ABSTRACT
Agencies and funders often mean well but under the pressure to meet service outcomes look at problems as the responsibility of individuals to solve because individual change is easier to measure than changes to the client’s social ecology. There is also growing interest in coming up with lists of benevolent childhood experiences (BCE) which Angela Narayan and her colleagues describe as events early in life that are positive for a child’s psychosocial development. Understanding the problem of recidivism to be partially the responsibility of a system that failed to provide the resources young people needed to make smooth transitions, author advocated for the primary caseworker for a particularly high-risk offender who was named Sobaz to continue working with the boy half a day a week after he was discharged.
