The Government of Youth: Disorder and Dependence?
| Author | Barry Vaughan |
| Published date | 01 September 2000 |
| Date | 01 September 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900302 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE GOVERNMENT OF YOUTH:
DISORDER AND DEPENDENCE?
BARRY VAUGHAN
Irish Penal Reform Trust, Dublin, Ireland
ABSTRACT
This article is concerned with the Crime and Disorder Act, introduced by the Labour
government in England & Wales. The Act’s central aim is the reduction of crime and
disorder within local communities, and young people are seen as the main locus of
disorder. A range of new sanctions is provided to correct the behaviour of young
people. The Act has been widely castigated for continuing the intolerance of the
previous Conservative administration and showing scant awareness of the needs of
young people. Young people are maintained in a subordinate position vis-à-vis society
and the paternalistic nature of juvenile justice is reaffirmed. Such an interpretation
would blind one to the innovations within the Act; drawing on the governmentality
literature, it is suggested that youths are being encouraged to take greater responsi-
bility for their actions and to attach themselves to an emotional community. The
demise of a unitary notion of society means that young people must become active
citizens, taking charge of their lives in accordance with the wishes of others; those
who do not will bear the brunt of the coercion that is so evident within the Act.
INTRODUCTION
Don’t be surprised if the penalties are tougher when you have been given the
opportunities but don’t take them. (Tony Blair, 13 June 1997)
FOR THOSE interested in the criminal justice system in the United
Kingdom, the accession of the Labour party into power in 1997 was
greeted with mixed emotions. It was hoped that the Labour govern-
ment would be less concerned to stoke the fires of populist punitiveness than
the previous Conservative administration; yet it was feared that the Labour
party would be unwilling to desist from the habit of talking and acting tough
on crime that it had acquired in opposition, in a bid to match the Conserva-
tives on law and order prior to the general election in 1997.
When the Labour party introduced its showpiece legislation for the
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criminal justice system, the Crime and Disorder Act (CDA), which was
passed in the summer of 1998, many thought that their worst fears had been
realized. The CDA is an amalgam of different themes: community crime pre-
vention, whereby local police forces are placed under an obligation to reduce
crime and disorder in their area; youthful offending, whereby young people
are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions; and sexual offending,
whereby offenders must register with a local police force. The overall ration-
ale is the prevention of crime and reduction of disorder by local communi-
ties and agencies that must be monitored and evaluated by local government.
Some commentators believe that the CDA points up a narrow approach to
crime prevention which elevates that which is measurable over more unquan-
tifiable outcomes (Crawford, 1998); others are critical of how the CDA stig-
matizes and excludes already vulnerable groups, such as young people
(Muncie, 1999; Walsh, 1999), and seeks to present them as a ready scapegoat
for many of the ills that communities may be enduring. The combination of
both of these perspectives may seem uneasy bedfellows: one advocating a dis-
passionate approach that is concerned with pragmatic efficiency; the other
pandering to the fretful passions of the public (Brownlee, 1998).
It is possible to interpret the CDA as continuing the rightward tilt of the
Labour party, seeking to assuage mythical middle England, as part of the in-
exorable ‘great moving right show’, initiated by the Conservatives under
Margaret Thatcher. However, I believe that this would blind one to the real
innovations within the CDA, namely that it might represent a real shift in the
way youth are regulated and governed. There may be a move away from a
paternalistic model of regulation that stresses the essential passivity of youth
toward the cultivation of a more active subjectivity within young people who
will be required to take more responsibility for their lives. Thus rather than
seeing the CDA as part of some tactical exercise in vote getting, it may be
more apposite to see it as a strategic shift in government, in the sense that
Michel Foucault (1991) intended, of discipline concerned with the conduct
of citizens.
Of course, the Labour government would like to argue that its adminis-
tration does embody a new mode of government, namely the Third Way,
which seeks to steer between the putative faults of state socialism and market
individualism and to renew social democracy (Giddens, 1998). This has been
derided for its vacuity but as Rose (1999) recognizes, it is offering something
more than negative prescriptions. Community, rather than society, is the
space in which conduct is regulated: community connotes emotional attach-
ment so that social problems are seen in terms of people being sundered from
appropriate ‘webs of belonging’. The Labour government sees itself more and
more as a facilitator which will encourage people to attach themselves to pos-
itions of responsibility within society rather than directly providing roles for
people, social intervention as opposed to social engineering (Straw, 1998).
This is the thrust of Labour’s ‘welfare to work’ policy, where Labour will
provide benefits as long as people take up whatever position is being offered.
The implication is that social rights are becoming more conditional as they
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