Juvenile Facility Staff Contestations of Change

This article explores juvenile facility frontline staff members’ contestations of change to custodial practices aimed at reducing restraints, introducing trauma-informed practices, and downsizing juvenile facilities. Drawing from qualitative research about frontline staff members in a U.S. state undergoing reform, the article points to the ways that the reforms challenge staff members’ investments in behavioral control practices as a vehicle for achieving order and control in their everyday lives as workers. It also points to shifts in the broader political economy of punishment at the local, facility level, and the subsequent impact on staff member perceptions of order, control and criminality

Challenging the Logics of Reformism and Humanism in Juvenile Justice Rhetoric

This article draws on contemporary policy discourse in order to advance claims about the intractable figure of the “bad” child in contemporary juvenile justice reforms in the United States (US). The article focuses in particular on the discourses of trauma and “brain science” to point to a form of neo-positivism that has arguably emerged and which challenges efforts to engage in systematic decarceration. The article also focuses on the idea of the “bad child” that persists in the commitment of some reformers to the necessity of confinement for some children. The article questions the extent to which new forms of positivism challenge our ability to leverage structural claims