Youth Custody, Resettlement and the Right to Social Justice
| Date | 01 December 2011 |
| Author | Patricia Gray |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225411420529 |
| Published date | 01 December 2011 |
420529YJJXXX10.1177/1473225411420529GrayYouth Justice
Article
Youth Justice
11(3) 235 –249
Youth Custody, Resettlement and
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225411420529
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Patricia Gray
Abstract
Rapid increases in rates of youth custody until quite recently, and breaches of human rights inside institutions
for young offenders in England and Wales, have been a repeated source of criticism among youth justice
commentators. However, this article focuses on the issue of resettlement to argue that current attempts
to improve resettlement provision for young people leaving custody are beset with failure because of the
way the concept of resettlement has been interpreted by policy makers. Instead of acknowledging broader
structural constraints arising from poverty and socio-economic disadvantage, young people’s social needs
on release from custody have been individualized and equated with correcting perceived personal deficits.
The end result is that the concept of resettlement has been criminalized, as young people’s needs on leaving
custody have been framed in a discourse of individual pathology and responsibilization. The article concludes
by considering how young people’s resettlement needs could be advanced through the development of a
transformative rights based approach which, while framed around the 1989 United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child, is informed by social justice ideals.
Keywords
individualization, resettlement, social justice, structural constraints, transformative
Introduction: Youth Custody in the Context of International
Human Rights
In recent years it has become commonplace to employ standards laid out in international
agreements, such as the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
(UNCRC),1 as benchmarks to assess the extent to which youth justice policy and practice
breach the fundamental human rights of young people below the age of 18 years
(Commissioner for Human Rights, 2009; Convery et al., 2008; CRAE, 2009; Kilkelly,
2008). According to the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 2008) which moni-
tors the implementation of the Convention, the use of custody for young offenders in
England and Wales2 – the subject of this article – fails on at least three counts to comply
Corresponding author:
Dr Patricia Gray, Plymouth Law School, University of Plymouth, 20 Portland Villas, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon,
England PL4 8AA, UK.
Email: P.Gray@plymouth.ac.uk
236
Youth Justice 11(3)
with its standards and other UN Rules and Guidelines (see Hazel, 2008 for a detailed
discussion of these). The first criticism3 is that the imprisonment of children in England
and Wales is not being ‘applied as a measure of last resort’ and is not ‘for the shortest
period of time’ (CRC, 2008: 19). The politicization of youth crime and the demonization
of young offenders since the beginning of the 1990s legitimated a ‘punitive turn’ in youth
justice (Muncie, 2008), marked by a 90 per cent increase in the number of young people
(aged 10−17 years) sentenced to custody between 1992 and 2002 (Bateman, 2005).
Although this increase has since partially fallen back, the recent improvement has been
countered by an increase in the average length of a custodial sentence (Ministry of Justice,
2011a). The second criticism targets the treatment children receive while in custody. The
CRC (2008: 9), in line with the Convention, argues that they should be protected from all
forms of physical and mental abuse and negligence.4 Yet reports from organizations mon-
itoring children’s rights continue to condemn the inhumane and degrading way incarcer-
ated juveniles are treated inside penal custody, particularly through the use of painful
physical restraints (Goldson, 2009; Goldson and Coles, 2009; Howard League, 2009;
Prison Reform Trust, 2010).
However, this article will focus on a third area in which custody in England and Wales
breaches the Convention by examining resettlement provision for young offenders upon
their release from Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) – an area often given less attention
by children’s rights commentators. Article 3 of the Convention states that in all proceed-
ings relating to young people in conflict with the law ‘the best interests of the child shall
be a primary consideration’.5 The concept of protecting the ‘child’s best interests’ is open
to considerable interpretation but according to the CRC (2007) and the Commissioner for
Human Rights (2009) this shall be understood to mean that the welfare or well-being of
the child should be paramount during the resettlement process. Over the last few years the
Youth Justice Board and Prison Service have set in place several new initiatives and
expanded resources to strengthen and improve welfare provision for young offenders
leaving custody (Morgan, 2009; Muncie, 2004/2009). However, in this article I will argue
that most of these initiatives have had only limited success in meeting the resettlement
needs of young offenders. Several factors have been put forward to explain this lack of
success. But I will contend that the main explanation rests in the way policy makers have
framed the concept of resettlement as one of encouraging young offenders to take respon-
sibility to address resettlement needs on their own account, while giving inadequate recog-
nition, let alone tangible help, to addressing the structural constraints that limit their choices
and actions. In conclusion I will consider how the resettlement needs of young offenders
could be more successfully advanced through the development of a ‘transformative’ rights
based approach.
Resettlement and the Every Child Matters Agenda
A multitude of research studies have documented the high levels of personal and socio-
economic disadvantage experienced by young people which are likely to undermine their
motivation to successfully resettle in the community upon release from custody and which
Gray
237
mean that they are disproportionately likely to be among the most socially excluded
(Morgan, 2009). Levitas and colleagues define social exclusion as:
… a complex and multi-dimensional process. It involves the lack or denial of resources, rights,
goods and services, and the inability to participate in the normal relationships and activities,
available to the majority of people in a society, whether in economic, social, cultural or political
arenas. It affects both the quality of life of individuals and the equity and cohesion of society as
a whole. (Levitas et al., 2007: 25)
Based on this definition Levitas et al. (2007) went on to develop the Bristol Social
Exclusion Matrix (B-SEM) as a conceptual tool to measure social exclusion. This matrix
identifies ‘resources’, ‘participation’ and ‘quality of life’ as the three main dimensions of
social exclusion. ‘Resources’ include both economic and social resources such as those
generated from income and family or interpersonal support networks. While ‘participa-
tion’ relates to involvement in employment, education and training as well as other social
and political activities, ‘quality of life’ refers to concerns about health and general emo-
tional well-being. Applying the B-SEM to Jacobson et al.’s (2010) profile of young people
in custody clearly illustrates the extent to which and in what ways this group are at height-
ened risk of being socially excluded.
Turning first to ‘resources’, Jacobson et al.’s (2010) research found that half of young
people in custody lived in deprived households (where members were often dependent
on benefits and accommodation was overcrowded and lacked basic amenities), three-
quarters had absent fathers and a third absent mothers, and nearly 40 per cent had been on
the child protection register and/or had experienced abuse or neglect. ‘Participation’ was
characterized by educational disaffection, detachment and underachievement, with just
over half having truanted from school, a quarter having difficulties with literacy and/or
numeracy and nearly half having been excluded from school. Finally in terms of ‘quality
of life’, 17 per cent had a formal diagnosis of emotional or mental health difficulties, 11
per cent had attempted suicide and 20 per cent had self harmed. Further evidence of poor
‘quality of life’ outcomes can be found in a study of the experiences of 15 to 18 year olds
in custody conducted by the Youth Justice Board and HM Inspectorate of Prisons (Cripps,
2010) where 23 per cent of young men and 38 per cent of young women reported emo-
tional or mental health problems. But perhaps the most disheartening finding of Jacobson
et al.’s (2010: 72) research was the extent to which young people in custody were exposed
to multiple and overlapping types of disadvantage as evidenced by the fact that the aver-
age child had at least 7.4 disadvantage factors.
Research on why young people become motivated to stop offending suggests that
desistance is a complex, interactional process (McNeill, 2006) which results from the
simultaneous interplay of subjective changes in how they perceive their life chances and
objective changes in their social situation (Farrall and Calverley, 2006; Webster et al.,
2006). However young people’s choices and abilities to change are often limited by their
immediate socio-economic...
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