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Can You Not Find Any Good in This Boy?

As a young probation officer, I was writing a pre-sentence report for a young man who had been extremely non-compliant since his last appearance before the court. My report reflected that — it was, to put it plainly, scathing. I documented every failure, every violation, every missed appointment. I submitted it to my supervisor; confident I had done my job thoroughly.

My supervisor read it, looked up, and asked me a question I have never forgotten:

"Can you not find any good in this boy?"

That question stopped me and forced me to question the punitive lens I had been working from in my approach to juvenile justice. My focus had been entirely on the negative — on what this young man had done wrong, on what he had failed to do, on the ways he had disappointed the expectations of the system. The possibility that there was something worth finding, something to build on, had not entered my report at all. In merely “reporting the facts,” I was missing an opportunity to begin setting a foundation for him that could change the trajectory of his life. 

That moment changed the way I viewed every young person who came after him.

What my supervisor was pointing toward — intuitively, before I had the language for it — was something that the science of positive psychology has since given us a rigorous framework to understand. Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson's work on character strengths, and specifically the VIA (Values in Action) Classification of Character Strengths, identifies 24 universal strengths — qualities like perseverance, creativity, kindness, bravery, fairness, and humor — that exist in every person in varying degrees. Not as aspirational traits to be developed from nothing, but as genuine capacities already present, waiting to be recognized and engaged.

In the juvenile justice context, this is more than an affirming idea. It is a clinically and practically significant reorientation. The young people who come before the court have, in the vast majority of cases, survived circumstances that would overwhelm many adults. The persistence required to survive poverty, trauma, family instability, and community violence is a character strength. The loyalty that keeps a young person embedded in a dangerous peer network is a character strength misapplied — and misapplied strengths are far more workable than deficits, because they are real. They exist. They can be redirected.

Research on strength-based approaches in juvenile justice consistently finds that interventions which identify and engage young people's existing strengths — rather than focusing exclusively on risk reduction and deficit remediation — produce better engagement, stronger therapeutic alliances, and more durable behavioral change. When a young person is asked what they are good at before they are told what is wrong with them, something shifts in the room.

The system I worked in for over two decades was built, almost entirely, around the deficit model. What did this young person do wrong? What risks do they carry? What conditions must they comply with? These are not illegitimate questions. But they are incomplete ones — and a system that asks only those questions will produce reports like the one I wrote as a young officer: technically accurate, clinically useless, and blind to the human being sitting across the desk.

My supervisor's question — can you not find any good in this boy? — was not soft. It was the hardest question she could have asked me, because it required me to look again. To look differently. That is what I believe positive psychology, and specifically the VIA character strengths framework, offers juvenile justice: not a replacement for accountability, but a more complete way of seeing — one that finds what is already there and builds from it.

I have been in this field long enough to know that the young people most written off are often the ones with the most to offer, once someone decides to look.

Dr. Sokoyama Songu-Mbriwa is a juvenile justice practitioner and researcher with over 23 years of experience in juvenile probation. He is the author of Everchanging: Contemporary Social and Psychological Issues in Juvenile Justice (in progress) and completed his doctoral dissertation on compassion fatigue and burnout in juvenile probation officers at Grand Canyon University in 2024.

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