Transatlantic ‘Positive Youth Justice’: a distinctive new model for responding to offending by children?

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Palgrave Macmillan under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/A model of ‘positive youth justice’ has been developed on both sides of the Atlantic to challenge the hegemonic punitivity and neo-correctionalism of contemporary actuarial risk-based approaches and the conceptually-restricted rightsbased movement of child-friendly justice. This paper examines the origins, main features, guiding principles and underpinning evidence bases of the diferent versions of positive youth justice developed in England/Wales (Children First, Ofenders Second) and the USA (Positive Youth Justice Model) and their respective critiques of negative and child-friendly forms of youth jus tice. Comparing and contrasting these two versions enables an evaluation of the extent to which positive youth justice presents as a coherent and coordinated transatlantic ‘movement’, as opposed to disparate critiques of traditional youth justice with limited similarities