Informatics as the Nexus between Public Health and Juvenile Justice

While youth violence increasingly has become recognized as both a public health and juvenile justice problem in recent years, the social-ecological model and tools of public health have not yet been fully integrated with the juvenile justice system. Establishment of a public health informatics system that integrates data on the individual, event and the natural, built and social environments, at a small area level, can provide us with opportunities both to increase our understanding of the social-ecological context of youth violence and provide communities with data that they can use to identify modifiable community attributes and target local interventions to reduce youth violence. Collectively, integrating an Epidemiological Criminology perspective into such a framework can further begin to address the social justice of informatics, health, and judicial disparities that are normally considered as separate and distinct throughout the literature within a social determinants context.