Construcción de conocimiento: ¿Cómo se manifiesta la construcción de conocimiento?

In a recent US study, Pope et al. (2016) state that all interviewees, in acknowledging the ‘too much, too late’ approach to people involved in the criminal justice system,

… stressed that the interventions for people with early criminal justice involvement and mental illness need to occur prior to incarceration to address their myriad needs. Rather than perpetuating a system that rewards late-stage intervention as opposed to prevention, and rather than providing high-quality interventions to people only once they become hard to serve, interviewees said that the system needs to make a fundamental shift to front-end, early interventions (Pope et al., 2016:10).

Crime is one of many expressions of deprivation, disadvantage and despair by young adults. In addition, for young adults who commit offences, a number of complex and multiple challenges need to be navigated as they make their way towards adulthood. Often these young adults have been excluded from school due to behavioural issues or have experienced disrupted living circumstances through repeatedly moving house throughout their childhood, creating a barrier to full engagement and participation in education. In addition, parents or carers may have been distracted by their own personal disadvantage and, consequently, have not been able or willing to encourage their children to commit to school and to learn the value of education for employment prospects in young adulthood. As a result, many young adults have found it difficult to secure stable, full-time and reliable work. The literature also points to many young adults within the criminal justice system who are suffering from mental ill-health, manifesting maladaptive or at-risk behaviours, or heavy alcohol or other substance use which, while not entrenched due to their young age, require much more intensive support than early intervention services are able to provide within their

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framework of practice.32 _{Being able to understand what prevents young adults from}

engaging in behaviours that lead to criminal activity precipitates an understanding of what protects them against it. Young adults are naturally influenced by the people around them when they are able to draw on secure and stable environments for protection and safety. However, the absence of positive role models, stable family environments, healthy friendship groups and respectful relationships can often result in antisocial behaviour leading to criminal activity (Ericson and Vinson, 2010). Crime is an intrinsic and serious societal issue that cannot be viewed in isolation from other major social, health, economic and cultural concerns. Often single issues such as homelessness or mental health tend to dominate the political agenda as isolated concerns; however, the evidence makes it abundantly clear that the many needs presented by disadvantaged young adults are interlinked and, in order to be addressed effectively, need to be treated as inseparable. The key factors associated with offending are clearly documented.33 _{Many relate to poverty; poor} education and employment prospects; poor, unaffordable and inaccessible housing and ubiquitous homelessness; excessive risk-taking behaviour; unhealthy and destructive habits such as heavy drug and alcohol use; normalcy of violence; high stress and distress levels within family and romantic relationships; dangerous driving; and high-risk sexual behaviour (Karamanli, 2011). Many of these matters, however, do not become relevant to a person’s development and independent functioning until they have to take responsibility for managing them and, while children and younger people are not expected to do so, this is an expectation of young adults.

Where income is difficult to secure by legal means, within disadvantaged communities, young adults who are ‘resourceful’ can often turn to illegal activities to make a living and survive. For some, to a point, this is considered a valid income stream not only bolstering welfare income but also providing a social network, as indicated by the following quote:

In neighbourhoods/communities with high levels of deprivation, illegal income sources such as drug dealing and selling stolen mobile telephones, often supplement or replace legitimate ones. One of the major reasons cited by young people who join gangs is that they see gangs as alternative reference groups, and see no life outside the gang. The gang provides social recognition and status which other areas of their lives, such as schooling, legitimate income, job status or relationships, do not (Karamanli, 2011:8).

32_{SeeT2A Alliance’s Young Adult Manifesto [Helyar-Cardwell, 2009b:3]).}

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In this context, Felson (1994) argues that most crime is ‘ordinary’, occurring in everyday life activities, and, for that reason, it should be addressed within the person’s local community context rather than in the overwhelming and expensive criminal justice system. Particular emphasis is placed on how crime reduction, through purely ‘tough on crime’ and ‘law and order’ strategies with the ultimate sanction being prison, is often counterproductive to the positive development opportunities necessary to enable young adults, in particular, to get their lives on track (Mulvey et al., 2004). Nowhere, it seems, is the inconsistent treatment of young adults more apparent than in criminal justice practice as practitioners continue to grapple with the tension between welfare and justice. In a similar form to other Westernised jurisdictions, the Australian criminal justice system slides back and forth across the justice (a risk)/welfare (at-risk) continuum. Richards (2011), however, notes that “... juvenile justice systems are, on the whole, more welfare-oriented than adult criminal justice systems (Edwards, 2010:5).

