Against Youth Justice and Youth Governance, for Youth Penality

Abstract

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Janus‐Faced Youth Justice Work and the Transformation of Accountability

“…In this article, we have argued that the day‐to‐day realities of youth justice work and the outcomes of such work are shaped by ‘centralisation’, ‘standardisation’ or ‘discretion’ but not solely, exclusively, or in an over‐determined fashion. The political realm does play a determining role in youth justice practice via its transformation of ‘accountability’, but, as the data above demonstrate, agentic practitioners at different levels within and across youth justice agencies and organisation also have a part to play (see also Phoenix ). The data also demonstrate that other non‐youth justice agencies and actors also have influence, particularly when it comes to shifting the locus of control.…”

“…Our concern is rather different. The introduction of multi‐agency YOTs by the CDA 1998 encouraged a number of empirical studies at the organisational level (for example, Burnett and Appleton ; Souhami ; Field ), but as Phoenix () discusses, recently dominant approaches within youth criminology have tended to flatten ‘the complexity (and the specificity) of the social relations that make up the youth penal realm’ (p.136). Recent dramatic reductions in the numbers of young people receiving a reprimand, final warning or conviction for the first time (‘first time entrants’), numbers of young people sentenced in court and numbers of young people in custody, and a political context in which aspects of the current approach to youth justice work are being questioned (Carlile ; Taylor ) have again prompted new interest in the local functioning of youth justice organisations (for example, Drake, Fergusson and Briggs ; Smith ; Byrne and Brooks ; Morris ).…”

“…Drawing on qualitative interviews with 71 youth justice practitioners and managers, collected at two sites in England, we discuss two apparently contradictory narratives within our data. First, most participants were keen to tell us about significant recent changes that had taken place at work, including: organisational transformations, such as restructuring and integration in the face of significant budget cuts; completely new areas of work following the launch of new initiatives and the integration of services (at one research site); and new processes, such as new forms of assessment for expanding ‘pre‐court’ work not governed by National Standards for Youth Justice Services (Youth Justice Board ) (all discussed below); and increasingly important relationships with local political actors and the declining significance of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB) (see also Kelly and Armitage ; Phoenix ). Second, our participants also told us that, despite this, aspects of their work remained identifiably the same.…”

Professional Perspectives of Youth Justice Policy Implementation: Contextual and Coalface Challenges

“…Bateman 2017). However, contemporary youth justice policymaking has been characterised as confused/contradictory (see Goldson 2019; Hopkins‐Burke 2016; Muncie 2008), excessively politicised (Smith 2011; Smith and Gray 2019) and even bereft of consolidating principles (Goldson and Muncie 2006) – arguments that coalesce to form the ‘youth governance’ critique of youth justice (Phoenix 2016). Although these criticisms can tend towards overgeneralisation and caricature of youth justice policy trajectories in order to emphasise academic argument, the assertion that neither policymaking nor policy implementation necessarily develop along linear and predictable ‘pathways’ (Case and Hampson 2019) is unequivocal.…”

Against evidence-based oppression: Marginalized youth and the politics of risk-based assessment and intervention

“…Let us think through the youth offender risk assessment calculus to illustrate how risk assessments render "objective" the very subjective (and highly racialized) process of criminalization and youth penality (Phoenix, 2016). We know from research that the number of youth arrested and convicted for status offending, fighting, drug offending and property offending involves a high degree of discretion from school administrators, the police, and prosecutors.…”