Abstract
Youth justice in England and Wales is delivered by multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) which are expected to work in partnership with social welfare agencies to provide ‘holistic’ support that targets the interrelated personal and social needs of young offenders associated with their risk of reoffending. This article engages with criminological debates which attempt to interpret the hybrid assemblages of penal governance that have characterized late modernity in order to theorize why these partnerships have had only limited success in addressing the social context of youth crime. It will be argued, evidenced by an analysis of research data on YOT partnerships in action, that these assemblages are ‘classed’ in so much as they act as conduits for strategic elements which articulate powerful class interests (along with those of other social forces) to be translated into practice. Such strategic elements sustain class inequality and deny social justice to young people in conflict with the law.
Keywords
Introduction: setting the scene
This article engages with the concern raised by Hannah-Moffat and Lynch (2012: 119) of the need to explain ‘the complexities of contemporary penality and its social purposes’ beyond the macro theoretical level through an analysis of ‘on-the-ground punitive practices, particularly in contexts that challenge traditional understandings of the penal realm’. The micro-intricacies of current penal practices are explored through an analysis of the work of Youth Offending Team partnerships, which can be conceptualized as typical exemplars of assemblages of penal governance in action. Youth justice in England and Wales has undergone major restructuring following the implementation of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. Youth justice is now delivered by multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) with representation from the police, probation, education, health and children’s services (National Audit Office, 2010). These teams are expected to work in partnership with a range of mainstream and voluntary sector social services to provide holistic, child-friendly interventions which target the complex social welfare difficulties of young offenders in order to reduce their risk of reoffending.
Research has shown that most young offenders have experienced high levels of personal and socio-economic disadvantage which heightens their risk of reoffending and social exclusion. Levitas et al. (2007: 25) define social exclusion as ‘a complex and multi-dimensional process’ which ‘involves the lack or denial of resources, rights, goods and services, and the inability to participate’ in mainstream socio-economic and political relationships and activities. The Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix (Levitas et al., 2007) measures social exclusion in the three areas of ‘resources’, ‘participation’ and ‘quality of life’, and Jacobson et al.’s (2010) research illustrates the extent to which young people in custody are vulnerable to social exclusion based on these indicators. The first indicator, ‘resources’, refers to income and the quality of family or other interpersonal support networks. The majority of Jacobson et al.’s (2010) sample lived in deprived households and had experienced severe breakdowns in interpersonal relationships resulting in abuse or neglect. ‘Participation’ in education, training and employment was the second indicator. Here, Jacobson et al. (2010) found that a high proportion of the sample had poor educational achievement and had been excluded from school. ‘Quality of life’ was the final indicator and refers to emotional well-being and mental health issues. Again Jacobson et al. (2010) found that young people had serious needs in this area. Overall the young people in Jacobson et al.’s (2010: 82) research were subject to ‘multiple layers of different types of complex disadvantage’, amounting to what Levitas et al. (2007: 100) categorized as ‘deep exclusion’.
Desistance research suggests that young people make the decision to stop offending when changes in their way of thinking are accompanied by improvements in their social circumstances (Farrall and Calverley, 2006; McNeill and Weaver, 2010). This brings to mind Giddens’ (1984) arguments about the dialectic between agency and structure. In his concept of the duality of structure, young people’s ability to refrain from reoffending is often limited by broader structural constraints, particularly those arising from the three social exclusion factors cited earlier (Farrall et al., 2009, 2010; MacDonald et al., 2011). The multi-agency composition of YOTs and their partnerships with mainstream social services should provide the ideal scenario to achieve an equitable balance between correcting perceived deficits in young people’s attitudes and behaviour while also addressing their broader social problems, suggesting a more ‘holistic’, ‘inclusionary’ and ‘redistributive’ approach to youth justice as advocated by Goldson (2010: 165).
Unfortunately research shows that the restructuring of youth justice has failed to live up to its expectations. Research repeatedly evidences that YOT partnerships have had only limited success in meeting the complex social needs of young offenders. Initial indications of poor quality outcomes appeared in Solomon and Garside’s (2008) independent audit of the youth justice system. They found that most of the targets set by the Youth Justice Board to monitor the performance of YOTs in addressing young offenders’ difficulties of young offenders in such areas as accommodation, mental health, and education, training and employment were not being achieved. Recently Youth Justice Board monitoring has been relaxed and its centrally driven targets reduced, but research continues to confirm that the multiple social needs of young offenders are not being adequately met by YOTs (National Audit Office, 2010). Using the classifications of the Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix, research shows while there have been some improvements with ‘resources’, partnership arrangements between YOTs and children’s services are not effectively safeguarding young offenders from harmful and abusive interpersonal relationships as thresholds for entry to appropriate support services are being set too high (Youth Justice Board, 2010). In regard to ‘participation’, the quality, range and delivery of educational provision have been a key area of criticism (HM Inspectorate of Probation et al., 2011). The same is true of the ‘quality of life’ support services, with the most negative comments directed at the ‘wide variation in the type, level and quality of measures put in place to support the emotional wellbeing and good mental health of children in the youth justice system’ (Berelowitz, 2011: 64).
The new penality, hybridity, political agency and class
In order to understand why YOT partnerships have had such limited success in addressing the social context of youth crime and given the focus of this article on exploring the complexities of penal governance, it is useful to place developments in youth justice in the context of broader theorizing about the new penality, or changes in the ‘rationalities’ and ‘technologies’ for the governance of crime which have occurred in advanced liberal societies (Rose, 2000: 322). The penal landscape that has appeared in the last two decades has been variously depicted as the ‘new penology’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992), the ‘culture of crime control’ (Garland, 2001) and the ‘penalisation of poverty’ (Wacquant, 2012), and heated debates have ensued among criminologists as to its key features and how they are to be interpreted.
