This article considers the trajectory of children from state care to imprisonment in relation to 105 New Zealanders who spent time in residential care between the 1950s and 1990s. Following previous research, the article demonstrates how children in state care are far more likely to progress into prisons as a result of maltreatment, multiple care placements, damaging residential cultures, social disadvantages and psychological harms, as well as differential treatment in the criminal justice system. This New Zealand research also shows how the interconnected and long-standing processes of victimization and criminalization increase the likelihood of a child transitioning from care to custody.
This article outlines a social-ecological approach to understanding young people’s prolific offending and effective youth justice responses to it. Seeing young people through the lens of interactions and relationships – with family, peers, community and the broader socio-cultural-political context – gives insight into the type of interventions that can most effectively disrupt their offending and enhance their wellbeing. These insights have implications for the way in which youth offending teams engage with young people, in their social context, to bring about positive change in their lives. Effective interventions, we argue, focus on engaging young people in normalising relationships, over time.
In the light of recent disciplinary reform in United States and United Kingdom schools, academic attention has increasingly focused on school punishment. Drawing on interviews with school staff in alternative and mainstream schools in the United States and the United Kingdom, we highlight differences in understandings and practices of school discipline. We argue that, in both countries, there is a mismatch between mainstream schools and alternative schools regarding approaches to punishment, techniques employed to manage student behaviour and supports given to students. While these disparities mirror what one would expect based on the distinct institutional arrangements and organizational priorities of alternative and mainstream schools, they pose particular problems for children transitioning between the two types of school. In this article, we raise a series of questions about the impact of these mismatches on children’s experiences and the potential for school disciplinary reform to achieve lasting results.
Restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence measures have recently been introduced into youth justice systems. As gatekeepers to these measures, Children’s Court magistrates play a crucial role in their success. However, little research has been undertaken on magistrates’ views of these measures. This article addresses this gap by presenting results of interviews undertaken with Children’s Court magistrates in New South Wales, Australia. Our research suggests that magistrates are enthusiastic about the philosophy of both restorative and therapeutic measures, but are reluctant to embrace them if they consider them under-resourced, poorly understood and/or poorly implemented. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Māori youth are over-represented within the New Zealand criminal justice system. Māori youth comprise 60 per cent of the total youth apprehensions and represent only 20 per cent of New Zealand’s youth population. This qualitative study focuses on the narratives of six young Māori men and women about their criminal histories, and how their engagement in a re-education initiative – the Youth Guarantee policy – impacted upon their criminal activity. Although the study provided evidence that is congruent with assumptions about the education–crime relationship, the participants’ narratives implied that the impact the Youth Guarantee had on Māori youth offending could be attributed to a number of proxy impacts that they received as a result of their re-engagement in the open-door practices of one provider’s Youth Guarantee–funded programme.
The Victorian Children Youth and Families Act 2005 authorises the detention of children aged 10–17 years in Secure Welfare Services (SWS) if there is a substantial and immediate risk of harm. Children are generally on protection orders and administratively detained by the Department of Human Services. In 2014, the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Security Measures) Bill 2013 was passed uncontested in parliament. It codifies existing SWS practices including searches, seizure of property, use of force and seclusion. The Security Measures Bill and associated government discourse construct children as risk and security as a necessary precursor to meeting their welfare needs. These conceptualisations problematise the safeguarding of children’s rights.
Young people in custody are likely to reoffend, questioning current resettlement practice. In Wales, the Resettlement Broker Project was established to address this, beginning by assessing current practice. The ensuing data set of interviews with young people from North Wales serving sentence in England was analysed regarding custody and resettlement experiences. Resettlement and desistance literature provided a strong basis for effective working; the slowness of the English and Welsh youth justice system to truly incorporate desistance thinking means that these young people missed a potentially beneficial working ethos, centred on personal goals and individual strengths, indicating the need for radical change.
Reflecting developments in the broader penological realm, accounts have been advanced over the last number of decades about a ‘punitive turn’ in the youth justice systems of Western democracies. Against the background of this work, this project seeks to identify convergent and divergent trends in the youth justice systems of England, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as the rationalities and discourses animating these. The results lend support to research emphasising the continued salience of national, regional and local factors on penal outcomes but also suggest the need to steer an analytical path somewhere between nomothetic (convergent) and idiographic (divergent) accounts.
This study concerns the incidence and aetiology of breach of youth community sentences. A between-groups archival study compared those who breached with those who did not, on socio-demographic and criminogenic factors. Breachers were a minority, likely to breach repeatedly and were similar to those who re-offended. Whether they breach or re-offend may depend on something other than the characteristics of the Order and the young person’s situation. Youth Justice Professionals should be mindful of the identified areas of need and responsivity when considering compliance.
The criminalisation of young people in response to children’s residential, home-based challenging behaviour remains a persistent problem in the United Kingdom. This article presents research which, through a series of semi-structured interviews and a focus group with professionals from the care and youth justice systems, sought to gain insights into why this might be the case. It was concluded that there is a need to empower residential staff; bring greater objectivity into decision-making processes and raise awareness of how system contact can impact children’s self-perception, and future prospects.
Principles of advanced liberal youth justice policy and practice have infiltrated several jurisdictions. Reflective of these developments, this article contends that Irish youth crime prevention and diversion policy has been dominated by three central rationalities: New Public Management, deficit-based explanations of young people’s behaviour and the prioritising of behaviourist types of interventions with young people. To illustrate this argument, the article analyses the Agenda of Change reform process of the multi-agency Garda Youth Diversion Projects. Paying close attention to the discursive nature of policy texts and associated technologies of government, it is suggested that advanced liberal discourses are productive of a distinctive field of youth justice work.
In Scotland, the Whole System Approach to preventing and reducing offending includes the provision of court support for young people under 18 years. This article outlines the insights from an evaluation of one Scottish local authority’s support service. Semi-structured interviews conducted with 26 participants were combined with observation of interactions between support workers and young people, with some additional follow-up statistical analysis of key outcomes. The insights suggest that the court support helped to reassure young people and make them more aware of their rights. It helped many young people to avoid receiving custodial sentences, meet bail conditions, reflect upon their offending behaviour and begin to make alternative choices.
Despite governmental and cultural differences, many jurisdictions are experiencing common tensions between care and control within juvenile justice. The study–work school is an early intervention measure in China aiming at child protection and crime prevention. Relying on empirical data, this article seeks to explore some characteristics of the study–work school, the role it plays and the challenges facing it. It is hoped that the findings here will inform local policy and practice, make contributions to the increasing international body of literature on comparative juvenile justice studies and help a better understanding of the implementation of global policy in local settings.
A national Swedish project was followed in 12 municipalities aimed at youth aged 15–20 years. Neither police nor social services systematically used the indicators based on criminological research and proposed by national authorities. The police and social services thought they had more contemporary and holistic intuitive knowledge than any systematic indicators could provide. Despite implementation difficulties, the project was described as a success at the political level and widely dispersed. The specific and systematic image of early indicators provided momentum at the policy level. The local authorities welcomed the opportunity to reach a group considered difficult to manage.