Risk, responsibilities and rights: Reassessing the ‘economic causes of crime’ thesis in a recession

Abstract

This article explores competing accounts of an apparent inversion of the previously prevailing relationship between young people's unemployment and the incidence of youth offending at a time of economic recession. It begins by highlighting the faltering association between unemployment and offending, and considers the paradoxical implications for risk-based methodologies in youth justice practice. The article then assesses explanations for the changing relationship that suggest that youth justice policies have successfully broken the unemployment-offending link; and alternatively that delayed effects of recession have yet to materialize, by reference to the work of four inter-governmental organizations and to youth protests beyond the UK. In place of ever more intensive risk analyses, the article then focuses on the adverse effects of unemployment on social cohesion, and proposes a rights-based approach to youth justice that recognizes the growing disjuncture between the rights afforded to young people and the responsibilities expected of them.

The Life Course of Young Male and Female Offenders

“…These trends, showing a narrowing of the gender gap in crime, are also in line with those reported in other countries (see e.g. Lauritsen et al 2009;Fergusson 2013). …”

‘Child friendly’ international human rights standards and youth offending team partnerships

“…According to some research, it is global economic restructuring and the consequent destruction of the youth labour market and not poor employability qualifications and skills which have made it so difficult for young people to find employment (Ferguson, 2013). The seriousness of the problem can be seen from the UK situation where 31.…”

“…But this may be a fallacy because as pointed out byFerguson (2013) the current high level of unemployment has been accompanied by a significant drop in youth crime. This challenges the research guiding the risk factor prevention paradigm.…”

Against Youth Justice and Youth Governance, for Youth Penality

“…In constructing the new youth justice as a discrete system that can be theorised and analyzed as such, many commentaries and studies start by locating youth justice in its wider social and economic conditions only inasmuch as any specified wider conditions are also traceable within youth justice 2 . This enables questions to be asked about the characteristics of 2 There are notable exceptions however, including recent work by Ros Fergusson (2013) looking at the links between the criminalisation of young people and youth unemployment as well as Muncie's (1999) earlier attempts to analyze the wider ideological and political conditions that made the CDA 1998 possible.…”