Jonathan I. Cloud

The aspiration of Growth-Focused Youth Justice Case Management (GFCM) is to enhance one of the youth justice system’s successful initiatives, which is risk-focused practice. I did not develop GFCM to “fix” or “reform” the system. I developed it to seize upon an opportunity that, in my view, is being missed in our work of assessing and managing risk. What is that opportunity? Risk assessment of youth utilizes a process that produces extraordinarily powerful information which can be used to support their growth or maturation. It identifies and offers details regarding areas (e.g., risk domains) that must be navigated by youth when undertaking their primary developmental task of forming a positive identity, the doing of which fosters desistance from offending. To many in the justice field, risk factors are mostly viewed as “what’s wrong” with a youth, or what caused a youth’s offense, or “predictors” of a youth’s likelihood to reoffend. In fact, risk factors tell us much more but we do not have a sufficient approach or framework that “endows them with meaning and identifies interactions between them” in a way that can guide our work to support youth in forming positive identities. GFCM offers such an approach or framework.  

After a decade of casework and administrative work in mental health, child protection, foster care, youth justice, and youth development, I engaged in three decades of consultation, training, and technical assistance in youth justice and several other fields. A major part of those three decades was the role I played in several national initiatives sponsored by federal agencies that contributed to moving the youth justice field toward a more structured decision-making approach based on assessing and managing risk to offend. There is now a well-established evidence-based practice based on a risk focus called the Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) approach. GFCM is designed to align with this approach, which this website covers, and thereby enhance it by integrating it with exciting and powerful developmental science. Over the course of providing GFCM training and technical assistance to various jurisdictions around the country since 2020, the phrase that has come to capture this integration of risk science with developmental science is: “Managing risk by facilitating growth.”  

Doing this is not easy, but not because it requires “more work.” In fact, GFCM streamlines case planning in a way that naturally involves youth without need to take extra steps to “get them involved,” an aim of many juvenile probation departments. Managing risk by facilitating growth is not easy because it calls for working in a manner that facilitates who they can become, not only sanction or stop what they did. This website attempts to depict this subtlety. Based on experience I fully recognize that it can be a heavy lift for probation officers to pay attention to  

what youth are experiencing during formal processing and integrate into their work intentional practices to help youth have specific “growth experiences” that support forming a positive identity during formal processing and community supervision (and beyond, with assistance of community formal and informal supports).  

Accordingly, GFCM is not for every jurisdiction. Where it has gained traction thus far is in juvenile probation departments that were already broadening their focus, so to speak, to link positive youth development with their risk-focused work. This website includes a succinct summary of ways in which some jurisdictions have implemented or plan to implement GFCM enhancements of risk-focused practice after receiving training and technical assistance. What you will notice is that each jurisdiction’s implementation work is different. This is as it should be. GFCM is not a one-size-fits-all highly prescriptive “model.” Rather, it is a framework which, frankly, is yet another challenge for agencies accustomed to prescriptive, highly routinized and straightforward “checklist” ways of doing work.  Each jurisdiction tailors the GFCM framework to enhance its work in ways that it determines works best for them. But in all cases, the desired end state is the same- protecting community safety by setting youth on a path to forming positive identities that are incompatible with offending. 

I am honored to offer information on this growth-focused framework to the youth justice field. My hope is that it will support efforts to become more effective in doing the important and very difficult work of making our communities safer by helping youth that offend grow out doing so by realizing their potential.