Shifting Gears on Juvenile Justice Communications
New MessageMemo and Toolkit Help Advocates Make Stronger Case for Reform
Advocates are gaining momentum in reforming the nation's juvenile justice system so that it is fairer and more just, takes a more age-appropriate approach to juvenile crime, and puts a greater emphasis on prevention, rehabilitation, and alternatives to detention.
But youth justice involves two complex, abstract systems--- youth development and criminal justice--- and the American public lacks ways of thinking about these topics as policy issues. The matter is further complicated by deeply held racial stereotypes. As Pastor Jamal Bryant of Baltimore put it: "Our children have been so reduced to the color of criminality that they can't even be seen as children." As long as these patterns of public thinking are intact, hard-won reforms may prove to be fragile, and the path to additional progress will remain steep and difficult.
To broaden the constituencies that support effective approaches to youth justice, and to build and maintain support for reforms, advocates need framing strategies that expand public understanding of youth development and marginalize outdated thinking about punishment and deterrence. A new FrameWorks MessageMemo--- Talking Juvenile Justice Reform--- aims to align advocates around a coherent narrative that foregrounds brain development and its implications for systemic reform. It is complemented by a communications toolkit--- Shifting Gears on Juvenile Justice--- that models multiple ways to put the recommendations into practice.
Key recommendations include:
- Use the Value Pragmatism to position juvenile justice reform as a commonsense issue, as in: "Our justice system should serve highly practical goals: It should prevent crimes and successfully rehabilitate youth who get into trouble with the law so that they don't commit crimes in the future. We should rethink any policies that don't support these goals; they just don't make sense."
- Don't assume that the public understands terms like "age appropriate" or "developmentally appropriate." Instead, rely on widely used, highly accessible explanations of brain development--- like Brain Architecture--- to offer the public a way to think about adolescents as "under construction."
- To advance reform, rely on the power of metaphor to focus attention on the system, not the people in it. The Explanatory Metaphor Justice Maze can help the public understand complex issues like disproportionate minority contact or other types of racial disparities as flaws in the system, not flaws in communities of color. Justice Gears can help the public appreciate the variety of interventions available in the juvenile justice system and prioritize alternatives to detention.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation supported the development of these strategic guides, which draw on multiple bodies of previous research sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the Rosenberg Foundation, and the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. FrameWorks research on criminal justice has been conducted in partnership with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University's Law School, and its work on child development has been conducted in partnership with the
National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. The FrameWorks Institute is a communications think tank that uses social science methods to study how people understand social justice issues and empirically identify ways that experts and advocates can explain them more effectively. Since 1999, it has conducted pioneering research on the communications aspects of a wide variety of scientific and social issues, such as early childhood development, climate change, immigration, and more. In 2015, FrameWorks received the MacArthur Award for Creative & Effective Institutions.
--- FrameWorks Institute
Changing the conversation on social issues.
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