Towards a Genealogy of Young People in Conflict with the Law in the Chilean Social Sciences,1980–2010

Abstract

This article explores Chilean social science discourses on youth in conflict with the law between 1980 and 2010. Through a scoping review of academic and scientific writings and articles in the social sciences about young people in conflict with the law, the manuscript describes three figures or semantic configurations referring to young people in conflict with the law: (i) anomic youth, (ii) psychosocially harmed youth and (iii) young people at criminal risk. The analysis of these three configurations highlights a shift from a pathological and deficit-based consideration of youth in conflict with the law towards a perspective that seeks to anticipate juvenile crime as a possible future. This forward-looking orientation corresponds to the scarcity of sociological output on youth issues and, in turn, to the rise of psycho-neuro disciplines and technologies as expert discourses on the subject.

Introduction

In recent Chilean history, the so-called ‘juvenile delinquency’ problem has frequently arisen in political discourse and as an issue of public opinion. After the end of the civil–military dictatorship, disparate and contradictory discourses around juvenile delinquency began to circulate. On the one hand, the press and media reported on the threatening proliferation of a ‘new delinquency’ perpetrated by ‘violent’ adolescents, suggesting that the justice system was powerless to deal with the problem (Tsukame, 2017). On the other hand, the nascent democratic transition allowed reformers to call for modifications to the current penal system based on the tutelage of ‘minors’ ¹ by implementing a specialized penal regime in line with the international conventions signed by the Chilean State (e.g. the Convention on the Rights of the Child). ² A space, thus, opened up for a public conversation on the problem of youth in conflict with the law, involving not only politicians and criminal lawyers but also academics and social researchers.

Before concerns over juvenile delinquency began to emerge during the transition, some incipient research had been developing since the mid-1980s that addressed the problem within the framework of a much broader concern: the emergence of marginalized or urban-popular youth. Until then, the social research on young people in Chile and across Latin America focused its inquiry on university students (Oliart & Feixas, 2012), thus placing all youth identities under one homogeneous umbrella (Aguilera, 2009; Cottet, 1994; González, 2021). As protagonists in the massive protests against Pinochet’s regime between 1983 and 1986, marginalized youth were seen as ‘a new youth reality’ (González, 2021) or, as José Weinstein (1989) described them: ‘a new feature in Chilean political history’ (p. 6). Social scientists characterized young people’s expressions of protest through violence, spontaneity and the lack of a political project and, therefore, as symptoms of an epoch: subjective, individual and interpersonal manifestations of the aftermath of the authoritarianism and capitalist modernization put in place under the dictatorship (Garretón, 1991; Tironi, 1987, 1990; Valenzuela, 1984; Weinstein, 1984, 1989, 1991).

Rapidly, academics and social scientists extended this diagnosis to a set of emerging youth phenomena: street violence, unemployment, school dropout, alcohol consumption, drug addiction and, especially, delinquency. Social scientists saw young people sinking deeper into frustration, apathy and withdrawal. Consequently, the young people’s expressions of discontent were addressed as individualistic, evasive, hedonistic and (self-)destructive activities; in other words, as anomic and deviant behaviours. The pandillas, ³ patos malos, ⁴ as well as volados ⁵ and angustiados ⁶ were seen as representatives of anomie, that is, the most radical manifestations of social disintegration: the ‘problem-youth’ (Weinstein, 1991, p. 272), ‘the anomic youth par excellence’ (Valenzuela, 1984, p. 99), and ‘deviance in the margins’ (Dubet, 1987, p. 96). Since the end of the 1980s, marginalized or urban-popular youth as a problem has, therefore, become an area of political and social concern, giving rise to new research agendas and specialized knowledge to deal with violence, drug use and juvenile delinquency (Cottet et al., 1992; Goicovic, 2000).

