In good economic times we think about what we can do to improve children’s lives. Perhaps hard times like these are a good opportunity to consider, instead, how we might help young people just as much by stopping doing things purportedly for their benefit.

There are plenty of candidates for reassessment. Soft targets might include the multitude of unproven, mostly lightweight programs offered to schools. Other targets are much harder to hit, and they don’t come much more elusive than the damaging downside of juvenile justice.

Prevention Action has reported previously how the act of arresting a young person can tend to increase the likelihood of future antisocial behavior [See, for example: Youth Justice: Is doing nothing better than doing something?]. Now, from Canada, there is more troubling evidence to support that view: the forces of law and order can be very adept at pushing the crime rate up.

The study by Uberto Gatti at the University of Genoa, Italy, working alongside the University of Montreal’s notable duo of Richard Tremblay and Frank Vitaro, shows how interventions by Canada’s juvenile court tend to increase the likelihood of future delinquency.

Not only does requiring a young person to go to court have the potential to boost future criminal activity, some of the measures likely to be recommended by the court, such as juvenile detention, can increase the chances of a bad outcome even more.

The findings are based on the study of 779 young men growing up in poor communities in Montreal. It began when the boys were in kindergarten and drew on their own reports of criminal behavior, alongside official data accumulated between their tenth and seventeenth birthdays.

Not all of the boys offended. And not all those who got into trouble were processed by the juvenile justice system. But those who did were nearly seven times more likely to be arrested for crime in adulthood than their similarly difficult peers who escaped the gaze of police officers and judges. 

Furthermore, those in the juvenile justice system who were sentenced to juvenile detention were 37 times more likely to be arrested again as adults than were their misbehaving peers.

The evidence sits well with historical studies. Three decades ago, Joan McCord was among the first to show how society’s efforts to help can often hinder. The title of Gatti’s paper points bluntly to the iatrogenic effects associated with most interventions. Too many policy makers and practitioners prefer not to think about them.

We know why some of these negative effects occur. But Tom Dishion’s theory of assortative pairing, to explain how antisocial young people seek each other out and “talk-up” their delinquency, remains one of the least appreciated insights into child development.

So here we have an evidence-based policy (sending kids into the juvenile justice system) and an evidence-based program (locking them up together). But the evidence says neither works.

As policy makers carefully count what little is left in the government coffers, mightn’t it be time to act on this compelling evidence base?

See: Gatti U, Tremblay R E and Vitaro F “Iatrogenic effect of juvenile justice” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 50, Number 8, August 2009, pp. 991-998(8)

McCord J, “A 30 year follow-up of treatment effects”, American Psychologist, 33, 284-289. 1978

• To download a Newsweek story on this topic by Maia Szalavitz, which also discusses Tom Dishion’s work, visit the website of the US National Juvenile Justice Network.