Many young people involved in criminal activity are never detected; many who have been arrested are diverted entirely from the system at the point of police apprehension; and many are cautioned and that warning is sufficient to deter them from committing further offences. For many other young people, they are propelled into the criminal justice system and face the disposals available to the courts from a sentencing menu. In some courts, this is supplemented by creative and innovative interventions that have worthwhile, minimal or no long-term effect on the young person or on their attitude towards risk-taking behaviour thus leading to recidivism. Continuing on this path, they face more serious sanctions that the courts have at their disposal to deal with persistent offenders which, ultimately for many, culminates in a prison sentence. Once a young person reaches the chronological age of 18 years, they are treated as adults within the criminal justice system and, consequently, face the less rehabilitative and more punitive sentencing disposals available to courts. Osgood et al. (2010) outline the dilemma in the US which is equally applicable within an Australian context, when young adults move from the juvenile system to the adult system “... which views children as dependent and malleable and takes rehabilitation as at least its nominal goal, to the adult system, where the explicit goal is punishment” (Osgood et al., 2010).

Dame Anne Owers, the inaugural Chair of the Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance, qualifies the dilemma faced by young people approaching adulthood, alluding to the inherent problem in trying to define a process of development and growth against an arbitrary cut-off point in a young person’s life when she states that “[b]lowing out the candles on an 18th birthday cake does not magically transform anyone into a fully functioning and mature adult

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– even without the life disadvantages many young people in criminal justice have experienced (Prior et al., 2011:2). Much of the literature differentiating the traits between juvenile offenders (defined as those below 18 years) from adults (those over 18 years) could, in the context of this evaluation, be equally applicable to young adults aged between 18 and 25 years. Issues such as impulsivity and inhibition control; ongoing changes in brain development; emerging mental health problems such as anxiety and depression; thrill seeking; and engaging in riskier and experimental behaviour with illicit substances and unsafe sex do not suddenly stop at the age of 18 years. Young adults, due to their chronological age, are also legally allowed to drink alcohol and drive a vehicle which, when combined with their experimental and inexperienced personalities, can and does create potentially catastrophic consequences.

In the UK, the Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance is a diverse coalition of 14 leading health, youth and criminal justice organisations that has been initiated and supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust. The evaluation of the T2A Alliance’s three pilot programs has started to build a body of evidence to strengthen the notion that young adults aged between 18 and 24 years require specific and tailored responses by criminal justice and community services to achieve a more coherent response to their “combined vulnerabilities” and treatment of their needs in relation to the prevention of reoffending. This is based on the claim that young adults have a unique set of developmental and transitional concerns that set them apart from children, younger youth and adults and that their transition to adulthood should be viewed as a distinct stage in life with a range of features that distinguish it from other aging processes along the lifespan. Furthermore, it is argued that this is a fundamental period for humans interacting with their social surroundings to lay the foundations that dictate the progress and success of their adult life which is played out in the choices they make; the relationships and friendships they create; the formulation, nurturing and protection of their own families; the education in which they engage; and the work that they do.

In New Zealand, in closer proximity to Australia, a slow shift appears to be occurring with an emphasis on the need to construct policy tailored to the specific needs of young adults. In 2009, the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key commissioned a report from his Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, into the barriers and challenges faced by young people during adolescence. The composite report was released in May 2011 and provides a crystallised overview into the issues affecting young people in New Zealand as they make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The content of the report has been compiled from international literature and research articles, indicating that the issues adversely

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affecting young people are global and peculiar to the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and not culturally-specific to New Zealand, hence indicating shared concerns that might inspire scalable responses in similar jurisdictions elsewhere.

In the USA, a growing body of scholarly literature argues that prevailing interventions or ‘first-generation’ interventions have not achieved their goals because they are based on the faulty premise that serious mental illness has a causal relationship with people’s involvement in the criminal justice system, and that mental health treatment would therefore resolve the issue. This approach fails to take into account evidence that untreated symptoms generally do not explain criminal justice involvement, nor does it square with evidence that connecting people to mental health treatment often fails to prevent further involvement (Pope et al., 2016). A growing approach taken by scholars and researchers is that effective ‘second- generation’ interventions cannot be limited to those with mental illness if the strongest predictors of recidivism (such as homelessness and criminal history) appear in people with and without mental illness. The second-generation interventions need to be guided by a person–place framework that accounts for individual factors including mental illness, addictions and trauma, and established risks for criminal behaviour including such traits as an antisocial personality, as well as all environmental factors such as social and environmental disadvantage. Research undertaken by the Vera Institute of Justice in the USA suggests that little analysis has been undertaken on designing interventions intersecting with the criminal justice system and behavioural health systems that both decrease recidivism and expand life opportunities for participants. In fact, little analysis has been undertaken within a recovery orientation framework. As this report states:

Rather than perpetuating a system that rewards late-stage intervention as opposed to prevention, and rather than providing high-quality interventions to people only once they become hard to serve … the system needs to make a fundamental shift to front-end, early interventions … The driving idea is a simple one: to invest in people early on to avert or halt a trajectory with the criminal justice system ... treatment must be reconfigured to include not only therapeutic intervention, but also strategies to address people’s material needs and the place-level factors that affect their lives and communities: homelessness, unemployment, high levels of violence, and other forms of social and economic disadvantage … (Pope et al., 2016:10).

This is consistent with the approach taken by the YCLP in which young adults received early intervention that addressed their practical issues such as a job, house, car and relationships to enable the therapeutic interventions to be maximised.