While the neo-liberal drift towards ‘responsibilizing’ youth justice programs and policies has been explored extensively in the literature, the lived realities of another aspect of the neo-liberal turn – welfare retrenchment – have been given much less attention. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with detained girls in the USA, this article explores what ‘welfare inaction’ means in the context of the lives of young women in trouble with the law. While gendered tropes about self-sufficiency and individualized empowerment may provide young women with the grammar by which to articulate self-reliance, the absence of welfare supports seemed the most important mechanism for offloading responsibility on to them and shaping what justice system intervention meant for them.
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