This article explores Chilean social science discourses on youth in conflict with the law between 1980 and 2010 as semantic configurations (Fassin, 2012); namely, a set of discourses and notions with their origins in specific social worlds (for instance, professional, cultural or institutional) to describe and make a social fact intelligible according to problems, consequences and solutions. Drawing on the genealogical work developed by Michel Foucault (1999a, 1999b, 2012), I address these discourses as part of a more extensive set of political, social and securitarian organized and organizing interests and practices (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 2001) in the framework of the Chile’s recent history. In the last 50 years, Chilean society has undergone significant political, economic, social and cultural transformations through neoliberal reforms initially enforced by the military dictatorship and later consolidated by democratic governments. In light of this, the article aims to contribute to the debate regarding the implication of expert knowledge (such as psychological, psychosocial and neurological) in Western advanced liberal societies (e.g., Garland, 1985; Rose, 1999, 2007; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). The ‘Chilean case’ could provide insights into how knowledge about youth in conflict with the law, as well as discourses related to their welfare and punishment, have emerged within the specific ecological conditions provided by the so-called ‘Chilean neoliberal experiment’.

To achieve this aim, I carried out a literature review, specifically a scoping study, of Chilean academic and scientific writings and articles in the social sciences about young people in conflict with the law. Scoping studies seek to map what has been published on a subject to identify the key concepts underpinning a research area, and the main sources and types of evidence available, analysing how it has been treated and the main theories and perspectives (Gough et al., 2012; Mays et al., 2001). The search included articles and other contributions published between 1980 and 2010. The justification for selecting this time period is based on the following criteria: first, the research on youth in Chile and Latin America was scarce before the 1980s (Aguilera, 2009; Duarte, 2018), a situation which changed drastically in the mid-1980s (Duarte, 2005; Salazar & Pinto, 2002; Weinstein, 1989); and second, the decision to limit the search to 2010 responded to a set of reforms in the criminal justice and child and youth rights protection systems during the first decade of the 21st century, ⁷ which broadened the public conversation on the subject. Additionally, in this article, I focus on young people in conflict with the law in urban contexts. This decision is based on the fact that, in the last 30 years, Chilean social sciences have focused on urban and marginalized youngsters at the expense of rural young people (González, 2021). The few studies on this subject (e.g., González, 2004; Salazar & Pinto, 2002) have not addressed the problem of young people in conflict with the law. Furthermore, research on rural delinquency (e.g., Cooper, 1986) has broadly covered the topic but has neglected rural juvenile delinquency specifically.

Following Arksey and O’Malley (2005), I used two literature review strategies. First, I conducted a search through the electronic databases of specialized Chilean social science journals. ⁸ I defined a set of keywords (adolescence, young people, youth, juvenile delinquency, youth offenders, criminality and their different declinations) to focus the search and, then, I excluded all the articles that did not address the topic of youth in conflict with the law. Secondly, because most social science research during the military dictatorship was developed outside universities (Aguilera, 2009; Sandoval, 2002), I explored the digital archives of key Chilean study centers and non-governmental organizations that conducted research with young people. ⁹ By doing this, I discovered information about primary research and identified narrowly circulated and unpublished works (Badger et al., 2000). As a result, I found 103 academic publications, of which 91 were selected: 63 articles, 7 books, 11 book chapters and 10 governmental and non-governmental reports. ¹⁰ Once articles were selected, I extracted and charted their basic information (author, year of publication, discipline and main subject). Subsequently, I conducted the process of revision through a narrative synthesis and thematic analysis of each article, capturing central topics and concepts in relation to the research aim. Based on this, the use of a genealogical approach grounded in Foucault’s work and the concept of semantic configuration allowed me to explore the historical conditions—specifically, those in recent Chilean history—from which scientific and expert discourses emerged in order to explain the juvenile delinquency as an object of social concern and problematization.

The article is divided into four sections. First, I address the development during the 1980s of ‘social studies on youth’ and their interest in marginal or urban-popular youth and ‘problem youth’. Then, I present and explore the three semantic configurations referring to young people in conflict with the law that emerged from the literature analysis: (i) anomic youth, (ii) psychosocially harmed youth and (iii) young people at criminal risk. Finally, in conclusion, I describe how the analysis of these three configurations highlights a shift from a pathological and deficit-based consideration of youth in conflict with the law towards a perspective that seeks to anticipate juvenile crime as a possible future. This forward-looking orientation corresponds to the scarcity of sociological output on youth issues and, in turn, to the rise of psycho-neuro disciplines and technologies as expert discourses on the subject.

