ABSTRACT
Most juvenile justice systems deal predominantly with offenders from working class backgrounds, and thereby reflect the class biases in definitions of social harm and crime, as well as basing responses on these biases. Those most frequently found in youth detention centres and custodial institutions, for example, consist predominantly of young men with backgrounds of low income, low educational achievement, poorly paid and/or casualised employment (if any) and strained familial relations. Ethnic minority and Indigenous youth are typically overrepresented (Cunneen and White, 2011; Muncie, 2013; Cunneen et al., 2013). Young people’s social position is defined and distinguished on the basis of the type and geographical location of their housing; the capacity of their parent/s to provide material support; the nature of their education – state school or private school; the age at which their formal education terminates; their age at entry into the labour market and the nature of their employment (if any); and the type of leisure activities that they pursue (Jamrozik, 2001; White and Wyn, 2013). Resources are distributed via the market, the state, and informal community and family networks. For young people, what happens in each of these spheres has a huge bearing on their overall class situation. The overwhelming focus on particular categories of young offender reinforces the ideological role of law and order discourse in forging a conservative cross-class consensus about the nature of social problems. The reinforcement of this discourse also unwittingly enhances the legitimacy of coercive state intervention in the lives of working class people, even if under the rationale of ‘repairing harm’ as in the case of restorative justice. At a social structural level, such processes confirm the role of ‘crime’ as the central problem (rather than poverty, unemployment, racism), neglecting or avoiding entirely the roles of class division and social inequality. This chapter provides a brief survey of key issues pertaining to juvenile justice in advanced capitalist countries such as Australia, the UK, the USA and Canada. Differences between a social control agenda, and a social empowerment agenda, are explored through consideration of two broad interrelated tendencies within juvenile justice. The first tendency is for criminal justice authorities to rely upon risk assessment as the preferred mode of understanding and intervening
in young people’s lives. The focus on the individual as potential threat or problem is reinforced by policy frameworks that stress the responsibility of young people for their own actions. The countervailing tendency, however, acknowledges the limitations of the risk model, and provides a more sophisticated consideration of the interplay between structural conditions and subjective choices when it comes to youthful offending. This approach to intervention demands an active role on the part of the offender. This can take the form of repairing the harm associated with offending. It can also manifest in rehabilitation strategies that emphasise offender competencies and potentials. Before considering these different types of intervention within juvenile justice, however, it is important to put youth offending into social context.
