Dictionary of Youth Justice

Barry Goldson

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843922940
• eBook ISBN: 9781134011063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This Dictionary explicitly addresses the historical, legal, theoretical, organisational, policy, practice, research and evidential contexts within which 'modern' youth justice in the UK and beyond is located. The entries cover a spectrum of theoretical orientations and conceptual perspectives and engage explicitly with the key statutory provisions and policy and practice imperatives within each of the three UK jurisdictions. This book is a key resource for those teaching and studying under-graduate and post-graduate courses in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social policy, law, socio-legal studies, community justice, social work, youth and community work and police studies, together with policy-makers, managers and practitioners working within the youth justice sphere (including staff training officers, youth justice officers, social workers, probation officers, police officers, teachers and education workers, health professionals, youth workers, drug and alcohol workers and juvenile secure estate staff).The Dictionary of Youth Justice:

• is designed to meet the needs of researchers, policy-makers, managers, practitioners and students;
• begins with an introductory chapter that maps the key shifts in contemporary national and international youth justice systems;
• contains over 300 alphabetically arranged entries - written by almost 100 experts in the respective fields - that explicitly address the core components of youth justice in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland;
• Provides specifically tailored recommended key texts and sources in respect of each entry;
• is closely cross-referenced and contains a detailed index to assist readers to make connections between and across entries;
• includes a detailed 'Directory of Agencies' that relate to youth justice in each of the three UK jurisdictions;
• is compiled and edited by one of the UK's leading authorities in youth justice.

Introduction – Making sense of youth justice

More than two decades have passed since Robert Harris and David Webb (1987: 7–9) observed that the ‘[youth justice] system is riddled with paradox, irony, even contradiction … [it] exists as a function of the child care and criminal justice systems on either side of it, a meeting place of two otherwise separate worlds’. Nothing has occurred in the meantime to obviate the complexity and contestation to which Harris and Webb allude. If anything, the ‘paradoxes’, ‘ironies’ and ‘contradictions’ are even more conspicuous and, in some jurisdictions at least, the distance between child welfare and youth justice is as great, if not greater, than it has ever been.

This short introductory chapter aims to sketch the contours within which contemporary youth justice is located and to define core sources of complexity. By referring to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of youth justice, to differentiated forms of ‘justice’, to both the potential and the limitations of comparative analysis and to the major reforms and transformations that characterize contemporary systems in the UK, the challenging task of making sense of youth justice will become apparent. It is within this context that the Dictionary has been conceived, and the chapter will conclude by summarizing its rationale and purpose.

A Constantly Moving Image

According to Nikolas Rose (1989: 121), ‘childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence’ (see also McGillivray 1997). If children per se are so closely governed, therefore, it is almost certain that those who offend adult sensibilities, transgress normative boundaries and/or breach the criminal law – the ‘disorderly’, the ‘anti-social’, ‘young offenders’ – are governed more closely still. That said, the various means by which children and young people are governed and/or youth justice is delivered are neither uniform nor static. Rather, both informal and formal modes of governance – and youth justice interventions more particularly – are characterized by distinctive and dynamic impulses transmitted through ever-changing organizational forms.

It follows, therefore, that certain juvenile/youth justice systems tend to privilege welfare approaches (rooted in inquisitorial, adaptable, informal, needs-oriented and child-specific processes), as distinct from orthodox justice-based responses (derived from adversarial, fixed, formal, proportionate and offence-focused priorities). In other systems the converse applies and classical justice imperatives prevail – including, in some cases, explicitly retributive/punitive elements – while a third typology of youth justice systems attempt to broker a difficult balance – a hybrid fusion – comprising a combination of welfare, justice and/or punitive dimensions. Furthermore, the extent to which youth justice systems prioritize ‘welfare’ or ‘justice’ or attempt to establish hybrid fusions is temporally and/or spatially contingent. In other words, policy responses and practice formations not only change over time (the temporal dimension) but they also vary between jurisdictions and, in some cases, within jurisdictions (spatial dimensions).

Differential Justice

If youth justice systems are dynamic configurations that are ever in flux – changing over time and across space – then it follows that the organizational frameworks, statutes and policies, modes and methods of intervention and the practices of ‘justice’ that underpin them will also vary. Perhaps the clearest expression of such variation or ‘differential justice’, centres around the age of criminal minority or criminal responsibility. This relates to the age at which a child or young person is held to be fully accountable in criminal law: the point at which an ‘act’ of ‘deviant transgression’ might be formally processed as a ‘criminal offence’. There is extraordinary variation in the age of criminal minority/responsibility between youth justice systems across Europe, as elsewhere in the world. For example, in Scotland the age of criminal responsibility is 8; in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Australia it is 10; in Canada, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands and Turkey it is 12; in France it is 13; in New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan it is 14; in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden it is 15; and in Belgium and Luxembourg it is 18 (Goldson and Muncie 2006a; Muncie and Goldson 2006). As stated, there is equal dissonance in the range of responses to children and young people depending on the extent to which youth justice systems emphasize welfare, justice, diversion, informalism, prevention, intervention, rights, responsibilities, restoration, remoralization, retribution or even starkly punitive imperatives.

In short, youth justice is uncertain. Governments, formal administrations, judicial bodies and correctional agencies ‘choose’ to govern ‘deviant’ children and young people in accordance with widely divergent ideological perspectives, political calculations, judicial conceptualizations and operational strategies. In this way, policies and practices are constantly in motion, and similar ‘acts’ can elicit quite different responses. Children’s experiences of ‘justice’ are defined and differentiated in accordance with time and place. Indeed, Muncie and Hughes (2002: 1) – not unlike Harris and Webb above – have argued that ‘youth justice is a history of conflict, contradictions, ambiguity and compromise … [it] tends to act on an amalgam of rationales, oscillating around and beyond the caring ethos of social services and the neo-liberal legalistic ethos of responsibility and punishment’.