The New ‘Social Question’ and the Emergence of Youth as a Problem

All cultures and societies have seen children and young people as an incarnation of the future (Burman, 2013, 2017; Castañeda, 2002). This interest in the future is not only an issue of individual destiny; on the contrary, society’s concerns for its reproduction and survival also rely on children and young people (Durham, 2004). Moreover, the social discourses about youth can address issues at the heart of the social imaginaries of an era and may help to classify discussions on how society thinks about and problematizes itself (Cottet et al., 1992; Durham, 2004). Therefore, I agree with Sven Mørch (1996) that ‘… the secret of youth would be found outside itself, in the changes of society’ (p. 21) and would perhaps add that the secret of society may lie in the social discourses about youth.

Following Castel (1997) and his definition of ‘social question’ as ‘… the confrontation of a society with the enigma of its cohesion and its possible fracture’ (p. 16), it is not an exaggeration to think that the restlessness produced by the urban-popular youth and the so-called ‘problem youth’ led to the emergence of a new ‘social question’ in 1980s Chile. This relationship between ‘social question’ and youth is not new. For instance, Alejandro Tsukame (2007) has written about how the Chilean ‘social question’ during 1880–1925 opened the door to public concerns—initially about the patronage of children in danger and then about the control of dangerous childhood—that mobilized governmental institutions, intellectuals and experts. ‘Today, perhaps as never before’—claimed José Weinstein in 1990—‘young people appear in the news… T.V. cameras follow them, they are ‘neopreneros’, ¹¹ ‘lautaristas’, ¹² or leaders of violent youth gangs’ (p. 1). ¹³ The ‘problem youth’, a genuine object of social problematization (Foucault, 1999a, 1999b), became the youth model in this period (Cottet, 1994). On the one hand, as the subject of targeted and sectoral policies (Sáez & Acevedo, 2018; Contreras, 2001; Goicovic, 2000) and, on the other hand, as the object of scientific and academic interest, particularly by social scientists during the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the transition to democracy.

Semantic Configurations of Young People in Conflict with the Law

Deviance in the Margins: Anomic Youth

During the 1980s, Chilean social studies on youth (Aguilera, 2009) flourished in the context of the military dictatorship. This context of intervention and political persecution in universities meant that most of the research was conducted by foundations, non-governmental organizations and territorial-based Catholic institutions (Aguilera, 2009; Sandoval, 2002). Despite their differences, these initiatives aimed to reconstruct the broken social bonds through popular education, training community leaders and implementing social studies on the realities of marginalized populations, especially young people. Thus, this early research was characterized by incorporating the structural and the psychosocial, the political crisis and their (inter)subjective consequences in the study of young people (Aguilera, 2009; Cottet et al., 1992).

With a few exceptions, ¹⁴ in the 1980s, most research addressed the phenomenon of problem youth and young people in conflict with the law through the concept of anomie (Durkheim, 1982; 1985; Merton, 1992). Following a Mertonian approach, ¹⁵ this research considered youth deviance to be a result of maladjustment between development aspirations and social mobility, and the lack of socially structured means for their fulfilment, in this case, education and employment as a means for social integration. The concept of anomie allowed Chilean researchers to identify diverse destinies as responses to the political and social crises caused by capitalist modernization. Unlike integration, conformism and alternativity as organized political resistance, anomie became the deviated (inter)subjective destiny per se in conditions of crisis (Valenzuela, 1984). As a result, among the pobladores ¹⁶ —one of the populations most affected by the crisis—young people were seen as an inherently problematic group and were explained in terms of their lack normative integration and even by the degradation of their role as social actors (Dubet, 1987; Solari, 1982; Tironi, 1987, 1990; Valenzuela, 1984; Weinstein, 1989; 1991). According to Eugenio Tironi (1987):

[Young people] represent the negative side of action in the pobladores movement. As well as individual withdrawal behaviors, the frustration caused by the crisis of the popular-national model leads to forms of delinquent adaptation, gang-like community core structures, and sometimes participation in revolutionary groups. (p. 14) ¹⁷

As a semantic configuration (Fassin, 2012) of young people in conflict with the law, two main characteristics are revealed in anomic youth during the 1980s. On the one hand, anomie operates as a conceptual formulation able to explain youth deviation as a whole but fails to recognize the differences between the diverse expressions of marginalized young people. Indeed, the concept of anomie shifted from being a way of explaining youth violence as an inorganic and non-political act of contestation and discomfort to a cause of the set of youth expressions considered as problems: gangs, drug addiction, alcoholism and especially delinquency. The figure of the anomic youth brought together these phenomena in a single concept, equivalent to problem youth, but dismissed the subjective, interpersonal and structural dimensions of each of these expressions.

