ABSTRACT

An historical perspective on youth justice is thus essential in helping to understand contemporary perceptions of young offending. Throughout history we can find references to the escalating problems of youth crime (West 1967; Pearson 1983) and the debates, discourses and political solutions in the past are remarkably similar to those of today. Fears about rising youth crime are constantly repeated, with the present continuously compared unfavourably with the peaceful days of a halcyon non existent golden age (Humphries 1981; Pearson 1983). The emphasis on appropriate parenting in the contemporary youth justice system is again nothing new and the notion that ‘the family’ is in ‘crisis’, and/or that parents are ‘failing’, comprises a ‘cyclical phenomenon with a very long history’ (Day-Sclater and Piper 2000: 135), while the ‘parenting theme’ (Gelsthorpe 1999) has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, a certain prominence within debates surrounding young people and crime. Contemporary notions of childhood and adolescence were therefore socially constructed at the outset of industrial modernity, and children and their families were subsequently disciplined and controlled not least in the interests of an industrial capitalism which required a fit, healthy, increasingly educated, trained and obedient workforce. Reality was nevertheless more complex than such neo-Marxist explanations, while the orthodox social progress perspective, which proposes these disciplinary strategies to be the actions of motivated entrepreneurial philanthropists with genuine concerns about poor urban children and young people, is also too simplistic. Many of these philanthropists – or ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Becker 1963) – clearly had little idea of the actual or potential long-term consequences of their actions while, at the same time, there is an identifiable failure to recognise the complexities of power and the outcomes of strategies promoted by agencies that often enjoy autonomy from the political centre and front-line practitioners who often enjoy considerable discretion. It is the carceral surveillance society thesis – devised by Michel Foucault (1980) and developed by Jacques Donzelot (1980), Stanley Cohen (1985) and David Garland (2001) – where strategies of power are seen to be pervasive throughout society, with the state only one of the points of control and resistance (Foucault 1971, 1976), that enables us to make sense of the situation. It is thus observed that there are numerous ‘semi-autonomous’ realms and relations – such as communities, occupations, organisations, families – in civil society where surveillance and control are present but where the state administration is technically absent and, moreover, these arenas are often negotiated and resisted by their participants in ways over which even now, the state has little jurisdiction. Hopkins-Burke (2004a, 2004c, 2008) has developed a variation on the carceral surveillance society thesis which acknowledges the orthodox premise that disciplinary strategies are invariably implemented by moral entrepreneurs, professional agents and practitioners who have little idea how their often humble discourse contributes to the grand overall disciplinary control matrix, but, at the same time, proposes that there are other, further, interests involved and these are significantly ours and in this context those of our predecessors. The bourgeois child tutelage project of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be clearly viewed in that context (Hopkins-Burke 2008). This hybrid or left realist perspective accepts that all accounts – neo-Marxist or social progress – are to some extent legitimate for there were and are a multitude of motivations for both implementing and accepting the increasing surveillance and tutelage of young people. The moralising mission of the entrepreneurial philanthropists and the reforming zeal of the liberal politician and administrator thus corresponded

conveniently with those of the mill and mine-owners and a government which wanted a fit healthy fighting force, but it also coincides with the ever increasing enthusiasm for self-betterment among the great majority of the working class that has been described from differing sociological perspectives as ‘embourgeoisement’ (Goldthorpe 1968-9) and ‘the civilising process’ (Elias 1978, 1982). Those who were resistant to that moralising and disciplinary mission – the ‘rough working’ class of the Victorian era – have subsequently been reinvented in academic and popular discourse as the socially excluded underclass of contemporary society, with the moral panics of today a reflection of those of the past, and demands for action remarkably similar. These observations should be considered in the context of the following brief history of the development of the juvenile – and latterly, youth justice system – in England and Wales.