"Should Juvenile Justice Take a 'Hard' or 'Soft' Approach?"

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Should Juvenile Justice Take a ‘Hard’ or ‘Soft’ Approach?

Bentley researcher looks at contrasting approaches to determine which actually leads to less crime.

George Grattan December 14, 2015

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As an applied microeconomist, Dhaval Dave looks at how and why individuals make decisions and how these decisions respond to costs and benefits. In some scenarios — say, buying a new TV — the stakes are relatively low. Others, such as choosing a health care plan, carry more serious implications. Then there are choices whose outcomes can be life changing.

Dave’s current research falls squarely into the latter category. The Stanton Research Professor in Economics at Bentley University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research is studying the juvenile justice system in Washington state to determine which type of approach produces lower rates of recidivism among offenders under the age of 18.

Along with colleague Alison Evans Cuellar, an associate professor of health administration and policy at George Mason University, Dave is examining data on every juvenile offender in the Washington system from 2003 to 2009. The goal is to provide policy recommendations for juvenile justice systems nationwide, as they struggle with strategies to address crime among young people.

Scoring Offenders As Dave explains it, the debate is between so-called hard and soft approaches. In the Washington system, juvenile offenders are assigned “scores” within the system, based on factors such as prior criminal history, severity of the current offense, and measures of household dysfunction. Those falling on one side of a cutoff score are generally subject to more punitive (or “hard”) approaches, such as confinement, and those on the other side get more rehabilitative (or “soft”) treatment, such as community restitution or therapeutic interventions. But the literature to date has failed to examine what is actually most effective in preventing a return to criminal activity.

The challenge for Dave and Cuellar is to establish causality, which they aim to do by exploiting these cutoffs in their rich data. As Dave observes, “correlation doesn’t inform policy.” Their research thus far shows that harsher, more punitive approaches reduce recidivism more than the rehabilitative approaches — but only in the short term. Longer term, recidivism is higher among recipients of punitive treatment.

Dave’s hypothesis attributes this “perverse iatrogenic effect” to the role of supervision by parole officers and other officers of the state. In the first three to six months of release, juvenile offenders are closely monitored and recidivism rates stay low.

Thereafter, they return to their communities with few systems of support — and recidivism rates increase. In contrast, juvenile offenders who receive multi-modal, rehabilitative treatment in the system show lower recidivism rates overall.

Outcomes and Implications Offenders who’ve experienced comprehensive treatment — including programs that address their often unmet mental health needs — perform better in another outcome area that Dave and Cuellar are studying: education, as shown by high school graduation rates. The more intensive their treatment program, the less likely juvenile offenders are to drop out of school. Dave and Cuellar have written a series of papers on this aspect of the study, including one under review at the Economics of Education Review.

To date, according to Dave, their research finds that a multi-modal, treatment-intensive approach to juvenile justice improves outcomes for all concerned. The benefits include better life outcomes for offenders, as well as improved safety and lower costs for communities. The implications of such research stretch well beyond the confines of Washington state.

Other Research In other work, Dave is looking at young people born amid “welfare-to-work” reforms of the Clinton era in the 1990s — now in their teens and 20’s — to examine the connections between welfare reform and health, schooling outcomes, crime, and other risky behaviors. He is also studying the impact of the Affordable Care Act on “job lock” among 20-somethings, and how economic recession affects people’s use of non-work time and their investments in their health.

In these and other studies, Dave’s goal is to get at why people make the choices they do and share compelling data that could shape public policies for generations to come.

“Economics is ultimately the study of choices that individuals make,” Dave says, “and thus understanding why people make the choices that they do can help policymakers

shape policies and reallocate scarce funds in ways that can improve not just the individual’s well-being but also societal welfare.”

Image credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock.com

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