The Social Organization of Access to Justice for Youth in ‘Unsafe’ Urban Neighbourhoods
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917703179 |
| Author | Naomi Nichols |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The Social Organization
of Access to Justice for
Youth in ‘Unsafe’ Urban
Neighbourhoods
Naomi Nichols
McGill University, Canada
Abstract
Drawing on the feminist sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this
article reveals how young people in a designated neighbourhood improvement area
in Toronto, Canada, experience reduced access to justice. Young people’s stories
about their interactions with the police in their neighbourhood ground an analysis
of the dispersal of justice in large urban centres as shaped by and constitutive of
the social relations of race, gender and class. While the research proceeds from
young people’s knowledge of their work and lives, the foci of analysis are the
objectified forms of thought and action that produce the individual accounts young
people share. The research finds that young people’s experiences of diminished
relational fairness in their encounters with the police reduce the degree to which
they expect full and equal access to other juridical and administrative public
institutions and processes. Ultimately, the state’s efforts to produce and manage
public safety, as a bureaucratic phenomenon, undermines embodied experiences of
safety and access to justice for young people who live in economically dis-
advantaged and racialized urban neighbourhoods.
Keywords
Access to justice, institutional ethnography, police, safety, urban neighbourhoods,
youth
Corresponding author:
Naomi Nichols, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, McGill University,
3700 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1Y2, Canada.
Email: naomi.nichols@mcgill.ca
Social & Legal Studies
2018, Vol. 27(1) 79–96
ªThe Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663917703179
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This article illuminates how young people’s experiences of procedural and relational
fairness on the frontlines of the criminal legal system – that is, during everyday inter-
actions with the police – shape their experiences and interpretations of race and class-
based patterns of exclusion more broadly. Research proceeds from young people’s
knowledge of their work and lives; the analytic focus is the social or ganization of
legal and bureaucratic processes, which shape inequalities of access to public sector
resources and the distribution of punishments. By connecting the everyday encounters
young people have with police in parks, libraries and community centres, to the
repeated stop-and-search procedures they experience on their bicycles, their observa-
tions of police raids in their neighbourhoods, their fear when filing police reports and
the messages they receive from the adults who care about their safety, the research
demonstrates how participants experience reduced access to justice across public sec-
tor contexts. Findings illuminate how young people come to know that Black and
Brown youth will not experience equal treatment at the frontlines of the criminal legal
system.
Within bureaucratically organized states, governing outcomes are systematically pro-
duced as part of a politico-institutional regime, rather than a single institutional body
(Hallsworth, 2006; Smith GW, 1990). Much like education, child protection and other
frontline public sector interventions, policing is coordinated with other administrative
and juridicalmediations of everyday life in contemporary cities(Hallsworth, 2006; Miller
and Rose, 2008). In order to produce an empirical analysis of institutional racism and
exclusion, therefore, one must train a sociological lens across political institutional
settings, paying attention to the coordination of conduct and thought across time and
space. As an institutional ethnographer, one begins such an investigation in the actual
conditions of people’s lives.
Grounded in young people’s own accounts of their lives and experiences, this article
explicates how public sector interventions – implemented in the name of community
safety – shape structural processes of exclusion operating within and through public
institutions. By focusing on the textual mediation of young people’s engagements with
police, I show how policing practices in racialized and economically disadvantaged
urban neighbourhoods produce young people’s diminished faith in the criminal legal
system and the public sector more broadly. An investigation that begins with the insti-
tutional and policy-mediated practices of actual people – in this case, young people
living in an institutionally designated vulnerable urban neighbourhood or a neighbour-
hood improvement area (NIA) and the police who work there – reveals how it happens
that racialized young people experience reduced access to justice across interconnected
institutional settings.
This article is the outcome of a larger study on community and neighbourhood
safety – Schools, Safety and the Urban Neighbourhood (2013–2018). Other articles
produced from this research focused on other institutionally mediated social rela-
tions, shaping young people’s experiences of safety and inclusion in the NIAs,
where this research occurred. For example, one article focused on the production
and use of institutional evidence in municipalities, the courts, policing and schools
to show how young people learn that their own knowledge of their lives and
experiences will be discounted, institutionally (Nichols, forthcoming). Another
80 Social & Legal Studies 27(1)
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