Youth Justice 2008:
Measuring Compliance with International Standards
Day One: Thursday April 3rd 2008
Parallel Session 2: Thursday 4.30 – 6.00pm
Panel E.Boole Lecture Theatre 2
Chair: Ms Bronagh Gibson, Children Acts Advisory Board
Paper 1: Reconfiguring youth justice: youth justice and children’s rights
Professor Jeremy Roche, Faculty of Health and Social Care, Open University, England.
This paper considers the commitment of the UK government to children’s rights in the development of youth justice law and policy in England and Wales. The first section explores a number of the substantive and procedural changes in ‘youth justice’ law that have taken place over the past 15 years. These will include the impact of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights decisions, key provisions of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 including the emergence and deployment of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, the ‘blurring’ of the boundary between the civil and the criminal justice systems and the intensification of the policing of family life - justified on the basis of the need to ‘nip criminality in the bud’. The second part of the paper considers the particularity of the language of the Government’s reports to the CRC since it ratified the UNCRC outlining how it is meeting its obligations under section 40 of the UNCRC. The third section returns to a consideration of the language of children’s rights, including how this language has developed over the past 15 years, and asks how the current youth justice system can be said to respect the rights of children. Finally I explore the silences in the debates surrounding social order, children and families – in particular the emergence of a preventive or surveillance state and ask why there is not more debate about these developments – it as if ‘we’ are terrorised by the imagery of youth crime (and other ‘disorders’ associated with children and young people e.g. child abuse) so that it is difficult to find the political space and vocabulary to ask some fundamental questions about the changing relation between the state and civil society.
Paper 2: Recent Developments in Youth Justice Legislation in Canada
Dr Richard Barnhorst, Department of Justice, Canada
April 1, 2008 will be the fifth anniversary of Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). The YCJA is only the third youth justice statute enacted in Canada in the last 100 years. It introduced fundamental reforms that have had significant impacts, particularly in reducing the use of the youth court, increasing the use of non-court approaches to responding to youth crime, and lowering the number of youths in custody at both the pre-trial stage and sentencing stage of the youth justice process.
The paper will provide a brief overview of how youth justice policy and legislation have evolved in Canada. It will then discuss the major policy objectives of the YCJA as reflected in the general principles of the Act and in the provisions at key decision-points, including charging, extrajudicial measures, pre-trial detention, and sentencing. The paper will conclude with a summary of the impact of the YCJA and a discussion of lessons learned about youth justice legislative reform and the continuing challenges for youth justice in Canada.
Paper 3: Influence of the Nigerian news media on youth criminal justice policy: how market-driven news promotes punitiveness
Nurudeen Olalekan, Youth Action, Nigeria.
This paper argues that commercial pressures are determining the news media's contemporary treatment of youth crime and violence, and that the resulting coverage has played a major role in reshaping public opinion, and ultimately, youth criminal justice policy. The news media are not mirrors, simply reflecting events in society. Rather, media content is shaped by economic and marketing considerations that frequently override traditional journalistic criteria for newsworthiness. This paper explores local and national newspaper's treatment of youth crime especially in the Niger Delta Region, where the extent and style of news stories about youth crime are being adjusted to meet perceived viewer demand and advertising strategies, which frequently emphasize the Niger Delta youths with a taste for violence. Newspapers also reflect a market-driven reshaping of style and content, resulting in a continuing emphasis on crime stories as a cost-effective means to grab readers' attention. The paper also explores the accumulating social science evidence that the market-driven treatment of youth crime in the news media has the potential to skew Nigerian public opinion, increasing the support for various punitive policies such as mandatory minimums, longer sentences, and treating juveniles as adults. Through agenda setting and priming, media emphasis increases public concern about youth crime and makes it a more important criteria in assessing political leaders. Then, once the issue has been highlighted, the media's emphasis increases support for punitive policies, though the mechanisms through which this occurs are less well understood. This paper explores the evidence for the mechanisms of framing, increasing fear of youth crime, and instilling and reinforcing ethnic stereotypes and linking particular groups to crime. Although other factors, including distinctive features of Nigerian culture and the Nigerian political system, also play a role, this paper argues that the news media are having a significant and little-understood role in increasing support for punitive criminal justice policies. Because the news media is not the only influence on public opinion, this paper also considers how the news media interacts with other factors that shape public opinion regarding the youth criminal justice system.Panel F. Boole Lecture Theatre 6
Chair: Mr Liam Herrick, Executive Director, Irish Penal Reform Trust, Dublin.
Paper 1: Detention of Children in Ireland: learning from best practice?
