General Deterrence: A Valid Objective in Youth Justice?
| Author | Nigel Stone |
| Published date | 01 August 2014 |
| Date | 01 August 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1473225414537570 |
| Subject Matter | Legal Commentary |
Youth Justice
2014, Vol. 14(2) 186 –191
© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1473225414537570
yjj.sagepub.com
Legal Commentary
General Deterrence: A Valid
Objective in Youth Justice?
Nigel Stone
An earlier Commentary (Stone, 2012) reviewed judicial responses to serious public disor-
der and associated offending such as looting, in the light of sentencing arising from wide-
spread rioting in London and other English cities in August 2011, observing that the Court
of Appeal’s judgment in R v Blackshaw and Others [2012] 1 WLR 1126; [2012] Cr App
R (S) 114 (p. 677) gave ‘little basis for confidence that juvenile offenders [in this context]
should properly be regarded in a more nuanced, contextual light rather than in a catch-all
spirit of condemnation and deterrence’. None of the offenders whose sentences were
reviewed in Blackshaw were aged under-18 and, accordingly, that pessimistic interpreta-
tion was necessarily provisional. More recently the Court of Appeal has revisited the
issues in R v Lewis and Others [2014] EWCA Crim 48, arising from the same distur-
bances but involving very serious riotous disorder rather than the more tangential riot-
related offending addressed in that appeal,1 with the additional instructive value drawn
from one of the appellants being a juvenile.
Events Prompting Prosecution
Late on the evening in question a large group of masked or hooded individuals gathered
outside a public house (licensed bar) in Birmingham. Though the pub was closed for the
night, resident staff were on the premises upstairs. Having broken into these premises
some of the rioters set the ground floor alight with petrol bombs with which they had
come equipped and threw furniture out onto the street. The Appeal Court concluded that
this was done with the deliberate intent not of looting but of bringing the police to the
scene to be targeted. Another large group of troublemakers, similarly disguised, arrived
and joined in ‘enthusiastically’, breaking into other nearby business premises. Police
vehicles called to deal with the riot were attacked. Shots were fired at police officers, the
Corresponding author:
Nigel Stone, School of Psychology, Elizabeth Fry Building, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: n.stone@uea.ac.uk
537570YJJ0010.1177/1473225414537570Youth JusticeStone
research-article2014
To continue reading
Request your trial