Youth Justice

This article outlines a social-ecological approach to understanding young people’s prolific offending and effective youth justice responses to it. Seeing young people through the lens of interactions and relationships – with family, peers, community and the broader socio-cultural-political context – gives insight into the type of interventions that can most effectively disrupt their offending and enhance their wellbeing. These insights have implications for the way in which youth offending teams engage with young people, in their social context, to bring about positive change in their lives. Effective interventions, we argue, focus on engaging young people in normalising relationships, over time.

Restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence measures have recently been introduced into youth justice systems. As gatekeepers to these measures, Children’s Court magistrates play a crucial role in their success. However, little research has been undertaken on magistrates’ views of these measures. This article addresses this gap by presenting results of interviews undertaken with Children’s Court magistrates in New South Wales, Australia. Our research suggests that magistrates are enthusiastic about the philosophy of both restorative and therapeutic measures, but are reluctant to embrace them if they consider them under-resourced, poorly understood and/or poorly implemented. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Māori youth are over-represented within the New Zealand criminal justice system. Māori youth comprise 60 per cent of the total youth apprehensions and represent only 20 per cent of New Zealand’s youth population. This qualitative study focuses on the narratives of six young Māori men and women about their criminal histories, and how their engagement in a re-education initiative – the Youth Guarantee policy – impacted upon their criminal activity. Although the study provided evidence that is congruent with assumptions about the education–crime relationship, the participants’ narratives implied that the impact the Youth Guarantee had on Māori youth offending could be attributed to a number of proxy impacts that they received as a result of their re-engagement in the open-door practices of one provider’s Youth Guarantee–funded programme.

This article considers the trajectory of children from state care to imprisonment in relation to 105 New Zealanders who spent time in residential care between the 1950s and 1990s. Following previous research, the article demonstrates how children in state care are far more likely to progress into prisons as a result of maltreatment, multiple care placements, damaging residential cultures, social disadvantages and psychological harms, as well as differential treatment in the criminal justice system. This New Zealand research also shows how the interconnected and long-standing processes of victimization and criminalization increase the likelihood of a child transitioning from care to custody.