Child first, offender second – a progressive model for education in custody

Case, S; Hazel, N

Abstract

Dis­en­gage­ment and poor ed­u­ca­tional at­tain­ment in ed­u­ca­tion are firmly es­tab­lished risk fac­tors for ju­ve­nile crime, lead­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers to iden­tify ed­u­ca­tional pro­vi­sion in and af­ter cus­tody as a key path­way for ef­fec­tive reen­try (re­set­tle­ment). How­ever, al­though there is emerg­ing ev­i­dence that chil­dren’s ed­u­ca­tional progress can re­duce re­cidi­vism, per­sis­tent is­sues have dogged the de­liv­ery of ed­u­ca­tion in cus­tody across the West­ern world. We iden­tify these is­sues as rooted in fun­da­men­tal weak­nesses of the risk par­a­digm that de­fines the re­la­tion­ship be­tween cus­to­dial ed­u­ca­tion and ju­ve­nile jus­tice out­comes, in par­tic­u­lar re­flect­ing the ab­sence of a co­gent the­ory of change. We pro­pose an al­ter­na­tive ‘Child First’ con­cep­tual frame­work for cus­to­dial ed­u­ca­tion that draws on the ‘Pos­i­tive Youth Jus­tice’ ap­proach in con­tem­po­rary youth jus­tice and adopts the de­vel­op­ment of chil­dren’s pro-so­cial iden­tity as its the­ory of change and key pur­pose. We ex­plore for the first-time what over­ar­ch­ing prin­ci­ples such an ap­proach might en­tail and test the ap­pro­pri­ate­ness of its the­ory of change by us­ing it to rein­ter­pret ex­ist­ing good prac­tice mes­sages for cus­to­dial ed­u­ca­tion.There­fore, we pro­pose a thor­ough­go­ing eval­u­a­tion of cus­to­dial ed­u­ca­tion prac­tice through such a ‘Child First’ lens.

Citation

Case, S., & Hazel, N. (2020). Child first, offender second – a progressive model for education in custody. International Journal of Educational Development, 77, 102244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102244

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 1, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jul 19, 2020
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jul 16, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 19, 2022
• Journal: International Journal of Educational Development
• Print ISSN: 0738-0593
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Volume: 77
• Pages: 102244
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102244
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102244
• Related Public URLs: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-educational-development/