Book Review: Negotiating Class in Youth Justice: Professional Practice and Interactions by Jasmina Arnež
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231217818 |
| Author | Sveinung Sandberg |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
Book Reviews
Jasmina Arnež,Negotiating Class in Youth Justice: Professional Practice and Interactions, Routledge:
London and New York, 2023; 189 pp.: 9780367721732, £104 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Sveinung Sandberg, University of Oslo, Norway
In great empirical and theoretical detail, Negotiating Class in Youth Justice explores how
class influences relations between different actors and stakeholders in the field of criminal
justice. At the core of Jasmina Arnez
̌’s argument is a claim that class has been left out of
much contemporary criminological research. There is also a suggestion that Bourdieu’s
theories, combined with some others, allow for a better understanding of one of the
classic topics in criminology: young people who are in trouble with the law.
The first chapter sets out the socioeconomic and political conditions of these “behav-
iourally challenging young people”in the UK. The emphasis is on social problems, failed
policies, and the way that developmental and intergenerational explanations of delin-
quency have dominated family and crime control. The second chapter lays out the
main theoretical synthesis, namely a combination of Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and
field, and the associated relational understanding of class, with Boltanski and
Thévenot’s sociology of lay normativity and Sayer’s moral understandings of class.
The next five chapters explore in detail the different ways that class operates in action
among different groups and in the interaction between them. Data is drawn from an
impressive set of research with young people, their parents, and practitioners across
nine settings. It includes participant observation, qualitative interviews, and focus
group discussions. Topics that are studied vary from responses to manifestations of
class, the negotiation of childrearing difficulties, classed distortions in professional
responses including from the police and social workers, discrepancies in decision
making according to class, and organizational and institutional pressure and rhetoric.
The book is theoretically informed, and Arnez
̌dares to use big theory and to combine
traditions that are usually seen as being in opposition to each other. There are few short-
cuts, and the study is carefully researched and impressive in terms of the amount of
empirical data. It is also written with exemplary sympathy and understanding for the par-
ticipants, be it the youths, their parents, or the professionals. The presentation of long
quotes that gives statements context and full meaning can also be seen to respect partici-
pants by giving their words extra weight. These long quotes also allow for more
Theoretical Criminology
2024, Vol. 28(3) 405–414
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231217818
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