Janus‐Faced Youth Justice Work and the Transformation of Accountability

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12181
Published date01 December 2016
Date01 December 2016
The Howard Journal Vol55 No 4. December 2016 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12181
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 478–495
Janus-Faced Youth Justice Work and
the Transformation of Accountability
VICI ARMITAGE, LAURA KELLY and JO PHOENIX
Vici Armitage is Research Project Manager, University of York; Laura Kelly is
Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University; Jo
Phoenix is Professor of Criminology, Open University
Abstract: This article revisits claims about the relationship between ‘standardisation’,
‘discretion’ and ‘accountability’ in youth justice made in the wake of the Crime and
Disorder Act 1998. We argue that less centralisation and less standardisation have
transformed accountability, but this is experienced differently according to the place held
in the organisational hierarchy.This recognition demands a more nuanced understanding
of ‘practitioner discretion’, which can account for differences between managerial and
frontline experiences of what we describe as ‘janus-faced youth justice work’, and a broad
definition of the youth justice field and associated actors.
Keywords: accountability; discretion; managerialism; youth justice
Following the introduction of the principles and techniques of new pub-
lic management (NPM) to public sector agencies in England and Wales
from the 1980s, there has been considerable discussion of their impact
on what has since become known as ‘youth justice’ practice.1For so me,
and particularly the architects of the ‘new’ youth justice system intro-
duced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (CDA 1998), a pragmatic,
‘neo-bureaucratic’ adaptation of NPM was seen as the solution to the
‘problems’ of a previous generation – a lack of practitioner accountabil-
ity, lack of clarity about ‘what worked’ when intervening in the lives of
young people in trouble with the law, and a lack of consistency when re-
sponding to the misdemeanours of the young (Audit Commission 1996;
Home Office 1997; see McLaughlin, Muncie and Hughes (2001) for dis-
cussion). Critics were concerned, however, that more directive ‘National
Standards’ for youth justice work undermined ‘effective practice’ by re-
stricting practitioner creativity,autonomy and discretion (for example, Pitts
2001).
This article re-engages with these concerns at a time of apparent change.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with 71 youth justice practitioners2and
managers, collected at two sites in England, we discuss two apparently
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2016 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The Howard Journal Vol55 No 4. December 2016
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 478–495
contradictory narratives within our data. First, most participants were
keen to tell us about significant recent changes that had taken place at
work, including: organisational transformations, such as restructuring and
integration in the face of significant budget cuts; completely new areas of
work following the launch of new initiatives and the integration of services
(at one research site); and new processes, such as new forms of assessment
for expanding ‘pre-court’ work not governed by National Standards for
Youth Justice Services (Youth Justice Board 2013) (all discussed below);
and increasingly important relationships with local political actors and the
declining significance of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales
(YJB) (see also Kelly and Armitage 2015; Phoenix 2016). Second, our par-
ticipants also told us that, despite this, aspects of their work remained
identifiably the same.
These claims could coexist because it was common for practitioners to
make a clear distinction between two core aspects of their job. On one
hand, ‘frontline’ roles involved regular reporting of information (that is,
the ‘paperwork’). On the other hand, frontline practitioners worked di-
rectly with young people and families (‘face-to-face’ work or, for some,
‘the real work’). This aspect of the job involved building relationships
in ways that were largely uncaptured by performance management sys-
tems which recorded ‘contacts’,3tasks undertaken and decisions made,
but not the interactional techniques used to secure the ‘negotiated con-
nection’ that enabled the completion of the work or the qualities of the
associated relationships (Drake, Fergusson and Briggs 2014, p.31; see also
Prior and Mason 2010). As a consequence, the experience of ‘face-to-face
work’ was judged to be relatively unaffected by change, despite new ‘pa-
perwork’ – and in some cases, differing caseloads – particularly in areas
of work unregulated by National Standards and where assessment docu-
ments were not centrally determined (Ministry of Justice and Youth Jus-
tice Board 2013). Despite the relaxing of reporting requirements by the
YJB (Youth Justice Board 2011, pp.4–5), frontline practitioners also de-
scribed considerable continuity in demands for information from their
management teams. Similarly, while the need to ‘manage up’ and ‘man-
age down’ remained constant for managers, the declining importance of
the central bureaucracy (and a decline in central funding) at a time of
local budget constraints, produced new pressures and new drivers for
change.
This article reflects upon these accounts of the day-to-day realities of
youth justice work. We argue that three factors have together encour-
aged ‘janus-faced youth justice work’: (i) the embedding of managerialist
priorities and approaches within local bureaucracies; (ii) the local political
implications of post-2008 austerity measures; and (iii) threats to forms of in-
formal support in the face of organisational retrenchment/reorganisation.
Significantly, however, this takes different forms depending on the loca-
tion of the worker within the occupational hierarchy, and it has been di-
rectly affected by changing relationships between the central and local
bureaucracies in youth justice, and central and local government more
broadly. This causes us to revisit claims about the relationship between
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2016 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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