Youth Justice, Social Exclusion and the Demise of Social Justice

Abstract

A key theme underlying recent changes to youth justice in England and Wales has been responsibilising young offenders by holding them accountable for their offending. While this has led to a focus on offending behaviour and restorative justice programmes to address perceived deficits in young offenders' cognitive skills, it has also been recognised that their ability to desist from crime is frequently constrained by acute levels of socio-economic disadvantage. With this concern in mind, policy makers have introduced several initiatives to combat the risks associated with social exclusion, and facilitate reintegration. Yet research suggests that these initiatives have failed to alleviate the problem. It will be argued that this is because New Labour has constituted reintegration as the personal moral responsibility of young offenders, with scant regard to structural barriers and broader social justice ideals. The article concludes by suggesting that a solution may lie in the propagation of a 'transformative' rights-based agenda.

Restoring the social: offender reintegration in a risky world

“…For example, restorative justice practices used in a post-sentence context tend to work toward soliciting remorse and understanding on the part of the offender so that victims can move on, feel satisfied with an apology, or achieve clarity. But as Gray (2007) points out about restorative justice with youth offenders, the conferences tend to focus on the "moral deficits" of offenders. In other words, in holding offenders accountable, primary Downloaded by [FU Berlin] at 03:32 05 November 2014 K.J.…”

‘Power Differences’ and ‘the Power of Difference’: The Dominance of Secularism as Ontological Injustice

“…The idea of ontological injustice remains largely under-developed in academic theorizing. The term has been applied in criminal psychology (Gray, 2007) and spatial sciences (Calvelli, 2011), but appears rarely in other social science and humanities literature. When it does (for example, Daly, 2000), it is often utilized without explanation.…”

Against Youth Justice and Youth Governance, for Youth Penality

“…Hence, Muncie (1999Muncie ( , 2006Muncie ( , 2008, Goldson (2010), Haines (2009), Smith (2011), Haines and Case (2008), Kemshall (2008Kemshall ( , 2010, Gray (2005Gray ( , 2007Gray ( , 2009Gray ( , 2013) and a host of others drew on a range of Foucauldian-inspired governmentality conceptual tools. They deconstructed political rhetoric and policy and analyzed how and in what ways and under what conditions ever wider populations of risky and offending young people were being both drawn into the net of youth justice and increasingly 'responsibilised' for their misdeeds (Gray 2007(Gray , 2009, or, alternatively subjectified under new knowledge regimes of risk (Haines andCase 2008, Paylor 2011). In a similar fashion, researchers took to task both the evidence base upon which the new system rested, especially the risk factor prevention paradigm (Haines and Case 2008) and the noted punitive effects on young people of managerialism with its targets, performance monitoring and systems of audit (Morgan 2008(Morgan , 2009.…”