In this section, we first formulate an answer to our research questions, followed by a more global discussion and reflection on the results of our study. Furthermore, we discuss the strengths and limitations of this study, as well as its implications for research and practice.
What is it like for adolescents to (re-)build personally valued lives after a court-mandated stay in a closed institution?
Adolescents experienced their return to ‘regular life’ in different ways, especially because—at least for some of them—several aspects of their lives had drastically changed after their stay in the CI (e.g. being admitted to a new open institution, going back to school for the first time in years, not using drugs anymore, …). Some adolescents perceived these changes as positive and were predominantly enjoying their regained freedom and the new opportunities it brought them. For others, they felt lost and had the feeling they ‘fell into a black hole’. Examples of this are: a girl who is not hanging out with her former deviant peer group anymore, but who has no other friends either; a boy who stopped selling drugs, but has no job or income; or a boy who quit doing burglaries, but misses the tension and adventure it brought into his life. According to the GLM [
26], one could say that these adolescents’ trajectories were mainly guided by avoidance goals, with only limited scope for approach goals. This can be explained by the fact that some of these adolescents omitted or ceased several aspects of their former ‘socially unacceptable behavior’, often under pressure from others such as their parents, caregivers or the juvenile judge, but no—or only limited—positive replacements have taken place. As a consequence, they did not feel satisfied with their current lives, and were balancing and bouncing back and forth between holding on to this new lifestyle, or falling back into old behavior. This might imply that moving forward in the direction of a better life unfolds through a pattern in which adolescents first have to go through a difficult period—for instance by feeling a sense of loss in relation to their older life—after which they become able to reconstruct their lives again and through that return to a good quality of life. A similar pattern was also seen in a study with girls recovering from anorexia nervosa [
27] and is consistent with Cummins’ subjective wellbeing homeostasis theory [
28].
As placement in the CI induced—to a greater or lesser extent—discontinuity in adolescents’ lives [
29], most adolescents seemed to be looking for some new balance in their life, and highly emphasized the role of “important others” in this. Experiencing trusting relationships with people who are supportive, genuinely interested and committed, and who believe in them was deemed important in adolescents’ accounts of what made them value their lives. This corresponds with a study conducted with adolescents in residential youth care, in which ‘interpersonal relations’ (i.e. having supportive and reliable friends and family) was designated by these adolescents as the most important domain for being able to experience a good quality of life [
30]. Alongside support, adolescents also often experienced high levels of pressure from their environment (e.g. parents being overly controlling, very strict rules in the institution or frequent mandatory contact with home based counsellors) and they felt like having to prove themselves constantly. This ‘pressure to perform’ was also found in a study of a different target group (in this case mentally ill offenders) in secure forensic settings [
31] so this might be an inherent tension in mandatory treatment. While some adolescents perceived this pressure as a motivation to ‘do good’, others perceived it as too much and too stifling, leading them to either disinterest, rebellious behavior and/or disengagement from professional caregivers.
How did adolescents experience their stay in a closed institution?
Adolescents made frequent references to feeling frustrated, lonely and powerless, especially in the first days and weeks of their stay in the CI. This is consistent with findings of Van Damme and colleagues [
32] who found a clear drop in the quality of life of girls after admission to the CI, and is consistent with other qualitative studies in which this was found to be a highly stressful experience, as adolescents were cut off from their social networks and daily lives, and were limited in their autonomy and self-determination [
16,
33]. Adolescents rarely referred to specific treatment-related aspects when talking about what contributed to or influenced their trajectories in a positive way. The things that mattered most during their stay appear to be situated at the level of warm human contact: feeling closely connected to and supported by staff members (mostly group workers) and/or other adolescents, and being able to experience pleasure with them. This association between perceived social climate and therapeutic relationships, and satisfaction with forensic services has also been emphasized in a study of Bressington and colleagues [
34]. Our results show that being treated with respect and authentic care, as well as being treated in a reasonable and fair way, highly contributed to adolescents’ sense of wellbeing during their stay. This resonates with findings on ‘procedural justice’ in other studies [
35] and refers to aspects such as being fully informed of one’s own trajectory and prospects, as well as being listened to and having a say in decisions. This is also compatible with a recent study on adolescents’ experiences of repression in residential youth care, which decrease if their autonomy is respected and treatment is perceived as more personally meaningful [
36].
Looking back, how do adolescents make sense of their stay in the closed institution in relation to their current lives?
For some adolescents placement in the CI was perceived as a shocking and eye-opening experience, leading them to the decision of bringing about some important changes in their lives. Looking back, others see their stay in the CI as an opportunity—albeit an unpleasant and forced one—to diminish or even quit using drugs. For a number of adolescents, their time in the CI was important as it gave them hope again for a new start and a better future, and it strengthened self-confidence as they acquired some new coping strategies. However, some adolescents also saw their stay in the CI as a waste of time, in which nothing changed, and they just went back to their old lives afterwards.
How did adolescents experience change and what has been supportive and motivating for them on their way to change?
