Youth involved with the United States juvenile legal system (JLS) experience multiple institutional transitions — movements into, between, and out of state agencies — throughout their lifecourse. For youth and young adults dually-involved with both the child welfare system (CWS) and the JLS, two primary forms of institutional transitions include:1) crossover from the CWS to the JLS; and 2) reentry back into the community following prolonged system involvement. While all system-impacted youth experience adverse outcomes and navigate significant challenges during these transitions, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that dually-involved Black, Indigenous, and Youth of Color (BIYOC) fare even worse than their white system-involved peers. Research on dual involvement has focused on the demographic factors, events, and contexts associated with the crossover phenomenon, while research on reentry — particularly for dually-involved youth — has focused on the barriers and facilitators of positive reentry experiences, predominantly conceptualizing recidivism as the indicator by which to measure successful reentry. Less attention has been paid to the subjective experiences of dually-involved BIYOC, including how they conceptualize, navigate, and make sense of these transitions. Drawing from the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory and phenomenological approaches, this three-paper mixed methods dissertation contributes to scholarship on dually-involved youth by focusing on the subjective experiences of youth and young adults of color during crossover and reentry. Paper one is a qualitative study based on in depth semi-structured interviews (N=31) with dually-involved Black and Latino youth and young adults in Massachusetts. This study uses Reflexive Thematic Analyses to investigate the factors youth and young adults identify as contributing to their transitions from the CWS to the JLS and their subjective experiences of the CWS, JLS, and crossover. Paper two uses a subset of these interviews with Black and Latina girls and young women (N=10) and draws on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to examine their experiences with the CWS, JLS, and during reentry, tracing their life trajectories and their goals, hopes, and expectations beyond incarceration. Paper three uses linked child welfare and juvenile legal administrative data (N=1226) to further understand dually-involved youth and young adults’ reentry experiences, conceptualizing participation in reentry programming as a strengths-based metric for successful reentry. One central finding is that the CWS and JLS are highly porous, with nearly two thirds of youth committed to the Massachusetts JLS between 2015-2019 having experienced an open case with the CWS, and 43.6% having been removed from their homes. Youth and young adults’ narratives suggest that factors including CWS rules and regulations, subpar living conditions within congregate care facilities, and surveillance from multiple systems facilitate crossover into the JLS. Findings also suggest that when juxtaposed to CWS placements, dually-involved Black and Latino youth and young adults view the JLS context more favorably, describing the existence of a reactive but robust social safety net within JLS placements. This safety net is not only characterized by social services and support, but several forms of care including what I refer to as care-as-structure and care-as-relationships. Relationships between youth and JLS caseworkers are especially salient for girls and young women, who order their system trajectories through the lens of their relational constellations. The implications are manyfold and include the need for further research examining information-sharing practices between youth-facing agencies, the youth categorization mechanisms that facilitate crossover, and the nature of care within carceral contexts. Policy and structural implications include implementing youth programming focused on relationships rather than rules, redistributing social services to communities upstream of agency involvement, and facilitating kinship and chosen family networks within communities. / 2025-05-15T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46200 |
| Date | 15 May 2023 |
| Creators | Toraif, Noor Mohsen |
| Contributors | Augsberger, Astraea |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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