On the other hand, several sociological publications from this period (for instance, Garretón, 1991; Solari, 1982; Tironi, 1987; Valenzuela, 1984; Weinstein, 1991) turned to psychological and even psychopathological concepts and constructs that attempted to explain the social and subjective situation of problem youth. The repeated reference to concepts such as uncertainty, frustration, anguish and even perversion maps the configuration of a discourse whose semantics are criminalizing, pathologizing and deficit-based. This situation not only reproduces a classic problem in anomie studies, that is, the difficulties in differentiating the psychological and sociological dimensions of anomie (Girola, 2005), but also shifts the anomic from a social situation of normative crisis to an individual condition of psychological and moral deficit and deviance.

One of the dictatorship’s critical responses to dealing with marginalized youth and their anomic behaviours was violence, repression and punitive control (Goicovic, 2000). These strategies were framed in what Yanko Gonzalez has called a ‘generational putsch’, that is, the persecution and dismantling of youth identities and practices and their disciplining according to a unitary and depoliticized consideration of young people. However, the initial social research of the 1980s, while shaping marginalized youth and problem youth categories, delineated the interpretative framework that defined youth social policy-making after the transition to democracy. In other words, young people were seen as subjects of policies designed to integrate them into the emerging modernization and democratization process (Sáez & Acevedo, 2018; Goicovic, 2000).

Threats and Impairments to Development: Psychosocial Harm to Young People

At the end of the 1980s and with the decline of Pinochet’s regime, a discourse about the Chilean state’s ‘social debt’ to young people began to gain strength. The progressive recognition of violence against and the deprivation and exclusions of young people during the dictatorship revealed the need for specialized public policy addressed to young people (Goicovic, 2000). Before the constitutional plebiscite of 1989, the alliance known as the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia ¹⁸ added a set of guidelines concerning young people to its Programa Mínimo. According to this document:

We share the diagnosis of the situation of segregation, exclusion, and hopelessness in which a high proportion of young people find themselves … many of them take refuge in drugs or alcoholism or violent forms of rebellion. (Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, 1988, as cited in Sáez & Acevedo, 2018) ¹⁹

Thus, this discourse on the state’s debt to its young people defined the ethos of the new policies for the youth population, especially marginalized youth (Duarte, 2005; Goicovic, 2000). Without moving away from the diagnosis of youth exclusion, the policies proposed during the transition prioritized the objectives of overcoming poverty and controlling violence and juvenile delinquency through social and economic integration (Cottet et al., 1992; Duarte, 2005).

Within this debt rhetoric, a second semantic configuration (Fassin, 2012) around problem youth, particularly youth in conflict with the law, began to take shape: the psychosocial harm done to young people. Through the notion of psychosocial harm, researchers sought to highlight the impairments suffered by young people as a result of the violence that they experienced during the dictatorship (Duarte, 2005). Developed in several governmental and non-governmental reports since the early 1990s, ²⁰ psychosocial harm was, according to its promoters, an attempt to (i) adopt the point of view of young people whose life projects were affected by the crisis; (ii) avoid the stigmatizing consequences of the notion of deviation and (iii) identify the common dimensions running through the different youth problems (Weinstein et al., 1991).

However, contrary to its initial intentions, the discourse of psychosocial harm configured an eminently individual and psychologizing perspective. Specifically, this approach defined psychosocial harms as equivalent to problematic behaviours such as delinquency, street violence, alcohol and drug addictions, prostitution and teenage pregnancy. In the words of Weinstein et al. (1991):

First, harm is a process of personal impairment …. It always involves severe effects on the physical, psychological and social development of these young people that critically limit any personal project …. These are serious difficulties that prevent an individual from developing his or her potentialities as a person in different areas of social life …. These difficulties affect both their present and personal future, restricting personal capacities and future opportunities. (p. 69) ²¹