The Complexities of Comparative Youth Justice

Given the ever-changing and differentiated nature of youth justice, many academic researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students are increasingly becoming interested in comparative analysis (Muncie and Goldson 2006). By comparing national and international youth justice systems it is assumed that greater understanding will follow. Furthermore, the interest in transnational youth justice is often accompanied by a growing demand in policy and practitioner communities to discover ‘what works’ and to emulate ‘best practice’.

While comparative analysis, and the study of international youth justice, offers enormous potential, it is often imagined and/or presented in oversimplified forms and its complexity tends to be missed. At the most rudimentary level two quite different assumptions commonly prevail (in the UK at least) with regard to conceptualizing key trends in international youth justice. The first assumption is intrinsically pessimistic. It conceives a hegemonic ‘culture of control’ (Garland 2001) within which the special status of childhood is diminishing; welfare protectionism is retreating; children are increasingly ‘responsibilized’ through processes of ‘adulteration’; children’s human rights are systemically violated; and the global population of young people in penal custody continues to grow. This way of seeing situates England and Wales (just behind the USA) at the vanguard of a burgeoning wave of authoritarianism and punitivity that is sweeping uniformly across the ‘advanced’ democratic world. The second assumption idealizes international (especially specific west European and Australasian) jurisdictions. It infers a sense of continual advance towards penal tolerance, child centredness and progressive human rights compliance. Within this frame of reference, England and Wales and the USA are conceived as being conspicuously out of step with the liberal progressiveness that is said to typify other youth justice systems. Such binary classification is oversimplified, however, and it neglects the complexities and nuances that prevail between and within comparative youth justice systems. Furthermore, even when comparative analyses transcend crude penal severity/lenience dichotomies, their methodologies and scope often remain constrained.

International statistical comparisons of the operation of juvenile/youth justice systems are now routinely gathered by various government agencies and research institutes. Whatever their value, such processes are often dogged with problems. Comprehensive data are not always easy to recover or to interpret and, even when data exist they do not necessarily lend themselves to straightforward comparability, for three key reasons. First, the definition, codification and recording of ‘crime’ vary between jurisdictions. Second, discrete jurisdictions have developed different systems for categorizing and processing ‘young offenders’. For example, what is classified as ‘penal custody’ in one country may not be in others, even though the regimes and the practices of secure detention may be similar (Pitts and Kuula 2006). Furthermore, as noted, significant variations exist across the world in relation to the ages of criminal responsibility. Consequently, not all jurisdictions collect the same data on the same age groups and populations of children and young people and few, if any, appear to do so in the same time periods. Third, linguistic, cultural and socio-legal differences mean that such terms as ‘minor’, ‘juvenile’, ‘child’ and ‘young offender’ are defined and operationalized in different ways.

Similarly, despite their interest and benefits, several attempts to unravel national and international differences rarely go much beyond describing the development, powers and procedures of particular national jurisdictions (for example, Bala et al. 2002; Winterdyk 2002; Tonry and Doob 2004). This pays scant regard to the actual translation and transmission of statute via the varying (discretionary) practices of youth justice. Indeed, it can even be argued that the national is an inadequate unit of comparative analysis in that it conceals, or at least obfuscates, local and/or regional differences within jurisdictions. For sure, neoliberal economics, conservative politics and policy transfer may well serve to create some standardized and homogenized global responses to youth offending but, paradoxically, ‘international’ youth justice is also significantly ‘localized’ through national, regional and local enclaves of difference (Muncie 2005; Goldson and Muncie 2006a; Hughes and Follett 2006). In many countries it is difficult to prioritize national developments above widely divergent regional differences, most evident in sentencing disparities (justice by geography). In short, once it is recognized that variations within nation-state borders may be as great, or even greater, than some differences between them, then the problems associated with taking the national (let alone the international and the global) as the basic unit for understanding policy shifts and processes of implementation become apparent (Crawford 2002; Stenson and Edwards 2004; Edwards and Hughes 2005).

Contemporary Youth Justice in the UK

The UK is, of course, the site of three separate youth justice jurisdictions: England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and, in recent years, each has been characterized by major reform and substantial changes in law, policy and practice.

Such change has been most evident in England and Wales, the largest of the three jurisdictions. Since the election of the first New Labour government in May 1997, the youth justice system has been radically transformed. In fact, contemporary developments in law and policy have formulated the most radical overhaul of the youth justice system in England and Wales since the inception of the first juvenile courts in 1908 (Goldson 2007). In particular, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill (that is before Parliament at the time of writing) have introduced, or will introduce, a multitude of new legal processes, court orders and statutory powers. Indeed, the entire youth justice apparatus in England and Wales has been radically restructured and expanded via the statutory establishment of new national and local infrastructures. At the national level, an executive non-departmental public body, the Youth Justice Board, was established in 1998. At the local level, since 2000, social services authorities, education authorities, the Probation Service, the police and regional health authorities have been statutorily required to form multi-agency ‘youth offending teams’ (YOTs) and some 155 YOTs – substantially sized interagency organizations – have been established in England and Wales.

In Northern Ireland, youth justice reform was a key element of the Criminal Justice Review – initiated in 1998 and published in 2000 – that informed the provisions of the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002, the legislation at the root of substantial change and system reconfiguration. In some key respects the pattern of developments in Northern Ireland – although on a quite dissimilar scale – has mirrored those in England and Wales. A new ‘Youth Justice Agency’ has taken over the responsibilities of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of entries
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Making sense of youth justice
• Directory of Agencies
• References
• Index