ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the research participants’ narratives and Donzelot’s historical examination of how poor families have been policed by ‘the social’ since the eighteenth century to find that distortions according to class in professional assessments and decision-making still seem to occur across the multi-agency youth justice web. Institutional surveillance of working-class families is accumulated across services and can be understood as establishing what Boltanski and Thévenot have conceptualised as a wholly biased evaluative framework. This framework might systematically prevent the less privileged from being perceived and treated equally to middle-class clients. The chapter then examines potential cases of positive discrimination based on the same grounds when practitioners interact with families within an institutional setting. It concludes that negotiations between practitioners and families could become socially fairer if professionals relied on mutual ethical understandings of familial difficulties and took into account lay perceptions of justice in which disadvantages are acknowledged as mitigating circumstances. The chapter recognises that an increased reflexivity of practitioners would be beneficial and could contribute to substantively fairer decisions in particular cases, yet it remains hindered by organisational constraints within and between institutions.