According to this perspective, harm is conceptualized as a series of psychosocial situations that affect individual development as a future project. From a teleological perspective, development is understood as an individual moratorium from physical, psychological and moral incompleteness to fulfil the imperatives of social reproduction (Béhague & Lézé, 2015; Burman, 2013; 2017; Castañeda, 2002; Duarte, 2018). Even though this perspective defined psychosocial harms as ‘difficulties with their own social origin’ (Weinstein et al., 1991, p. 69), in the end, these were reduced to problematic behaviours and failed to recognize the social structural circumstances that produce them. Because of this individualizing, normative, teleological imprint, the notion of psychosocial harm did not reduce the stigmatizing and deficit-based consequences present, for instance, in deviance and anomie. Psychosocial harm may even have magnified these consequences, transforming young people into objects of merely remedial public policies (Goicovic, 2000).

Erica Burman (2013, 2017) and Claudia Castañeda (2002) have highlighted how the concept of development links the individual with the social. Through rhetoric based on the idea of progress, development bonds the individual and social destiny: the psychic and affective economy and the political economy. Suffice to note, for instance, the ambiguity of notions such as ‘development issues’ or ‘development challenges’, which are part of the World Bank’s financial vocabulary and the jargon of child–adolescent psychology experts. Thus, it is unsurprising that the notion of psychosocial harm emerged at the dawn of the transition to democracy. Along with denouncing past debts, this second semantic configuration raised an initial concern about threats to individual development. However, linked to the individual destiny of young people is the future of post-dictatorial Chilean society, that longed for future demanded in the ‘NO’ political campaign.^22,23

Dispute over the Future: Youth at Criminal Risk

In 1992, Agustín Edwards ²⁴ created the Centre of Studies on Delinquency and Prevention of Crime, Fundación Paz Ciudadana, an institution that has played a crucial role in the Chilean security agenda since the 1990s (Ramos & Guzmán, 2000; Tsukame, 2017). Paz Ciudadana established the idea of out-of-control delinquency (mainly juvenile), which should be controlled, but more specifically, prevented. The foundation’s success as an authoritative voice on crime prevention was epitomized during the runoff presidential election between candidates Ricardo Lagos and Joaquín Lavín in January 2000. In one of the public debates, Lagos (the next president after the election) challenged Lavín, stating: ‘I sign the Paz Ciudadana document in its entirety’ (Ramos & Guzmán, 2000, p. 53). ²⁵

Together with the discourse of public insecurity, Paz Ciudadana also urged investment in preventive evidence-based crime intervention models. In an article entitled Juventud libre de violencia: pasos adelante en Estados Unidos (Violence-free youth: steps forward in the U.S.) ²⁶ published in 1998, the Foundation reported how a group of experts from the renowned U.S. National Crime Prevention Council had successfully found the ‘causes of youth violence’. By identifying ‘… traits and situations that increase children’s probability of becoming violent individuals’, these researchers were able to develop action plans with the aim of ‘protecting young people from violence’ (Folch & Puig, 1998, p. 2). These preventive measures and therapeutic promises correspond to the well-known criminal risk prevention model (e.g., Andrews & Bonta, 2010; Farrington, 2000, 2003), which became the main intervention approach for young people in conflict with the law in Chile after the Law on Adolescent Criminal Responsibility (Ley de Responsabilidad Penal Adolescente, LRPA) was adopted in 2005.

Some transformations in criminal risk management discourses and practices appeared in the first decade of the 21st century. In the early 2000s, the risk and psychosocial harm models overlapped in some ways, particularly in their rigid and normative consideration of child and adolescent development. At that moment, risks were defined as circumstances that could produce mental health, behavioural and emotional problems and, therefore, as factors leading to adaptive maladjustments and failures in the transition to adulthood (Folch & Puig, 1998; Hein, 2000). However, the criminal risk model had changed by the end of the decade due to its apparent inability to determine future criminal dispositions. In 2000 renowned scholar in this field, David Farrington, claimed that the criminal risk model had failed to establish which factors are causes of future criminal behaviour and which are merely correlations (Farrington, 2000). As a result, the initial triumphalism and confidence that the causes of juvenile delinquency could be identified gave way to a more modest perspective focused on the probabilistic estimation of possible future occurrences of antisocial behaviours. According to a Paz Ciudadana report entitled Prevención social del delito. Pautas para una intervención temprana en niños y jóvenes (Social prevention of crime. Guidelines for an early intervention with children and young people) (Werth, 2006):

