The Lost Key: Secure Accommodation and Juvenile Crime: An English and Welsh Perspective
| Author | Noel Timms,Robert Harris |
| Published date | 01 December 1993 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486589302600304 |
| Date | 01 December 1993 |
AUST
&
NZ
JOURNAL
OF
CRIMINOLOGY
(December
1993) 26 (219-231)
THE
LOST KEY:
SECURE ACCOMMODATION AND JUVENILE CRIME:
AN ENGLISH AND WELSH PERSPECTIVE
Robert
Harris and Noel Timms'
219
This paper discusses aspects
of
a study
of
children in secure accommodation conducted in the
United Kingdom in the late 1980s. Secure accommodation is analysed as an ambiguous disposal
designed to hold both offenders
and
other youngsters causing concern. Reflecting a westerncultural
tendency to assume the existence
of
atechnical solution to every problem, professionalresponses to
the uncertainty accompanying ambiguity include the pursuit
of
more knowledge to identify the
"key" to the problems the youngsters present.
Some
implications
of
this approach for the youngsters
themselves are discussed,
and
it is suggested that rather than focussing predominantly on system
input, reformist endeavour might concentrate on what children have to do to be discharged.
Introduction: Secure Accommodation in England
and
Wales
In England and Wales, responsibility for managing
"problem"
children is divided
between national government (which has responsibility for penal custody) and local
authorities (whose powers
are
in the field of child welfare).
Hence
while central
government is predominantly concerned with enforcing judicial sanctions against
offenders, local authorities engage with
the
rather
more ambiguous considerations
surrounding children deemed, in
the
language of English
and
Welsh law, to be
"in
need of care
or
protection".
The
part
of this latter system which deals with the most
intractable youngsters is called secure accommodation. Because it involves locking
them up in their own interests, it raises difficult but fundamental issues.
This
paper
presents some theoretical dimensions of a large scale empirical study
of secure accommodation commissioned by the British Government and undertaken
in the late 1980s.
The
study is
reported
more fully in book form (Harris and Timms
1993) and some
of
the
complexities uncovered
are
manifest in
the
book's subtitle,
Between Hospital
and
Prison or Thereabouts, based on a respondent's answer to the
question
"What
in your view is secure accommodation?"
Though conducted in England and Wales (child welfare in Scotland and Northern
Ireland being subject to different legislative arrangements)
the
study raises a
number of issues likely to be
of
interest in Australia and New
Zealand,
where a lively
debate about juvenile justice has long featured in academic journals.
The
study as a
whole challenges
the
confidence of justice theorists
that
rewording statute will lead
to substantial differences in practice. It also questions the emphasis
characteristically placed by reformers on keeping youngsters
out
of security in the
first place, suggesting
that
restricting the length of stay may be a more attainable
objective. This paper, while touching on these points, concentrates on
demonstrating the implications for children in secure accommodation of the belief,
widespread in western culture,
that
there
is a "key" to most problems which, once
discovered, will unlock asatisfactory solution. First, however, we etch the
background to
and
nature
of secure accommodation.
*
Robert
Harris
is
Professor
of Social
Work
in the University of Hull,
England;
Noel
Timms
is Professor
Emeritus
of the University of Leicester,
England.
Correspondence
and
requests
for offprints
should
be
sent
to
the
first
author
at
the
Department
of Social Policy and Professional Studies, University of Hull,
Hull
HU6
7RX,
England.
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