In most adolescents’ stories there was a tangible tension between, on the one hand wanting to change, and on the other hand missing—some aspects of—their former lifestyle. This was mainly the case with regard to ‘experiencing pleasure, joy and adventure’ in their lives. Furthermore, having a clear vision of what one wants to do, or achieve, in the future (e.g. graduating, having a job, living more independently), seemed to be an important drive for adolescents to hold on to a new, more prosocial lifestyle. This is in line with recent findings on the role of envisioning prosocial future selves in the way to desistance [
37]. Experiencing success in one way or another, which is noticed and appreciated by important others, provided adolescents with the self-confidence needed to tackle their future, which has been referred to as the looking-glass self-concept, and is related to the importance of ‘being welcomed back into society’ [
38]. Furthermore, certain life events or experiences played out as ‘hooks for change’ [
18,
39] for the adolescents (e.g. expecting a baby, finding a job, a new boyfriend or girlfriend, …). However, some adolescents seemed to be missing the social or economic capital needed to be able to move towards better lives. Being surrounded by a solid and caring network of friends, relatives or professional caregivers—or at the very least one important other—in combination with having access to basic resources can be seen as a minimum set of elements in adolescents’ motivation and perseverance to change.
A global finding, when looking over the 25 stories, is that ‘change’ can be perceived on a continuum ranging from ‘no change at all’ to ‘a lot of change’, in which periods of relapse into old ‘socially unacceptable’ behavior (e.g. drug use, criminal offenses, truancy, running away from home, …) frequently occured, often following a certain setback such as a break-up, an argument at home, or a period of unemployment. This is in line with the process-driven and on-going nature of desistance, as described by—amongst others—Farrall et al. [
40] and Hunter and Farrall [
37]. A similar movement can also be seen in relation to boys’ [
12] and girls’ quality of life [
32] during and after stay in a CI. Furthermore, when taking a closer look at the mind maps that were made of each individual participant’s story, we see that both intertwined aspects connected to leading a good life—‘feeling good’ and ‘behaving good’—were combined in different ways and that, at least for a subgroup of the adolescents, one did not necessarily co-occur with the other. In other words, leading a life that is perceived as personally meaningful, does not imply that this life aligns with society’s normative expectations and standards, and vice versa. Taking account of this observation—however explorative—we concur with the GLM’s basic assumptions [
4,
7,
26] on the importance of combining and integrating both aspects in rehabilitation efforts: supporting people in getting away from a harmful lifestyle by helping them in the process of discovering what is important and valuable to them, and guiding them in achieving this valued life. Hence, treatment efforts should be directed on enhancing adolescents’ quality of life in those life domains that matter most to them. Further research that unravels the specific and possible interactions between the normative and personal aspect of leading a ‘good life’ could be important, as it can broaden our knowledge and understanding of different pathways to leading better lives, and the drives and motives that are central in these pathways.
Many of the themes that were found to be important for the adolescents in our study are in some ways prototypical for and might—to a greater or lesser extent—apply to all adolescents (e.g. importance of experiencing pleasure and adventure or striving for more autonomy). However, there are also important differences, for instance with regard to the structural barriers one has to overcome in life (see also Giordano et al. [
18]), and associated with that experiencing a more limited discretionary field to explore and experiment with different roles on the road to growing up to become ‘responsible citizens’. Almost all adolescents in our study made reference to one or more adverse or traumatic childhood experiences, and most of them had already been living in institutions for at least a couple of years. Furthermore, a large subgroup of the adolescents worried about their financial situation and (future) housing. This is consistent with findings on the high prevalence of adverse childhood experiences in juvenile offenders’ lives [
41‐
43], and supports the need for further research on the relationship between experiencing trauma and offending behavior, as well as on trauma-informed interventions [
44].
Even though most adolescents grew up in challenging and difficult situations, some of them somehow appeared to succeed in leading better lives. This might lead to the presumption that some adolescents are more resilient than others, as well as to the structure-agency debate that has been well described in the desistance literature (e.g. [
40,
45,
46]. It might be that for those adolescents, at some points along their way, more ‘hooks for change’ [described by Giordano and colleagues [
18] as “potentially prosocial features of the environment as catalysts, change agents, causes or turning points” (p. 1000)] have been available than for others. A central aspect in “hooks for change” is people’s openness to these hooks and their agency for ‘grasping’ them [
18]. However, agency can only be understood in relation to having choices and opportunities in life and in relation to having the capabilities and capacities to exercise it [
18,
39]. As such, the ability to exercise agency is closely related to, and dependent on the adolescents’ own possibilities and social supports in overcoming structural barriers that exclude them from these choices, which has also been described by Gray [
45]. For some adolescents in our sample, these barriers were at the moment of the interview simply too great to overcome, and they did not (yet) receive—or had no access to—the help or support they needed in doing this. Similar findings are reported in a follow-up study by Harder and colleagues [
14]. This is an important consideration for both policy makers and practitioners in rehabilitative treatment programs. One cannot expect adolescents to ‘work on themselves’ and their goals, while their current circumstances are constraining this, for example because of not having access to decent housing or financial resources or because of a drug addiction. This aligns with the GLM’s emphasis on tackling the obstacles that restrain people from living a life that is perceived as personally valuable [
26]; and with Colman and Vander Laenen [
47] who found in a sample of drug-using offenders that, before desistance can occur, offenders see recovery from drug use as the first important step. This might also hold to recovery in a broader sense, as in overcoming mental health problems, but also on a more societal level, as surmounting the consequences of social, cultural or economic exclusion (see also Giordano and colleagues [
18]).