… being able to link an antisocial behavior with a subsequent illegal behavior means that, by preventing the former, the subsequent criminal act and the development of personal histories of conflict with the law could be avoided …. As may be anticipated, this relationship is not easy to establish, mainly because crimes and the causes that lead a person to commit a crime depend on multiple factors … that directly or indirectly influence the person who commits an offense. However, what has been established is the relationship between multiple antisocial behaviors, their reiteration and permanence over time, and an increased probability of future criminal behavior. (pp. 9–10) ²⁷

So, what might seemingly have been a ‘disadvantage of the model’ (Droppelmann, 2011, p. 5) became its crucial feature. The new Chilean risk management strategies rejected their claims of determination and causality in favour of looking forward to the future following the rationale of notions such as probability, estimation and susceptibility; from current antisocial behaviour in childhood to possible criminal acts as young people. Or, from the control of a current state of ‘what it is and what it is not’ to neutralizing a potential future of ‘what you can be according to what you are’, and ‘what they might even do according to what they are already doing’ (O’Malley, 2011).

However, what is even more disturbing in this shift is how the so-called ‘fight against crime’—a veritable post-dictatorial securitarian mantra—has been embodied in young people. My review of Chilean academic and institutional documents on criminal risk management has uncovered a bellicose semantic: Confrontation, opposition, cancellation and neutralization are the interactions between risk and protective factors as forces in conflict, and the young person is the territory in which this dispute over the future takes place. Thus, the ‘fight against crime’ can be framed as a wager on the future, a confrontation aiming to anticipate a criminal future. Having dismissed determination and causality, that is, delinquency as destiny or predisposition (Castel, 1991; Rose, 2010), youth at criminal risk, their subjectivity and body, would become a field of modulation and permanent regulation; youth as a constantly assessed subject (day-to-day risk assessment) or, according to Sarah Jain (2007), a life in permanent prognosis.

Conclusions

This analysis of Chilean social science contributions to youth in conflict with the law from 1980 to 2010 has identified three semantic configurations: anomic youth, psychosocially harmed youth and youth at criminal risk. Anomie, psychosocial harm and criminal risk are the key heuristic points that, since the 1980s, have helped interpret juvenile delinquency and draw up strategies for its control. These three notions seem to exceed the boundaries of disciplinary discourses and the shared meanings of its practitioners, being embedded in the political, social and economic transformations of Chile’s recent history. Therefore, as I have shown, their intelligibility lies in power relations and political struggles (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 2001) framed by the dictatorship, transition to democracy and neoliberal consolidation during the post-dictatorial democracies.

From anomic youth to youth at criminal risk, the analysis seems to suggest that the problem of young people in conflict with the law has been gradually separated from broader categories to become an independent research field. From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, researchers sought to bring together, first through the notion of anomie and later through the category of psychosocial harm, problems as diverse as teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol addiction and juvenile delinquency. However, since the end of the 1990s, the youth in conflict with the law, conceptualized as ‘risky people’, has progressively become an autonomous object of both academic and securitarian concern. Beyond any pretension of ascribing causality, what is certain is that the interest and concern with juvenile delinquency by the media, politics and academia seem to be entangled and mutually reinforced.

Psy and neuro knowledge (e.g., Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013; Vidal & Ortega, 2017) about young people in conflict with the law has gradually emerged and gained traction over the last decade in Chile (Carreño Hernández et al., 2021). The rise of these discourses and technologies seems to correspond to their capacity to translate post-dictatorship securitarian concerns, assuming an expert role in the penal, welfare and protection reforms carried out since the mid-1990s related to childhood and youth and, in particular, young people in conflict with the law. For instance, the LRPA is underpinned by arguments about adolescent moral and cognitive development (i.e., Kotliarenko, 1998). ²⁸ These discourses have defined young people as ‘developing subjects’, justifying specialized (but no less punitive) penal treatment according to their presumed ‘vulnerable’, ‘risky’ and ‘transgressive’ nature (Radiszcz et al., 2019).

