Practice Cultures and the ‘New’ Youth Justice in (England and) Wales

Subverting Social Policy on the Front Line: Agencies of Resistance in the Delivery of Services

“…Similar practices in an operational ASB service setting were observed by Sadler (2008), where the implementation of national legal and policy frameworks was mediated by workers through consideration of local contextual factors, resulting in the development of what they judged to be actions that were more appropriate to the situations they faced. Field (2007) studied the activities of staff in Youth Offending Teams, whose adherence to ‘welfare’ values led them to develop practices that resisted pressures to prioritize punitive interventions in dealing with young offenders, instead adopting strategies which also enabled the broader range of the young people's personal and social needs to be addressed. What these examples reveal is a resistance by service delivery staff to formal policies that are intended to shape what they do – and which, in the case of both ASB and youth justice policies, were at the time being forcefully advocated by government (Burney 2005; Squires 2006) – which involved not a rejection of those policies but rather their modification and adjustment.…”

Janus‐Faced Youth Justice Work and the Transformation of Accountability

“…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 ).…”

Against Youth Justice and Youth Governance, for Youth Penality

“…Secondly, and relatedly, there is some debate about the extent to which actuarialism and risk thinking did penetrate the everyday working practices of youth justice particularly in relation to youth courts and young people themselves (Field 2007, Phoenix 2010, Phoenix and Kelly 2013. At least at the level of empirical analysis, it would seem that older discourses of welfare and care have not been displaced for many of the social actors, professionals and practitioners working within the youth justice system.…”

“…There is a lack of analytical demarcation made between on the one hand the actual bureaucracies, organisational configurations, occupational cultures that might comprise the system or the government targets and audit measures and on the other the social actions of the individuals youth justice workers. Apart from Souhami's (2007Souhami's ( , 2014, Canton and Eadie (2002), Baker (2005) and Field (2007) there have been few, if any, theoretically informed empirical investigations that have focused on youth justice occupational culture, youth justice practice or indeed the social relations between various levels of bureaucratic organisations (for instance, the youth justice board, youth courts and youth offending teams) even though it is now more than a decade since the CDA 1998 was passed. This lack of general delineation or demarcation is seen most clearly in the suggestion that one possible explanation for system contraction is growth of professional confidence to act differently (i.e.…”