The managerialist turn and the education of young offenders in state care

Abstract

Managerialism has become a major trait of youth justice systems throughout Europe over the past couple of decades. This has taken place in the wider context of significant changes in criminal justice systems, which in their turn are articulated with the rise of neo-liberalism. There has been a shift from a humanistic penal welfarism strongly predicated on state interventions, and aimed at the social reintegration of offenders, to a containment regime focused mostly on social control, risk management and the reduction of insecurity. Based on ethnographic work carried out in a detention and education centre for juvenile offenders in Portugal, this paper presents and discusses the ways in which this managerialist turn impacts on the education of youths in custodial state care. Specifically, it focuses on the downgrading of educational expectations, the relegation of schooling to a matter of low priority, and the decline of the rehabilitation ideal. The implications of this managerialist turn for professional practice are also discussed.

Nas últimas décadas, o managerialismo tornou-se um traço central dos sistemas de justiça juvenil europeus. Isto aconteceu no quadro mais alargado de transformações significativas nos sistemas de justiça criminal, que por sua vez se articulam com a escalada do neo-liberalismo. Verificou-se uma passagem de uma abordagem penal humanista, fortemente ancorada em intervenções estatais e dirigida à reinserção social dos ofensores, para um regime de contenção focado essencialmente no controlo social, na gestão do risco e na redução da insegurança. Com base em trabalho etnográfico conduzido num Centro Educativo em Portugal, este artigo apresenta e discute os modos através dos quais esta inflexão managerialista se repercute na educação dos jovens sob custódia do Estado. Especificamente, o artigo analisa a diminuição das expectativas educacionais, a relegação da escola e o declínio do ideal da reabilitação. São igualmente debatidas as implicações desta inflexão managerialista para a prática profissional.

Keywords:

• Education
• Youth Justice in Portugal
• Managerialism
• Institutions/Deinstitutionalisation
• Ethnography

Palavras-chave:

• Educação
• Justiça juvenil
• Managerialismo
• Institutionalização/desinstitucionalização
• Etnografia

Notes

1. Other classical dilemmas are, for example, the degree of visibility accorded to punishment practices and the definition of what constitutes proportionate retribution for a given offence.

2. In Portugal, Universities' Ethics Committees tend to play little or no role in the Social Sciences. The author recently had the opportunity of engaging in very interesting, and rather heated, debates on research ethics with colleagues from a UK University, where the situation is very different. Although the scope of such discussions extends well beyond the focus of this paper, two aspects deserve to be mentioned: ethics and morality are context-bound, and what is deemed ethical in Portugal, for example, might not be so in the UK and vice-versa; the strict adoption of what are currently deemed to be adequate ethics standards, as enforced by some Ethics Committees of the Saxon world, would have precluded the development of very relevant, unharmful ethnographic research on deviance (for example, Polsky 1971, Adler 1993, Bourgois 1996).