Abstract As a young offender in Sweden today you can be sentenced to juvenile care within the social services. Within the juvenile care it may be an option for these young offenders to undergo an affect program. That is a collective name for several types of structured programs that can include everything from conversations to visits. The purpose of this study was to create an understanding of which arguments there are for why these affect programs for young offenders is being used in three municipalities in southern Sweden. We authors found this interesting because of the lack of evidence for these affect programs. We do not know how effective these programs are for the young people that are undergoing them. We have interviewed employees at three different affect programs and the research questions that we have answered are: What arguments, for using these affect programs, do the concerned operators have? What do the concerned operators think about the lack of evidence for the affect programs? To achieve the aim of this study, we have implemented a qualitative study of semi-structured interviews. The analysis of our collected empirical work was based on the term isomorphism. The results of the study show that the reasons why the employees at the three studied affect programs chose to start these affect programs was because they had the requirement to be able to offer a legible, predictable and proportionate penalty. In the absence of evidence about how programs should be built the employees were inspired by other municipalities. The employees do not put much emphasis on different theories but instead they rely on their own experiences and on what they think is effective. The employees at the three programs think that it would be good if it existed evidence about the affect programs, but it is not crucial. Local resources set limits for how good the affect programs can become and the staff involvement also has a great significance.

<p>Abstract</p><p>As a young offender in Sweden today you can be sentenced to juvenile care within the social services. Within the juvenile care it may be an option for these young offenders to undergo an affect program. That is a collective name for several types of structured programs that can include everything from conversations to visits. The purpose of this study was to create an understanding of which arguments there are for why these affect programs for young offenders is being used in three municipalities in southern Sweden. We authors found this interesting because of the lack of evidence for these affect programs. We do not know how effective these programs are for the young people that are undergoing them. We have interviewed employees at three different affect programs and the research questions that we have answered are: What arguments, for using these affect programs, do the concerned operators have? What do the concerned operators think about the lack of evidence for the affect programs? To achieve the aim of this study, we have implemented a qualitative study of semi-structured interviews. The analysis of our collected empirical work was based on the term isomorphism. The results of the study show that the reasons why the employees at the three studied affect</p><p>programs chose to start these affect programs was because they had the requirement to be able to offer a legible, predictable and proportionate penalty. In the absence of evidence about how programs should be built the employees were inspired by other municipalities. The employees do not put much emphasis on different theories but</p><p>instead they rely on their own experiences and on what they think is effective. The employees at the three programs think that it would be good if it existed evidence about the affect programs, but it is not crucial. Local resources set limits for how good the affect programs can become and the staff involvement also has a great significance.</p>