Liam Herrick, Executive Director, Irish Penal Reform Trust, Dublin
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The placement of children in detention in Ireland has historically been decided by age with children under 16 years being detained in Children Detention Schools and children over 16 being detained in St Patrick’s institution. The Criminal Justice Act 2006 amended the Children Act 2001 to make provision for all children under 18 years to be detained together and plans to implement these provisions were recently published by the Irish Youth Justice Service. Attention will now shift to the design of this new facility and the regime to operate within it. This paper asks what can be learned from international standards during this process.
Paper 2: Coping in custody: the trials and tribulations of young prisoners on remand
Sinead Freeman, PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences and Law, Dublin Institute of Technology.
The fusion of young people to the prison setting has been described as a toxic combination. This appears to be especially pertinent when applied to young remand prisoners. Previous research studies have identified young people on remand as a highly vulnerable group of prisoners (Lader et al., 1998; HM Chief Inspector of Prisons; 2000; Goldson, 2002) and custodial remand to be a particularly stressful prison experience (Harding and Zimmermann, 1989; Lindquist and Lindquist, 1997). Despite this, little research to date has examined how young people cope while detained on remand. This paper addresses this gap by providing an insight into the issue of coping on remand through the voices of young prisoners in the Irish context. It is based on 62 semi-structured interviews conducted with young males and females aged 16 to 21 years on remand in Cloverhill Prison, St. Patrick’s Institution and the Dochas Centre, Mountjoy Prison, Dublin. The findings indicate that coping on remand is a very individualistic process which relies mainly on remand prisoners’ limited internal resources. This results in a high level of coping difficulty not only during the remand period but also on release or transfer to sentenced custody. The findings have important implications for all aspects of remand from penal theory, policy and service provision including the measures required to enhance coping for young prisoners on remand.
Paper 3: Reimprisonment among Ireland’s young offenders
Nicola Hughes, PhD Candidate, Institute of Criminology, UniversityCollegeDublin. .
In 2006 the findings of the first ever follow-up of released prisoners in Ireland (N=19,955) were published. The population of sentenced prisoners released from an Irish prison during the period 1 January 2001 to 30 November 2004 were followed for between one and 48 months in order to establish if they returned to prison for a new offence. The data for the study came from the computer system used by the Irish Prison Service, the PRIS system, and represents the first time that researchers were granted access to PRIS. The study found that half of the released prisoners were back behind bars within four years. Fine defaulters were certain to return to prison, as were prisoners under the age of 21. Indeed the rate of reimprisonment for prisoners under the age of 21 was 50 per cent higher than for prisoners over the age of 30. A detailed re-analysis of the data was undertaken just for those prisoners under 21, in an attempt to establish if younger prisoners differ to older prisoners in other important ways. Such as in the type of offence committed, level of educational attainment or employment status. Following on from this a number of in-depth face to face interviews were undertaken with young male prisoners due for release from St. Patrick’s Institution. The purpose of these interviews was to establish the circumstances of these young men prior to entering prison, their experiences of imprisonment, and their motivations, expectations and plans for their release. In particular if they have a job lined up for after their release, if they are returning to education and if they have somewhere to live. The role of the family, prior to, during and after imprisonment, and the communities to which they will be returning upon release were also considered. The PRIS computer system provided criminal history information on the interviewees and a one year follow-up will be undertaken in order to establish who has been reimprisoned. It is hoped that this information will provide a better understanding of the factors leading to recidivism or desistance for these young men.
Panel G.Boole Lecture Theatre 1
Chair: Dr Conor O’Mahony, lecturer, Faculty of Law, University College Cork
Paper 1: Exploring the risk-protection-promotion identities of young offenders
Dr Stephen Case, Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Criminology, Centre for Criminal Justice and Criminology, SwanseaUniversity, Wales.
The Youth Justice System of England and Wales has evolved a research, policy and practice focus upon identifying ‘risk factors’ that enable the prediction of young people’s risk of offending / reoffending and direct appropriate interventions. This risk focus has been underpinned by a global movement of risk factor research encompassing two distinct paradigms: quantitative, deterministic (predominantly developmental) approaches conceptualising risk as either a clinical, statistical artefact or a qualitative, constructivist understandings of how young people negotiate and respond to risk in their current lives (see Kemshall 2007). However, the purported influence of risk upon offending behaviour has largely amounted to educated guesswork by researchers privileging theoretical and methodological predilections (e.g. positivism, developmentalism, constructivism), whilst under-researching or neglecting the investigation of protective factors and factors that potentially promote positive behaviour. The exploration and interpretation of risk has been conceptually, methodologically and theoretically restricted by its overly-negative focus and insistence upon ‘factorisation’, at the expense of pursuing more complex and holistic, but probably less definitive understandings of risk as dynamic, reflexive processes that form part of broader identities that also contain protective and promotional elements.
