Rethinking Youth Justice: Comparative Analysis, International Human Rights and Research Evidence
| Author | John Muncie,Barry Goldson |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225406065560 |
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
ARTICLE
Copyright 2006 The National Association for Youth Justice
Published by SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1473-2254, Vol 6(2): 91–106
DOI: 10.1177/1473225406065560
Rethinking Youth Justice: Comparative Analysis,
International Human Rights and Research Evidence
Barry Goldson and John Muncie
Correspondence: Dr Barry Goldson, School of Sociology and Social Policy, The
University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69
7ZA, UK. Email: b.goldsonVliv.ac.uk
Abstract
Derived from a more ambitious international youth justice research project, this article
aims to critically interrogate the direction of contemporary youth justice policy in England
and Wales and the political priorities that underpin it. By rethinking youth justice on the
basis of comparative analysis, international human rights and research evidence, we
challenge the current policy trajectory and offer an alternative formulation: a youth justice
with integrity.
Keywords: comparative analysis, evidence, human rights, integrity, justice, research
Introduction: Making Sense of Policy and Taking Account of Critique
Youth justice policy analysis is a challenging enterprise not least because the conceptual
thematics and rationales that underpin statutes, policies and system configurations are
subject to constant movement and change and, throughout history, such dynamism has
been heavily influenced, if not determined, by prevailing political exigencies and specific
sectoral interests (Hendrick, 2006). As a consequence, ‘youth justice’ is temporally and
spatially differentiated, diverse and disparate and it is difficult, if at all possible, to
conceptualize it by appealing to any totalizing policy rationale. In this way:
. . . youth justice is a history of conflict, contradictions, ambiguity and compromise . . . [it] tends
to act on an amalgam of rationales, oscillating around and beyond the caring ethos of social
services and the neo-liberal legalistic ethos of responsibility and punishment.
(Muncie and Hughes, 2002: 1)
In short, youth justice policy discourses and the systems that emanate from them,
comprise fluid sites of contestation and uneasy settlements of competing and/or
intersecting thematics including: welfare; justice; informalism; rights; responsibilities;
restoration; prevention; remoralization and retribution/punishment (Goldson, 2004).
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The means by which particular ‘themes’are privileged within specific jurisdictions at
given moments in time, and the processes whereby intrinsic tensions are mediated, are
invariably subject to the vagaries of political imperative.
Within this context –as many commentators have observed –the pace of youth
justice reform in England and Wales since the election of the first New Labour
administration in 1997 has been unprecedented. As early as 1993, when the New
Labour motif of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’was first formulated,
youth justice policy formation has been overtly politicized. Three successive New
Labour governments have applied a ‘blizzard of initiatives, crackdowns and targets’
(Neather, 2004: 11); a ‘toughening up [of] every aspect of the criminal justice system’
(Blair, 2004: 6) introduced via innumerable policy statements (Jones, 2002) and
ultimately implemented through statute. Far-reaching and deep-cutting reforms have
been underpinned by a substantial corpus of new legislation including: the Crime and
Disorder Act 1998; the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999; the Criminal Justice and
Court Services Act 2000; the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000; the Criminal
Justice and Police Act 2001; the Police Reform Act 2002; the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003;
the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Beyond
an apparent political obsession with being ‘tough on crime’and adhering to a ‘no more
excuses’agenda (Home Office, 1997), it is difficult to identify any consistent rationale
and/or philosophical core to the reforming zeal. A ‘new’rhetoric of youth crime
prevention, restoration and social inclusion is uncomfortably located alongside the
targeting of ‘non-offenders’as well as ‘offenders’within formal systems of justice
(criminalization), an increasing tendency to responsibilize children, their families and
communities, and a reliance on an expanding control apparatus to ‘manage’poverty,
structural disadvantage and systemic inequality. In the final analysis, however, the
defining hallmark of contemporary youth justice in England and Wales is a ‘new
punitiveness’(Goldson, 2002; Pratt et al., 2005), characterized by rates of child
imprisonment significantly exceeding those found in most other industrialized
democratic countries in the world (Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, 2004).
The interventionist, criminalizing, retributive and ultimately incarcerative dimensions
of the new youth justice in England and Wales have attracted widespread critique on
a range of grounds from: academic researchers (see for example: Fionda, 2005;
Goldson, 2000b; Muncie, 2004; Pitts, 2001; Smith, 2003; Squires and Stephen, 2005);
major statutory commissions and inspectorates (see for example: Audit Commission,
2004; Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2005; Social Services Inspectorate et
al., 2002); parliamentary committees (see for example: House of Commons Committee
of Public Accounts, 2004; House of Lords House of Commons Joint Committee on
Human Rights, 2003); crime reduction and penal reform organizations (see for example:
Nacro, 2003 and 2005; the Howard League, 2005) and children’s rights and child
welfare agencies (see for example: Children’s Rights Alliance for England, 2002;
Monaghan et al., 2003). Furthermore, key aspects of youth justice policy have been
successfully challenged in the courts, including an action in 2005 brought by a
15-year-old boy from Richmond, London, regarding the legality of imposing curfews
on children under the age of 16 –a power granted to the police by provisions of the
Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 (Carson, 2005). An earlier action for judicial review,
Youth Justice 6(2)92
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