes the position that prevention efforts must be holistic and multisystemic, taking into account the institutional and individual forces that contribute to youth delinquency and criminal behavior. We place particular emphasis on schools that lie both at the crux of the problem and the solution to youths’ justice system involvement. We describe the origins and features of the school-to-prison pipeline and argue that reforming local school practices will reduce the total numbers of young people entering the justice system and also that reducing racial inequalities in school discipline practices will have the potential to reduce racial inequalities in arrest. We review the theoretical models of prevention, namely, multitiered systems of intervention, describe the groups most at risk of justice system involvement either because of individual or systemic factors and offer some initial guidance on how to find and choose an appropriate prevention program.