Changing Youth Justice
| Author | John Pitts |
| DOI | 10.1177/147322540300300102 |
| Published date | 01 April 2003 |
| Date | 01 April 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Changing Youth Justice
1
John Pitts
Correspondence: Professor John Pitts, The Vauxhall Centre for the Study of Crime,
University of Luton, Park Square, Luton, Bedfordshire LU1 3JU. Email:
john.pitts4Vbtopenworld.com
Abstract
This article contends that the depoliticisation of its knowledge base, and greater openness
to alternative perspectives on the part of policy makers, could only benefit the
development of the youth justice system in England and Wales. It argues that an
open-minded reappraisal of ‘welfarism’ and ‘progressive minimalism’, rejected by New
Labour on essentially ideological grounds, could offer solutions to some of the problems
presently confronting the Youth Offending Teams (YOTs), the Juvenile Secure Estate, and
the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB).
Welcome Aboard?
An earlier article of mine, in which I criticised what I regard to be simplistic models of youth
crime and the inflexible responses to young offenders espoused by the Youth Justice Board
for England and Wales, was published in this journal (Pitts, 2001a). The article appears to have
been fairly well received by practitioners, managers and others professionally involved in the
youth justice system, probably because the problems I highlighted were problems they had
encountered. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the article was not welcomed so warmly by the YJB, one
member of which opined that critical academics should ‘get on board’instead of ‘carping on
the sidelines’. This had echoes of remarks made by Lord Norman Warner, chair of the YJB,
to a recent gathering of youth justice managers and practitioners in which he advised them to
ignore the criticisms of ‘cynical’academics and listen instead to the account of events
emanating from the YJB.
Tentatively up the Gangplank
The suggestion that critical academics should ‘get on board’is not, on the face of it, an
unreasonable one, although an apparent desire to embrace the critic as a ‘partner in progress’
can sometimes mask a less creditable urge to marginalise, discredit or silence the critique. More
worrying, however, is the assumption behind this ambiguous invitation, that vigorous public
debate inhibits progress. In fact, it is a time-honoured axiom of democratic societies that
vigorous and informed public debate should precede political action, and that public servants
should be subject to critical public scrutiny. Edward Said (1994) has argued that the academic
and the public professional have a particular duty in this regard, because their profession offers
them privileged insight into pertinent public issues. Thus, Said enjoins us to put our analyses
into the public domain and ‘speak the truth to power’, however politically uncomfortable this
might be for the powerful, or indeed for ourselves. In this perspective, citizens of democratic
societies are best served if the public professional and the academic resist the temptation to
serve as apologists for the ephemeral ambitions of governments, and quasi-governments, and
speak out because, as the late Pierre Bourdieu (1998) observed, ‘there is no genuine democracy
1
This article is based on papers presented at the NACRO Annual Youth Crime Conference at the University of Nottingham (April
2002) and the National Association for Youth Justice Seminar and Annual General Meeting at De Montfort University, Milton
Keynes (June 2002).
without genuine opposing critical powers’. This does not mean that public professionals and
academics cannot contribute to the development of improved policies, procedures and
practices, quite the reverse. It simply means that in doing so they should honour their
responsibility to maintain a critical dialogue with government rather than becoming what
Taylor, Walton and Young (1973) once described as ‘handmaidens of the status quo’.
Such a critical dialogue is particularly important at the present time because, in three crucial
areas, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 introduced at least the semblance of reforms for which
progressives in youth justice had been campaigning for many years. These were: a fully-funded
multi-agency grouping dedicated to work with young offenders; a governmental body charged
with the realisation of an accountable, youth justice system with the power and reach to deal
with the problem of justice by geography and the inequitable distribution of resources; and the
administrative machinery necessary to effect a thoroughgoing reform of the juvenile secure
estate.
Beyond amnesia and polarisation
Several years ago it occurred to me that:
The history of the theory and practice of juvenile justice in Britain from 1959 is, to a considerable extent,
a history of the perpetual and apparently random repudiation and replacement of one set of ideas by
another.
(Pitts, 1988: 137).
The ‘new youth justice’
2
is rooted in a repudiation of what we might call, for the sake of
convenience, the ‘old youth justice’. The old youth justice comprises 1960s/70s ‘welfarism’
(which emphasised the central role of social inequality in the aetiology of youth offending, and
the need for robust state intervention to ameliorate the personal and social circumstances of
young offenders), and 1970s/80s ‘progressive minimalism’(which strove to divert young
people from a potentially stigmatising formal involvement in the justice system). In the new
youth justice these apparently contradictory, but potentially complementary ideas, have been
supplanted by a focus upon the deeds rather than the needs of young offenders, unless these
needs can be shown to have led directly to their offending, and a strategy of early, and in some
cases pre-emptive, formal intervention with crime-prone and offending young people (Pitts,
2001a). These interventions are rooted in the belief that early exposure to the system will have
long-term deterrent and rehabilitative effects (Pitts, 2001b).
Today, the ideas which informed the old youth justice are rejected on the grounds that they
are ideologically inspired, pre-scientific, and lead to woefully ineffective forms of intervention
or non-intervention. The new youth justice, by contrast, is presented as a child of ‘progress’.
Today, we hear, we have more experience, more and better scientific knowledge, and a new
post-ideological politics in which policy is made in accordance with the dictates of scientific
rationality, rather than redundant ideological postures. Put simply –nowadays ‘what counts is
what works’. In these circumstances governments have utilised criminology pragmatically,
incorporating those scientific discourses which articulate most closely with their policy
objectives, and so it is seldom clear whether criminological science is serving as a source of
intellectual illumination or political legitimation.
2
We should note that ‘New Youth Justice’is also consistent with what John Pratt (1989), has described as ‘Corporatism: the third
model of juvenile justice’. In the Corporatist model, all the relevant agencies and organisations spontaneously enter a (bottom-up)
partnership to deal effectively and efficiently with young offenders. Corporatism is, however, an organisational ‘model’and Pratt
is concerned with the changing organisational structures of youth justice rather than the theories/ideologies informing, or the
professional practices articulated by ‘welfarism’and ‘progressive minimalism’. Pratt is not, therefore, comparing like with like,
since it is possible to envisage a corporate ‘welfarist’,‘minimalist’or ‘correctional’youth justice system. Indeed, the ‘New Youth
Justice’marks the advent of what we might call ‘top-down corporate correctionalism’.
Changing Youth Justice6
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