(Custodial) spaces to grow? Adolescent development during custodial transitions

ABSTRACT

Drawing on empirical data from two individual research projects, this paper extends the literature on child and youth incarceration and offers a previously unexplored analysis of experiences and transitions through institutional environments for young people. Different penal environments have different operational practices and treatment according to arbitrary age-determined constructions of childhood, youth and young adulthood, evidenced by decreasing safeguards. This article demonstrates the reduction of operative and supportive investment in those held, and the shifting perception from children that require ‘training’ to young people and young adults who are managed and whose particular needs are neglected. The arbitrary nature of transitions presents a paradox between developmental maturity as an individualistic ongoing process and arbitrary age-determined transitions. As such, it is argued that there should be a more developmental approach to caring for young people across penal environments which accounts for their ongoing maturity and complex needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• transition
• young adulthood
• imprisonment
• maturity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jennifer Turner’s empirical data presented in this paper was funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award ‘Therapeutic Environments for Youth Custody’ at the University of Birmingham, for which Dominique Moran was PI. This was in conjunction with an ESRC-funded comparative project in the UK and Nordic region in 2015/16 investigating how penal aims and philosophies (that is, what prison is ‘for’) are expressed in design of new prisons (completed in or after 2010); and how those prisons are experienced by prisoners and staff. ESRC Standard Grant ES/K011081/1: 01/01/2014-30/06/2017, ‘“Fear-suffused environments” or potential to rehabilitate? Prison architecture, design and technology and the lived experience of carceral spaces’. The PI was Yvonne Jewkes and Co-I was Dominique Moran. The data is used here with the agreement of and thanks to Moran and Jewkes.

2 Jayne Price’s data comes from her PhD research ‘exploring pathways and transitions between the juvenile secure estate and young adult/adult estate’ conducted at the University of Liverpool, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) CASE studentship (ES/J500094/1) and received in kind contribution from HMI of Prisons. The primary data was collected between April 2017 and March 2018. As the research was conducted in YOIs which only hold males, this research does not include the experiences of females.

3 In total, 27 interviews were conducted with young people for this research. One participant was released before their post-transition interview could be conducted.

4 Not all males will transition into a YOI from an STC. The guidance dictates that consideration should be made to the most beneficial option for the individual (YJB 2018) although our analysis here disputes whether this is realised in practice.

5 All the young people interviewed in the second research project were given pseudonyms which are culturally similar to their names instead of participant numbers. This reflects the slight variance in the methodologies of the two wider research projects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500094/1 and ES/K011081/1] and an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award.