Janus-Faced Justice and the Possibilities for Change in Dealing with Youth Crime in England & Wales

• In Event: Youth Professionals: Working within Structured Spaces

Abstract

The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 marked a significant change to the way youth crime was dealt with in England and Wales. Academic commentators called it a 'year zero' (Pitts, 2001) and speculated that any shifts or changes in practice were subsumed into the wider project of governmentality. Drawing on Lipsky’s (1980) ‘street level bureaucracy’, this paper will challenge some of these assumptions through an empirical analysis of the ways that youth justice professionals make sense of the work they do. The paper is based on findings from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study of Youth Offending Services in two English counties, comprising qualitative interviews with 71 practitioners from managers to workers. We introduce the concept of ‘janus-faced justice’ to characterise youth justice in England in the 21st century and suggest that, in the face of a highly anomic context, youth justice practitioners have not retreated into some type of Mertonian ritualism or become 'zombified' deprofessionalised, deskilled governmental technicists as suggested in the literature. Instead, we argue that they construct and shape a space in which they are able to respond ethically to the young people they encounter.

Authors

• Jo Phoenix, University of Leicester, UK

• Vici Armitage, University of Leicester, UK