On 1 June 2000 a new court order was implemented in England and Wales. The ParentingOrder provided for the extension of state intervention (primarily through youth justice agencies) into 'family life'. We have recently completed research with regard to youth justice parenting initiatives, and during the course of our research, our interest in, and concern with, the broader question of 'parenting', 'parental responsibility' and the 'parenting deficit' consolidated. This article sets out our principal concerns by locating the new statutory powers within their wider context. By tracing their historical antecedents, theoretical foundations and policy expressions we aim to critique the latest developments in state intervention. Similarly, by analysing the material circumstances of the parents who are targeted by such intervention, and reviewing the means by which children, young people and parents conceive such intervention, we argue that the new powers essentially comprise an extension of punitiveness underpinned by stigmatising and pathologising constructions of working class families.

For over a decade, three successive New Labour administrations have subjected the English youth justice system to a seemingly endless sequence of reforms. At the root of such activity lies a core tension between measured reason and punitive emotion; between an expressed commitment to ‘evidence-based policy’ and a populist rhetoric of ‘tough’ correctionalism. By engaging a detailed analytical assessment of New Labour’s youth justice programme, this article advances an argument that the trajectory of policy has ultimately moved in a diametrically opposed direction to the route signalled by research-based knowledge and practice-based evidence. Moreover, such knowledge— policy rupture has produced a youth justice system that ultimately comprises a conduit of social harm. All of this raises serious questions of knowledge/evidence—policy relations and, more fundamentally, of democracy, power and accountability.

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This article is presented in two interconnected parts. It addresses issues that have arguably received insufficient attention in most sociologically oriented criminological research and commentary on youth justice and related policy and practice developments, both within the UK jurisdictions and in wider international contexts. First, it highlights the need to recognize the complexities of comparative policy analysis at international, national, regional and local levels. Second, in the light of such complexity, the article attempts to explore the challenges confronting social science in general and sociological criminology in particular, in efforts to critically inform policymaking processes. In conclusion, it is suggested that the possibilities for vibrant, critical and publicly engaged academic intervention in the youth justice policy sphere rest upon the mobilization of theoretically and empirically based analyses, together with research-informed proposals for policy formation and practice development.

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