Abolishing Youth Justice Systems: Children First, Offenders Nowhere
| Author | Stephen Case,Kevin Haines |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225419898754 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1473225419898754
Youth Justice
2021, Vol. 21(1) 3 –17
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1473225419898754
journals.sagepub.com/home/yjj
Abolishing Youth Justice
Systems: Children First,
Offenders Nowhere
Stephen Case and Kevin Haines
Abstract
The 1980s decade of diversion in UK youth justice consolidated critiques of iatrogenic systemic contact and
generated an abolitionist momentum that was significantly reversed by the 1990s punitive turn and ‘new
youth justice’ strategies of modernisation, expansionism, interventionism and risk management. However,
the tentative rejection of risk management and the rebirth of diversion in contemporary youth justice offer
new hope for abolitionist arguments. This article critically evaluates contemporary abolitionist arguments,
asserting that Children First definitions and diversionary, Bureau model responses could coalesce to form an
innovative paradigm to replace traditional, formal conceptions of youth justice ‘systems’.
Keywords
abolition, Bureau, Children First, diversion, new youth justice, punitive, risk management
The current system for dealing with youth crime is inefficient and expensive . . .
The present arrangements are failing young people.
—(Audit Commission, 1996: 96)
The above quotation is as true today as it was over two decades ago. The Youth Justice
System (YJS) in England and Wales continues to be inefficient, expensive and strikingly
ineffective. The justice system is failing, even harming, children and it is failing society:
the time has come to abolish justice system-based responses to childhood behaviour. In this
article, we set out arguments and evidence for the abolition of the YJS and its responses to
the behaviour of the children. YJSs are historically expensive, harmful and ineffective. It is
time to revisit the case for abolitionism within the youth justice field, a case thus far largely
restricted to advocating for the abolition of custody for children1 who offend. We offer a
more ambitious and contentious argument that the entire youth justice system should be
abolished, from its underpinning principle of enacting ‘justice’ through punishment, to the
Corresponding author:
Stephen Case, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK.
Email: s.case@lboro.ac.uk
898754YJJ0010.1177/1473225419898754Youth JusticeCase and Haines
research-article2020
Special Issue Artic le
To continue reading
Request your trial