UC Irvine

Justice system contact may contribute to frequent changes in living arrangements in the lives of justice-involved youth and the families they serve, especially children with prior histories of child welfare contact. Early life events in child welfare may produce inequalities in juvenile justice experiences resulting in earlier and more frequent home removals. Experiences with justice facilities and frequent location changes may hinder family connections and impair long-term stability and youth well-being. For example, justice supervision may increase exposure to detention facilities and justice institutional placements. Yet, research has understudied the importance of physical movement changes under juvenile justice supervision. This is significant because location changes from place to place are collateral consequences of institutional justice contact.

Using a novel dataset of youth physical movements in the juvenile probation system - locations constructed from administrative data and physical case files - this dissertation tells a holistic story of 120 justice-involved youth in the Los Angeles County juvenile justice system. Probabilistic matching reveals that 69% of this sample had a previous child welfare referral in Los Angeles County. Using linked administrative data, I analyze youth experiences from arrest (i.e., the start of their probation trajectory) and progress to the analyses of their physical movement changes over time during justice supervision. Specifically, I investigate the days until entrance to a detention facility (Chapter 1), the precarious physical movements during one year of justice supervision (Chapter 2), and the influence of out-of-home placement and subsequent delinquency trajectories (Chapter 3). This comprehensive examination of system experiences highlights the stability and instability of physical movement patterns among justice-involved youth with and without histories of child welfare contact.

This dissertation contributes to our knowledge about the potential consequences of multiple and ongoing system contact on family stability, specifically how justice contact may result in frequent physical movements in detention and out-of-home placements. Results reveal the inequity of justice facility entrances and physical movement transitions among youth with dual system contact across the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Physical movement patterns and out-of-home placement experiences are much more transitional and unpredictable for youth with early experiences in child welfare. Dual system youth placed in residential placements are more likely to recidivate than if they were placed on home supervision. In contrast, residential placements are potential positive turning points for justice-involved youth without child welfare histories. The findings raise the question of whether out-of-home placements as a mechanism for delinquency intervention is uniformly effective for subgroup populations of justice involvement.