Making a Place for Youth: Social Capital, Resilience, and Communities

Hawkins and his colleagues offer a framework, rooted in resilience and social capital theory, with which to generate support for youth reentering their communities after incarceration. Resilience theory in a community context considers the extent to which a community exhibits behaviors and offers resources that can support the positive adaptation of these youth. Social capital theory considers the density, strength, nature, and valence (in terms of promoting positive development) of the social connections youth possess, both within their families and outside them; as such social capital is one of the potential resources available for this purpose. The authors suggest that juvenile justice reentry programs and policies, and those designed to prevent criminal activity in the first place, would do well to assess a youth's access to social capital, differentiating negatively oriented social capital from that which is positive, and then optimizing opportunities to build on the latter.