TQM and All That Jazz: Rejuvenating Juvenile Justice

The anointing of Total Quality Management (TQM)1 and “reinvention”—the cluster of ideas described in Reinventing Government2—as the royal road to economic and political revitalization has sometimes led to over-expectations by those seeking quick fixes to long-term problems. Nonetheless, concepts such as TQM and reinvention have the potential to address many of the problems of the juvenile justice system, especially when integrated with the social development model3 and the work of the Balanced Approach/Restorative Justice (BA/RJ) group.4 Each of these approaches complements the other. Together, they can lead to change in the juvenile justice system, not the customary minor changes that come from periodically fine tuning our focus, but historic change that is profound and radical—a new paradigm.