A different way of thinking about risk, one that is more dynamic, holistic and multi-faceted than the traditional static model, is to think in terms of young people as possessing multiple risk-protection-promotion identities, which could be explored and addressed in youth justice systems through mixed methodologies of measurement, assessment and intervention. These identities flow from complex, dynamic interactions between the past, present and future – between young people’s understandings, perceptions and abilities to resist, negotiate and utilise risk, protection and promotion as factors and processes within different roles, relationships, situations and contexts at different times. Each component is further influenced by the perceptions and responses of significant others. The deeper investigation of risk-protection-promotion identities would progress hegemonic understandings of risk and preferred representations of risk ‘evidence’ beyond deficit-based deterministic, mechanistic, ‘factorised’ conceptualisations and constructivist interpretations of risk in current life, towards a dynamic, holistic, ultimately more realistic and valid understanding of fluid processes that are influenced by reflexivity, reconstruction, re-experience, interactions and the responses of significant others.
Paper 2: Children’s rights at the edges of youth justice
Dr Kathryn Hollingsworth, Faculty of Law, King’s College London
The child in the criminal justice system in England and Wales has a dual status: he is both offender and child. It has been argued elsewhere by this author, that the primacy given to the child’s status as offender (which is a status shared in common with adults) may be one reason why the courts in the youth crime context appear (prima facie) to be better at articulating the child’s ECHR rights than they are in other areas of law where the child’s primary status is child, such as family law.
However, although the child’s primary status is offender during much of the youth justice process, at some points the child’s status as child gains prominence. Arguably, where it does, the child should be treated in a manner consistent with the principles and approaches used in other areas of law where the child’s primary status is child, namely family law. This should not lead to a negation of the child’s ECHR rights (which continue to apply), but it may affect the content of those rights and upon whom duties are placed to protect them.
This paper will argue that at the edges of youth justice - at the beginning and at the end of the system (that is, firstly where the child is deemed to be at risk of offending but has not yet crossed the threshold into the youth justice system, and secondly where he is leaving the youth justice system) - emphasis should be placed on the child’s status as child. A justification for this proposition will be provided, and the paper will then explore the nature and protection of the child’s rights at the edges of youth justice. In particular, this will involve an examination of the role of local authorities in preventing children from offending and in safeguarding the child’s welfare and needs when he leaves the criminal justice system.
Kathryn Hollingsworth completed her PhD from Cambridge University in 2007, entitled ‘The Rights and Responsibilities of Children in Youth Crime’ and has published a number of articles in the area of children’s rights in youth justice in England and Wales. Prior to commencing her PhD she taught and researched in the area of public
Paper 3: The community context of reintegration for young adult prisoners in Cork: preliminary findings
Sylvia Hoare, PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences and Law, Dublin Institute of Technology.
Reintegration, otherwise referred to as resettlement or re-entry aims to facilitate the offender's return to "normal" community living upon release from prison (Josi and Sechrest, 1999:54). Though it is now more frequently referred to in legislation and policy documentation, there still remains little in the way of a true analysis of what exactly reintegration means and what it encompasses. This research attempts to fill the vacuum in this otherwise most neglected area of criminological discourse (Maruna, 2004). The importance of this investigation is further warranted given the provisions under the Children Act, 2001, specifically section 151 which provides for half the sentence of a youth being served in a place of detention and the remainder under supervision in the community. The aim of the Children Act, 2001 is to provide for the detention of young offenders only as a matter of last resort (section 96). This, together with the range of criminal sanctions under the Act means that young offenders will spend lesser periods of time in custody and consequently more time in their own communities.
While previous studies have focused only on reintegration as a process of preparation for release (Goodstein and Sontheimer, 1997), the focus of this research is on the role and significance of the community in its promotion or hindrance of a young adult's prospect for successful reintegration after the experience of incarceration. That repeat committals to Irish prisons come largely from a small number of geographical neighbourhoods (NESF) in itself warrants an investigation of the impact the community has on the reintegrative process. The research upon which the paper is based is currently being conducted in Cork at a number of research locations. These include community based resource centres facilitating ex-prisoners as they attempt successful reintegration in Cork city and a number of geographical areas identified by the research participants as their own local communities.