Youth, Community and the Struggle for Social Justice

The Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector: Concepts and an Agenda for an Emerging Field

“…Penal voluntary organisations make important contributions: saving (ex‐)offender lives (Tomczak and Thompson ); promoting personal growth and change (Buck ); helping reduce recidivism (Lewis et al . ; Sharkey, Torrats‐Espinosa and Takyar ), which, given the £15 billion annual costs and social harms of reoffending in England and Wales (Ministry of Justice , p.3) deserves further exploration; and campaigning against social exclusion, even under neoliberal governance (Goddard and Myers ). Some CJVVOs are also considered to have limiting or negative consequences, including: shoring up dangerous police detention conditions (Kendall ); obfuscating the flow of private funds into public policing operations and priorities (Lippert and Walby ); and shaping victim behaviour to align with the criminal justice priority of bearing witness in court (Svensson ).…”

“…Burgeoning literature considers isolated aspects of CJVVOs, for example in: policing (Bullock and Millie ); prisons (Abrams et al . ); community sanctions (Hucklesby and Wincup ); youth justice (Goddard and Myers ; Salole ); and victim support (Svensson ; Williams ). Rather than presenting case studies in institutional silos (for example, ‘volunteers in probation’, ‘victim support’ (Gill and Mawby )), we use cross‐cutting categories to conceptualise CJVVOs .…”

“…There are burgeoning literatures around voluntary organisations involved in prisons and community supervision, and victim services, but the policing and court voluntary sectors have escaped attention. Penal voluntary sector research has found that funding sources can affect, but do not determine, organisations’ activities (Goddard and Myers ; Kaufman ); and that organisations range from entirely volunteer run, through combinations of paid and volunteer workers, to larger organisations usually with far fewer volunteers (Tomczak ). It is not clear whether volunteers can, or could be distinctive from paid voluntary organisation staff, or the similarities between (quasi‐)statutory volunteers and volunteers within voluntary organisations.…”

“…Volunteers and voluntary organisations (with varying proportions of volunteer and paid staff) have been heavily implicated in criminal justice restructuring in, for example, England and Wales, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, and the Nordic countries (Tomczak ). Restructuring has created complex, ill‐understood governance formations and partnership working (Goddard and Myers ; Kaufman ), overlaid upon long‐standing, similarly ill‐understood criminal justice volunteers and voluntary organisation (CJVVO) activity. For‐profit justice involvement has attracted wide‐ranging interest, for example in: policing (White ); court interpreters (Aliverti and Seoighe ); court escort (Whitehead ); prison (Burkhardt ); community supervision (Deering and Feilzer ); and electronic monitoring (Hucklesby ).…”

Shifting sands: The reconfiguration of neoliberal youth penality

“…Arguably, too, AssetPlus is significant in terms of the key questions which it does not address -by retaining an essentially individualized, problem-orientated bias, wider opportunities and aspirations, as well as embedded inequalities and discriminatory experiences, are excluded from routine scrutiny. As Goddard and Myers (2018) argue in the context of the USA, such wider considerations could and, arguably, should, be reinfused into the assessment process. The recent 'loosening' of prescriptive controls over youth justice practitioners in England and Wales may serve that purpose.…”