Randolph R. Myers

Against evidence-based oppression: Marginalized youth and the politics of risk-based assessment and intervention

Actuarial risk/needs assessments exert a formidable influence over the policy and practice of youth offender intervention. Risk-prediction instruments and the programming they inspire are thought not only to link scholarship to practice, but are deemed evidence-based. However, risk-based assessments and programs display a number of troubling characteristics: they reduce the lived experience of racialized inequality into an elevated risk score; they prioritize a very limited set of hyper-individualistic interventions, at the expense of others; and they privilege narrow individual-level outcomes as proof of overall success. As currently practiced, actuarial youth justice replicates earlier interventions that ask young people to navigate structural causes of crime at the individual level, while laundering various racialized inequalities at the root of violence and criminalization. This iteration of actuarial youth justice is not inevitable, and we discuss alternatives to actuarial youth justice as currently practiced.

The Dark Ghetto revisited: Kenneth B Clark's classic analysis as cutting edge criminology

In this article we revisit one of the classic works of the 1960s on crime and delinquency in poor communities: Kenneth B Clark’s Dark Ghetto. Our exploration reveals its insights to be extremely relevant today both in understanding the roots of the self-destructive violence that tears at those communities and in thinking about how to combat the structural conditions and individual mentalities that generate it. Beyond the specific theoretical and methodological lessons that can be gleaned from Dark Ghetto, Clark’s work serves as a much-needed illustration of how theoretical insights derived from intensive qualitative research that is attuned to political, historical, and economic realities—and their human consequences—can enhance criminological theory, and align with progressive movements for social change.

Virtuous profits: Pay for success arrangements and the future of recidivism reduction:

Pay for success contracting is the latest financial instrument for funding social programs. Governments in Australia, the UK, the US, and elsewhere are piloting their use in reentry programs, youth offender programs, and a host of other initiatives aimed at homelessness, child welfare, workforce development, and preventive health care. Under a pay for success arrangement, private investors put up capital to fund a program, and if successful, a government agency will repay the investors with a yield, that is, with a profit. This article situates pay for success contracting in the context of reentry and decarceration and it theorizes how the arrangement will reverberate through new alternatives to incarceration and fundamentally change the meaning of “what works.” The article concludes by locating pay for success within the broader drift toward securitizing marginal populations under neoliberalism.

Youth-Led Struggles Against Racialized Crime Control in the United States

Recent work in a number of disciplines has explored how social, economic and cultural shifts coinciding with neoliberalism have worked to depoliticize the subjectivities of young people. As a counterpoint to such claims, this chapter details the work of youth-led grassroots organizations in the United States that create counter-movements against the criminalization of school discipline, racialized policing and mass incarceration. Although their victories are often small in scale, the work of these organizations should not be overlooked, as they help to bring together young people to mobilize for criminal justice reform, thus introducing them to the world of politics and collective action.

Barriers, Blinders, and Unbeknownst Experts Overcoming Access Barriers to Conduct Qualitative Studies of Juvenile Justice

This article details the various access barriers negotiated by the author in conducting qualitative interviews with young women in a county-level juvenile justice system. After discussing how these obstacles shaped and delayed this particular project, the importance of qualitative research for understanding the more nuanced facets and consequences of juvenile justice is demonstrated by analyzing one young woman’s reflections on how youth justice shaped her life. Reflecting on the insights of this “unbeknownst expert,” it is argued that one of the clearest windows into the larger social forces that condition whether or not a program or set of policies “works”—the words of young people—remains covered, in large part because of the access barriers analyzed here. The importance of creating an alternative to such a partial criminology of juvenile justice is discussed.

Book review: Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social?

male heteronormativity of the comic book landscape’ remains a dominating factor (p. 168). Similarly their chapter ‘Aren’t there any Brown People in this World?’ identifies how graphic representations of ethnicity remain stereotypical and problematic. Assessing how minorities portrayed as heroes have often overcome criminal or antisocial pasts, the authors observe that ‘in the intersection between race/ethnicity and crime fighting, a heteronormative context that upholds a white, male, patriarchal perspective is prevalent even today’ (p. 196). Comic Book Crime is an important and engaging book of relevance not just to cultural criminology scholars interested in how popular media depicts crime and justice issues, but also to those interested in the complexities of criminological discourse and its frequent reduction into simplistic law and order narratives. While comic book fans may prefer more discussion of their preferred heroes and criminologists might prefer a more critical exploration of the complexities of criminological theory, the authors have produced an effective discussion of comics and crime which deserves to reach a wide audience.