Shifting sands: The reconfiguration of neoliberal youth penality
| Author | Roger Smith,Patricia Gray |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619872262 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619872262
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(2) 304 –324
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619872262
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Shifting sands: The
reconfiguration of neoliberal
youth penality
Patricia Gray
University of Plymouth, UK
Roger Smith
Durham University, UK
Abstract
This article begins by tracing the emergence of ‘therapeutic surveillance’ as a new
formula for neoliberal disciplinary power. It maps and interrogates the reconfiguration
of a hybrid array of neoliberal rationalities and technologies for the penal governance of
young people who offend. It then engages with the challenges posed by critical realists
to the governmentality position by questioning how human agency can contest, subvert
and resist the dystopian reach of ‘therapeutic surveillance’ in action. While ‘therapeutic
surveillance’ is steeped in a disciplinary logic of individualization and responsibilization,
we argue that it also opens the space for a more transformative youth penality to be
articulated; one which challenges the constraints of structural disadvantage in the pursuit
of social justice. The article concludes by arguing that newly emerging youth justice
configurations which have appeared in response to dramatic cuts in public spending
offer a plausible or transformative challenge to the regulatory logic of neoliberal youth
penality.
Keywords
Critical realism, governmentality, neoliberal youth penality, strategic-relational,
therapeutic surveillance, transformative social justice
Corresponding author:
Patricia Gray, School of Law, Criminology and Government, University of Plymouth, 20 Drake Circus,
Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, UK.
Email: pgray@plymouth.ac.uk
872262TCR0010.1177/1362480619872262Theoretical CriminologyGray and Smith
research-article2019
Article
Gray and Smith 305
Introduction: Times are changing and the limitations of
dystopian accounts of penality
The study of penality focuses on the complexities of how socio-political, economic and
cultural forces interact and shape penal practices (Garland, 2013). The rise to promi-
nence in the 21st century of neoliberal politico-economic strategies, epitomized by eco-
nomic deregulation, the disciplines of managerialism and actuarialism, and the retraction
of the welfare state, has had a profound impact on penality (Reiner, 2017). This is
reflected in youth justice policy and practice in England and Wales1 where in the last
decade there has been a marked reduction in both the number of first-time entrants and
the rate of youth custody.2 These changes have occurred in a climate of financial auster-
ity which has seen severe cuts in public spending, accompanied by a reduction in central-
ized performance targets and the localization of youth justice services (Bateman, 2017).
This article seeks to interrogate, from two standpoints, the implications of such a
‘substantial penal downsizing in the youth justice sphere’ (Cunneen et al., 2018: 406).
First, what do these changes suggest to us about the micro dynamics of penal practices;
and, second and more precisely, what do they tell us about youth penality in neoliberal
times? In particular, how does the governance project of the neoliberal state adapt to
market driven processes of withdrawal, restructuring and ‘hollowing out’, while still
seeking to maintain discipline and control? The decision to focus on the theorization
of ‘youth penality’ and not ‘youth justice’ is informed by Phoenix’s (2016) criticisms
of the latter for being too narrow and limiting. The concept of youth justice, according
to Phoenix, simply offers a self-referential critique of existing policy and practice in
relation to youth crime, geared towards reform rather than transformation. Like
Phoenix, we believe that a theoretical framework centred on the concept of youth
penality offers a more sophisticated, critical and realistic tool for analysing young
people’s penal experiences and the broad array of powerful socio-political and eco-
nomic forces that affect them. It also ‘provides the platform for a new youth penal poli-
tics’ to emerge which seeks to challenge and transform ‘the unjust nature of the youth
penal realm’ (Phoenix, 2016: 135).
Debates about neoliberal penality have been significantly influenced by the work of
Loïc Wacquant. For Wacquant (2009) the neoliberal state is essentially a penal state
which has deployed social and criminal justice policies to clean up the horrors of
‘advanced marginality’ or the heightened levels of marginalization and social exclusion
generated by its divisive socio-economic strategies of market deregulation and welfare
cuts. The centrepiece of neoliberal statecraft is a complex mix of ‘welfare’ and ‘prison-
fare’ programmes with the former directed at the ‘penalization of poverty’ or the disci-
plining of the poor into accepting precarious low paid work and the latter relating to the
‘punitive turn’ or the way in which the rapid expansion of imprisonment has been used
not as a reaction to crime but to regulate and warehouse marginalized and potentially
disruptive social groups. This aspect of Wacquant’s argument is relevant to us because
the UK has recently been experiencing a particularly rapid process of restructuring,
driven by ‘austerity’, which poses the same challenge to those state agencies and func-
tions concerned with maintaining control and managing problematic populations. Our
focus is on the specific consequences of the resultant process of reimagining and
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