Risk-taking, challenging authority, and pushing the boundaries are rather basic characteristics of adolescent development. Within the context of a juvenile justice system wedded to actuarial risk assessments, however, they would likely be interpreted as criminogenic factors and potent predictors of future risk. Indeed, as the most recent replication of Brian Grant's research reveals, the application of such assessments by corrections generally results in the identification of the least appealing prisoners, as opposed to the most dangerous ones, being labelled as posing the greatest risk to re-offend violently in the community upon release. Paradoxically enough, it may be that the very youth who are not identified as a risk – especially those who are well able to negotiate their way through the system – who could in fact pose the greatest risk to public safety.

In addition, in order to better ensure that life is breathed into legislative intent to avoid the criminalization of our youth, community and social development efforts are paramount. Without adequate human and fiscal resources, young people who are in the greatest need will likely continue to be jettisoned from inadequate educational, health, social service and child welfare resources into the only system that has historically been unable to refuse them. The consequent criminalization of "acceptance" into the juvenile justice system exacts too great a human price to continue unabated.

It seems self-evident, therefore, that in addition to directing more resources outside of the juvenile justice system, all approaches within the system for those youth who are criminalized, must focus on supporting, encouraging and inspiring youth as an essential approach to all assessment and service provision approaches. To achieve this means that there must be far greater emphasis placed upon the identification and support of individual and collective strength, rather than institutional compliance. Current hierarchical types of approaches currently utilized to assess and classify prisoners merely reinforce the tension between prisoners' willingness to disclose personal information and their need to be able survive in the institutional setting.

Especially in penal institutions, it is those who have the power to assess who have power over the individuals they are tasked with the process of classification. Many people have expressed reservations regarding the increasing trend to move towards the use of more actuarial risk-based tools for assessing all prisoners, especially those who are most marginalized and discriminated against as a consequence of their youthfulness, race, gender, poverty and other class realities, sexual orientation and lifestyle choices. There are increased calls for examinations of risky behaviour based upon situational or environmental factors that may contribute to the appearance or fear of risk.

The current classification and assessment schemes are clearly based on forensic psychology and are most often linked to the management of prisons. The current classification schemes applied to youth engage a great deal of subjective morality and focuses on such areas as the expected roles and expectations of youth. Rather than continuing to pathologize youth for their individual behaviour, the approaches taken by more progressive criminologists and sociologists is to attempt to develop means of contextualizing risk, while still addressing the behaviour which may be considered problematic. These workers recognize that notions of risk are "moral" categories and are therefore generally very subjective, and consequently often implicitly – occasionally explicitly – sexist, racist, ageist, homophobic, and classist in interpretation.