The New Economy and Youth Justice

Abstract

This article focuses on the shape of the contemporary political economy and its effects on the young people and adults who are involved in the ‘deep end’ of the youth justice system – youth prisons. This ‘deep end’ arguably represents the end of the road for young people and adults who have found themselves adrift in the context of the contemporary capitalist model, and who have passed through existing social systems intended to offer them a safety net. After examining the consequences of the economy for these individuals, the article looks to new economic models and processes and their possible implications for a research and reform agenda.

‘Child First’ and desistance

“…Asset therefore embodied a staged process of reductionism when trying to bring about desistance directly that has rendered risk a decontextualised and dehumanised artefact and hindered the possibility of understanding children's individual lived realities and how these might be influenced (O'Mahony, 2009;Phoenix, 2009;Cox, 2020). Application of RFPP peaked in November 2009 with the inception of the 'Scaled Approach' assessment and intervention framework, which dictated that formal youth justice intervention must be proportionate to the child's assessed risk of offending (YJB, 2010; see Sutherland, 2009), formally extending processes of risk-based reductionism and invalidity into the sphere of intervention but justified by an undertheorised, partial and inconsistent evidence base for the 'effectiveness' of risk assessment and risk-based interventions (Case et al, 2022).…”