Youth Justice

The skills and knowledge required by practitioners to develop relationships with young offenders that will engage and sustain them in intervention programmes is a core theme of the ‘effective practice’ literature. Yet this question of how to secure young people’s engagement is scarcely examined in research on interventions with young offenders, despite an apparent preoccupation with ‘what works’. The article discusses this disjuncture between the research and practice literatures, arguing that prevailing orthodoxies regarding what constitutes valid research evidence prevent certain questions about what works and how from being studied. It is suggested that both the practice literature and alternative research methodologies can provide rigorous evidence in response to these questions.

This article analyses juvenile justice reform in Vietnam and suggests how this connects with key transformations in wider Vietnamese cultures of control. It offers a grounded investigation of themes raised in recent discussions of policy transfer in the global criminal justice field. It concurs with others that global processes of policy convergence have their local limits, using Vietnamese examples to illustrate where this convergence comes about in practice and where it does not. It explores efforts to professionalize existing community justice practices through a discussion of perceived needs for ‘training’ and for the expansion of ‘counselling’. In doing so, it aims to show how justice practices that might be called ‘neo-welfarist’ are emerging in one of East Asia’s most remarkable political hybrids — the new Vietnam — a communist state that has embraced economic liberalism and, in the process, is creating a new kind of ‘social’ sphere.

The article studies the practice of one special form of closed accommodation: special care. The term suggests that this is a welfare-oriented response to norm-breaking behaviour of young people. The empirical example comes from Finland, where special care is defined as restrictive activity under the Child Welfare Act and aimed at, among other things, interrupting a vicious circle of crime in young people for the best interests of the child. A contradictory picture is drawn of special care. The article suggests that the contradictions should be understood — but not necessarily accepted — within the social context in which the institutional placements take place.

The concern about anti-social youth is on the increase globally, as are the range of available sanctions. This article explores the nature of current youth justice strategies in western societies and draws upon a qualitative analysis of the experiences of 20 young men from deprived communities in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. It explores the way in which the recent preoccupation with anti-social behaviour, gang culture and punitive interventions has impacted on these young males. The article illustrates the negative impact of the young men’s marginalization on their sense of citizenship and human rights, and makes recommendations for the future.