Understood as a complex and diverse process involving several actors and institutions, the psychologization and neurobiologization of young people in conflict with the law seem to be embedded into the criminal risk model and the current consideration of delinquency as a public health problem (Rose, 2010). According to several international studies (Farrington et al., 2016; Loeber et al., 2003), as delinquency becomes more complex, severe and persistent, more individual risk factors are involved, such as psychological characteristics (attitudes and tendencies), pathological personality traits, cognitive distortions and mental disorders. In light of this, during the last few years, several Chilean researchers and studies have shown an interest in (i) the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among young offenders (Fundación Tierra de Esperanza, 2012; Gaete et al., 2014; Rioseco et al., 2009); (ii) the development of psychometric scales for criminal risk assessment (Chesta et al., 2022; Chesta & Alarcón, 2019; Pérez-Luco et al., 2014); (iii) the assessment and characterization of antisocial behaviour according to personality traits (Alarcón et al., 2005, 2018; Vinet et al., 2014); (iv) the updating of child and adolescent psychopathy as an explanatory construct of juvenile delinquency (Vinet, 2010; Zúñiga et al., 2011); and even (v) the identification of neuropsychological correlates of juvenile delinquency (Sepúlveda & Rivas, 2019). Although it is still too early to talk about a new semantic configuration based on psy and neuro knowledge, further research and studies need to be done to explore and assess the role of these discourses in the current models and intervention strategies proposed for treating and controlling young delinquency in Chile.

Moreover, these three semantic configurations highlight a shift from current deviations to the probabilities of future antisocial behaviour. In other words, an epistemic and political displacement from the concern and government of the present to the future (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). Anomic youth reveals a perspective in which transgression is always an issue of the present or even the past. According to this perspective, the strategies mobilized by this semantic configuration intervene at the level of what is happening (Foucault, 2007) and what has already happened. While the psychosocial harm youth strategy inaugurated an emergent concern about the future, it implied a teleological consideration of youth based on notions such as psychosocial moratorium and developmental tasks. However, current discourses about criminal risk radicalized these concerns for the future, drawing attention to the possibility of anticipating criminal futures. As Werth states, ‘[the] probability of future criminal behavior’ (2006, p. 10). At this point, there is a need for new research to explore how the rise of the risk model, the psy and neuro discourses and technologies on young people in conflict with the law, and the concerns on governing the future could be correlated with the progressive emergence of psy and neuro research agendas and the concomitant decline of sociological research since the mid-1990s identified in this analysis.

These three semantic configurations should be thought of as something other than a sequence of concluded stages or according to a presumed hegemony of the risk model and psy and neuro knowledge. As Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega (2017) have pointed out, ‘… no one conception of the human is monolithic or hegemonic in a given culture, and persons are not one kind of subject alone’ (p. 15). As a result, the weight of a given scientific discourse about youth and young people in conflict with the law must be analysed within the local contexts in which it is observed. The current acceptance of risk thinking and psy and neuro knowledge by the criminal justice system for adolescents has not eradicated former criminalizing and pathologizing perspectives (Carreño et al., 2021; Radiszcz et al., 2019). Despite the rise of these discourses and technologies, I think these different discourses and notions seem to coexist, mix and enter into friction daily.

In the words of Pat O’Malley et al. (1997), one issue is the programmatic governmental texts and another is the ‘profane’ and ‘messy’ realities of governance. At the same time, research cannot focus exclusively on theoretical subjects elaborated by social science discourses and governmental interventions (Han, 2012). Consequently, the analysis of youth in conflict with the law should not lose sight of the specific modes under which these discourses and notions take place in specific practices, technologies and strategies alongside the local and ordinary worlds (e.g., Das, 2006) of youngsters, their everyday lives and experiences. Furthermore, rather than addressing these worlds as separate domains, research must recognize their entanglements and mutual determinations. Research and studies are, therefore, needed to address the complexities that emerge from the intersection among subjectivation processes, power and knowledge. Specifically, perspectives emphasize how objects of concern and scientific interest are co-produced by complex and multi-directional relationships among clinics, science, and everyday life (Béhague, 2018). On the subject of youth in conflict with the law, studies should explore how young people and their experiences have been configured not only in the context of their everyday lives but also in and through the interactions and (mis)encounters with strategies, devices (dispositifs) and institutional agents that are designed for their treatment and social reintegration.

Supplementary Material

The supplementary material for this article is available online.