Special Issue "Youth Justice Research"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Geography and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2021.

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Stephen Case
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Head of Social and Policy Studies, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK
Interests: youth justice youth crime prevention, and social justice, particularly the promotion of positive, children-first ways of working with children embroiled in the youth justice system

Special Issue Information

The focus of this Special Issue is youth justice research, particularly the generation of evidence to inform systemic and informal responses to offending by children and young people.

For this Special Issue, applied and secondary research conducted internationally (Western and non-Western world) over the previous decade outside of (before and beyond) and within youth/juvenile justice systems, which has produced evidence-based recommendations for youth justice policy and practice, will be considered.

The aim of this Special Issue is to engage in a thorough and multi-faceted examination of the scope, diversity, validity, and utility of research conducted to inform empirical understandings of and policy/practice responses to youth/juveniles offending globally and the quality of the methodologies employed and evidence produced by this body of research.

There is no directly relevant existing literature, as a Special Issue of this type has never been attempted before. There have been a few isolated examples of attempts to scrutinise youth justice research more broadly (typically in edited collections), notably including the following:

  • “What evidence for youth justice?” by David Smith (in Goldson and Muncie 2015).
  • “Research-informed youth justice” by Barry Goldson (in Taylor et al. 2010).
  • “Politics and research in youth justice” Jo Phoenix (in Taylor et al. 2010).

However, such piecemeal narratives and polemics have never been gathered into a single publication dedicated to examining youth justice research, its methodologies, and evidence.

Prof. Dr. Stephen Case
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

Article
Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice
Sustainability 2021, 13(4), 1735; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041735 - 05 Feb 2021
Viewed by 892
Abstract
The generation of empirical evidence to explain offending by children and young people has been a central driver of criminological and sociological research for more than two centuries. Across the international field of youth justice, empirical research evidence has become an integral means [...] Read more.
The generation of empirical evidence to explain offending by children and young people has been a central driver of criminological and sociological research for more than two centuries. Across the international field of youth justice, empirical research evidence has become an integral means of complementing and extending the knowledge and understanding of offending offered by the official enquiries and data collection of professional stakeholders and an essential tool for informing ‘evidence-based’ policy, practice and ‘effective intervention’. However, it will be argued that the hegemonic empirical evidence-base created by youth justice research over the past two decades has been generated through methodological reductionism - the oversimplification of complexity, the restriction of conceptual lens and the relative exclusion of competing explanatory paradigms and empirical methodologies, which in turn, has reduced the scope and validity of the policy and practice recommendations derived from it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Youth Justice Research)
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