"Keep Everything, Except the Jail:" Dually-Involved Youth and Young Adults' Experiences of Reactive Social Safety Nets across the Child Welfare to Juvenile Legal Continuum

Background and Purpose: Sociolegal research demonstrates how Juvenile Legal Systems (JLS) in the United States are increasingly serving as perverse social safety nets, offering mental health services, housing, food, and other necessities for survival in the absence of robust community-based social services and supports. This qualitative study draws on semi-structured interviews and Reflexive Thematic Analyses to investigate how youth and young adults (N=31) dually-involved in the Massachusetts child welfare system (CWS) and JLS conceptualize, navigate, and make use of social services across their system trajectories, focusing specifically on crossover from the CWS to the JLS and community reentry.

Methods: In depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with youth and young adults (N=31) dually-involved with the Massachusetts CWS and JLS to identify their system trajectories and experiences of social service provision across the child welfare to juvenile legal system continuum. Interviews were approximately 60 minutes and were conducted both in-person and virtually via Zoom. Interviews covered topics including participants’ initial and ongoing experiences, supports received or needed from, and recommendations for both the child welfare and juvenile legal systems. Interview transcripts were analyzed using the six steps of Reflexive Thematic Analysis, which include: 1) familiarization with the data through listening to interview recordings and reading transcripts; 2) inductive coding; 3) creation of initial themes through grouping of inductive codes; 4) development of overarching themes through discussion and reflection on initial themes; 5) definition and naming of overarching themes and clear identification of theme subcomponents; and 6) writing of the study findings.

Results: Findings suggest that vital social services are more accessible to study participants both during and after involvement with the JLS than in any proactive capacity within their communities or social service settings, including in placements within the CWS. In addition, participants asserted that the safety net within the JLS is not only characterized by social services meeting basic needs, but also includes other complicated dimensions of care. These dimensions of care include the regimentation of daily life through structures and schedules (care as structure) and the emerging relationships formed with JLS caseworkers and staff, as well as other youth in JLS placements (care as relationships). Importantly, relationships forged between youth and JLS caseworkers were especially salient for girls and young women, who consistently ordered their system trajectories through the lens of their relational networks.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings confirm previous scholarship on the expansion of reactive and triaged social services behind bars for adults, suggesting that social safety nets may be further entrenched within carceral systems for youth populations, and further constrained within their community contexts. As jurisdictions appropriately expand their youth and young adult diversion programs and decarceration efforts, the findings underscore the need for developing proactive and robust social services that do not reenforce youth criminalization, and that are instead situated upstream of agency involvement and within youths’ communities.