Excavating Youth Justice Reform: Historical Mapping and Speculative Prospects
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12379 |
| Author | BARRY GOLDSON |
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12379
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 317–334
Excavating Youth Justice Reform:
Historical Mapping and Speculative
Prospects
BARRY GOLDSON
Charles Booth Chair of Social Science, University of Liverpool
Abstract: This article analytically excavates youth justice reform (in England and Wales)
by situating it in historical context, critically reviewing the competing rationales that un-
derpin it and exploring the overarching social, economic, and political conditions within
which it is framed. It advances an argument that the foundations of a recognisably mod-
ern youth justice system had been laid by the opening decade of the 20th Century and that
youth justice reform in the post-Second World War period has broadly been structured
over four key phases. The core contention is that historical mapping facilitates an under-
standing of the unreconciled rationales and incoherent nature of youth justice reform to
date, while also providing a speculative sense of future prospects.
Keywords: evidence-based policy formation; history; politics; sociological crim-
inology; youth justice reform
Introduction: Past-Present-Future
More than 50 years ago Hayden White (1966) posed a challenging ques-
tion:
it is worth asking, then, why the past ought to be studied at all and what function can
be served by the contemplation of things under the aspect of history. Put another
way: is there any reason why we ought to study things under the aspect of their
past-ness rather than under the aspect of their present-ness. (p.132)
In reflecting on White’s provocation, it is argued here that longitudinal ex-
cavation and analysis of youth justice reform not only enables us to situate
and to understand the present but – if those with power care to take heed
– it might even serve as a basis for crafting policy into the future. In this
way, the argument resonates with an observation made more recently by
the crime historian, Paul Lawrence (2012):
317
C
2020 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which per-
mits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 317–334
the current aims of both criminal justice history and sociological criminology – to
understand crime and its control in the past and the present, to contribute to a
better informed and more rational criminal justice policy … are congruent. (p.325)
In other words, the article aims to map youth justice reform in England
and Wales, from the beginning of the 19th Century to the present. It will
be argued that the complex and seemingly incoherent nature of such re-
form ultimately derives from attempts to reconcile and balance competing
rationales and fractious relations within an overarching context of shifting
social, economic, and political conditions. Further – and in the spirit of the
interdisciplinary ‘congruence’ between criminal (youth) justice history and
sociological criminology to which Lawrence refers – the article concludes
by reflecting upon the lessons that historical mapping provides, and the
means by which such insights, alongside the accumulated knowledge base,
might be taken to signpost a more rational (evidence-based) youth justice
for the future.
The Foundations of Modern Youth Justice: Tension, Hybridity, and
Unreconciled Rationales
At the beginning of the 19th Century there was no discrete legal cate-
gory of ‘juvenile delinquent’ or ‘child/young offender’ and the practices
of the criminal justice and penal systems did little, if anything, to discern
between children and adults. The minimum age of criminal responsibil-
ity was set at seven years. As such, once children reached the age of seven
years they were deemed to be fully culpable before the law and exposed
to precisely the same – often Draconian – penalties as adults. As the 19th
Century unfolded, however, social reform and ‘child saving’ initiatives de-
veloped in tandem with burgeoning moral anxieties and political concerns.
Prominent philanthropists were moved by their revulsion at the appalling
conditions endured by the children of the poor, while the Establishment
was concerned with the prospect of the ‘criminal classes’ and the ‘danger-
ous classes’ (increasingly organised sections of the working class) joining
forces and destabilising the social order. In short, the prevailing view was
that society needed to protect children but it also needed to be protected
from them; an expression of what might be termed ‘victim-threat dualism’
(Goldson 2004; Hendrick 1994).
Similar concerns inspired the first systematic inquiry into juvenile delin-
quency undertaken by the Committee for Investigating the Alarming In-
crease of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis in 1815. The Committee’s
report was published in 1816 and it concluded:
Dreadful is the situation of the young offender: he [sic] becomes the victim of cir-
cumstances over which he has no control. The laws of his country operate not to
restrain, but to punish, him. (1816 Report cited in Muncie 2015, p.53)
The Committee proposed that distinctive responses should be estab-
lished for ‘juvenile delinquents’, underpinned by reformist and rehabil-
itative objectives as distinct from exclusively retributive and punitive re-
actions. Similarly, in 1817 the Society for the Improvement of Prison
318
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2020 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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