Young offending: towards a radical/critical social policy

Abstract

Young offending is perceived as a serious social problem and always remains near the top of the political agenda. Over the post-war years, policy and practice moved from welfare/treatment towards punishment as the key for addressing the problem, culminating in New Labour's Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Thereafter there was increasing concern about antisocial behaviour. But is this an appropriate response? My research with young offenders suggested that it is not, and here, drawing on some of their views, I argue for a more radical/critical social policy based on equality and redistribution. Such steps towards an emancipatory project may seem utopian in the current political, economic and ideological climate dominated by global capitalism, but I argue that it is the way forward.

Keywords:

• welfare/treatment
• punishment
• equality
• redistribution
• emancipation

Notes

1. For example, Blair's New Labour referred to a third way that differs from the old left and Thatcher's new right, but, as Powell (2000) notes, it is neither distinctive nor new, leaning to the Thatcherite right and its reworking of relationships between politics, society and economy, rather than the centre or centre-left.

2. Some argue that it does not make much sense to talk of youth justice in terms of welfare/treatment or punishment (Muncie 1998, 1999a, 2006). Instead a more corporatist or managerialist strategy has developed, characterized by administrative decision making, greater sentencing diversity, the construction of sentencing packages, centralization of authority and coordination of policy, the growing involvement of non-judicial agencies, and high levels of containment and control in many sentencing packages. The key players are Youth Offending Teams, and the aim is to deliver neither welfare/treatment nor punishment but the most cost-effective and efficient way of managing young offenders. Offending is defined in technical terms, while political and moral debates about the causes of offending and purpose of intervention are shifted to the sidelines. Youth justice, the argument continues, has been reconceptualized as young offending management services, with a hard core locked up while an expanding range of statutory and voluntary community-based agencies devise non-custodial sentences which focus on tougher programmes of control, punishment, reparation, shaming and admission of responsibility. My response, however, is that although this may well describe the current situation, the last sentence in particular indicates that the punishment model continues to dominate. Muncie (1999b) does in fact acknowledge that the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 amounts to ‘an amalgam of “get tough” authoritarian [or, one could add, punishment orientated] measures’ (p. 169). Indeed, the continued relevance of welfare/treatment and punishment to developments in not only England and Wales, but also many Western countries more generally, is shown by Hill et al. (2007).

3. It is also worth emphasizing that it is not only young people who are now subject to the punishment model, this being reflected by developments in relation to the Probation Service over recent decades (e.g. McIvor and Raynor 2007).

4. In fact, there was a two-thirds reduction in the numbers of prosecutions of young people, and the number of custodial sentences fell by almost three-quarters in the period 1981–91 (Children's Rights Development Unit 1994). As Farrington and Langan (1992) note, one factor was social workers’ use of system management strategies, including the use of diversion from court by cautioning, to keep young people out of the youth justice system wherever possible, together with their development of intensive community alternatives to incarceration. This ‘justice model’ was a result of the work of Thorpe and his colleagues at Lancaster University (Thorpe et al. 1980) and became the ‘new orthodoxy’ (Pitts 1988, Blagg and Smith 1989, Smith 1995). A young person's offence became the focus of, and rationale for, intervention rather than the young person themselves. This can be seen as a ‘soft’ punishment approach involving, for example, offence-focused work with young offenders, reparation for misdeeds, and mediation between young offenders and victims. So successful was this work seen to be that the Home Office (1988) intended to transfer lessons from youth justice to policies in relation to offenders generally. As most young offenders grow out of crime as they mature, they need help and encouragement to become law-abiding, with even a short spell in custody likely to have deleterious effects by confirming them as criminals, particularly as they learn skills from other offenders. It is a pity this progressive view did not hold sway.

5. New Labour sees paid work as being the only way of becoming ‘included’, of being a valued and responsible citizen. One hesitates to make the comparison, but, arguably, Hitler had similar views: the Auschwitz motto, borrowed from Dachau, was ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – ‘Work makes you free’. I will let the reader make of this analogy what they will. Even so, it is worth noting that we are now in a society in which the imperative seems to be ‘to live to work’ rather than (surely how things should be) ‘working to live’.

6. True citizenship has to go much further than New Labour and its talk of such as active, empowered and responsible citizenship. This neglects the notion of the ‘abandoned citizen’ resulting from ‘the dismantling of the protections and defences constructed in post-war welfare capitalism against the rigours, vagaries, demands and inequities of the market and the unconstrained powers of capital’ (Clarke 2005, p. 452).