Three prominent themes have fuelled these debates. First, an apparent obsession with actuarial styles of reasoning which constitute youth crime as a risk to be measured and managed rather than, by way of contrast with penal welfarism, as a psychosocial pathology to be treated and cured (Case and Haines, 2009). Second, the pressure on criminal justice agencies to adopt a managerialist, business-like ethos in their approach to crime prevention and public protection by engaging in strategic planning, prioritizing objectives and monitoring performance which is subject to regular audit (McLaughlin and Muncie, 2000). YOT partnerships are deeply embedded in this audit and performance-management culture (Goldson, 2010). Third, the volatile and contradictory nature of the new penality (O’Malley, 2004) which tends to oscillate between a rational, managerialist approach to crime and a more populist and emotive punitive stance committed to the reassertion of law and order (Garland, 2001). A prime example of the latter was the response to James Bulger’s murder in 1993 when the demonization and ‘othering’ of the two culprits as threatening outcasts was generalized to encompass all young offenders (Muncie, 2008).
However, the grand theoretical debates which have emerged to interpret the new penality have been subject to sustained challenge on at least two fronts (Hughes, 2007). First is their tendency to assume that the emergence of actuarial risk logic has been total and all encompassing, whereas recent theorizing on the new penality has highlighted that the governance of youth crime is an intricate multi-faceted process (Field, 2007; Phoenix, 2009; Phoenix and Kelly, 2013). Risk thinking is aligned with a ‘heterogeneous array’ of disciplinary, welfare and punitive youth justice discourses and practices ‘with diverse effects and implications’ (O’Malley, 2008: 453). The distinct advantage of the hybridity of risk thinking, particularly the merger with welfare logics, is that far from being limited to the actuarial management of young offenders, it is able, as Hannah-Moffat (2005: 31) argues, to pursue disciplinary aspirations by constituting ‘the transformative risk subject who is … amenable to change through targeted therapeutic interventions’. Risk thinking has not displaced penal welfarism or marked the end of the ‘social’; instead the ‘social’ has been ‘revised’ (O’Malley, 2004: 148). A novel responsibilizing industry has emerged to become the ‘new rehabilitation’ of late modernity which aims, through the use of cognitive-behavioural technologies, to correct offenders’ attitudes and behaviour and transform them into morally responsible citizens who are capable of regularizing their own risk of reoffending (Robinson, 2008).
The second challenge directed at the grand theorizing rhetoric of proponents of the new penality accuses them of failing to attach sufficient weight to political agency in the governance of crime and disorder. Foremost in leading this challenge has been critical realist research on the micro-dynamics of how political agency is negotiated beyond the state through YOT (Goldson and Hughes, 2010; Muncie, 2011) and community safety partnerships (Edwards and Hughes, 2005; Hughes, 2007), conceptualized by Rose (1996) as ‘governing at a distance’. This research evidences local, regional and national diversity in the way key actors in these partnerships have exercised political agency as they differentially translate youth justice and community safety policies into practice and the inevitable bargaining, compromise and resistance involved. More recently, to further explore how political agency is exercised beyond the state, Edwards and Hughes (2012: 436) apply regime analysis which they argue provides the conceptual and empirical tools to explore the set of ‘arrangements that equip regimes with the capacity to govern’.
Regime analysis conceptualizes political power as an essentially constructive rather than repressive social force and offers a framework to investigate the processes by which political agency is negotiated in assemblages of penal governance such as community safety and YOT partnerships through the formation of collaborative working relationships, the securing of resources and the development of action plans in order to realize or deny diverse policy agendas. But the shortcoming of regime analysis is that it overstates agency, struggle and the diffusion of power, suggesting an almost pluralist model of political regulation. However, there is considerable speculation as to the extent to which ‘governing at a distance’ has displaced sovereign power. Crawford (2006: 471) maintains that the state still exercises considerable control in crime and disorder such that ‘recourse to command and control continues to occupy a prominent place within the contemporary social regulation armory’. Hallsworth and Lea (2011: 144) argue that a novel ‘securitized’ style of authoritarian state governance has emerged to coercively manage socially excluded and marginalized groups. Lea and Stenson (2007: 21) similarly challenge the displacement thesis, arguing that the appearance of a multiplicity of local sites of governance reflects the ‘re-articulation and re-organisation’ of sovereign power which widens the opportunities for diverse social forces to enact their interests.
Neo-Marxists would argue that while class power should be viewed non-deterministically as but one of several such social forces, it remains a key distinguishing feature of people’s lives in contemporary society (Coleman et al., 2009; Scraton, 2007). Jessop (2008) describes this as a post-Fordist advanced capitalist political economy. Post-Fordism has seen significant changes in the configuration of its means and relations of capital accumulation in western economies, including a dramatic decline in large scale manufacturing industries, the creation of a mobile flexible labour market, the de-regulation of the financial sector and massive reductions in welfare. These strategies have produced significant levels of socio-economic inequality, marginalization and exclusion, with large sections of the work force abandoned to either a permanent state of unemployment or a twilight zone of unstable, insecure, precarious and poorly paid jobs.
De Giorgi (2006, 2013) provides an enlightening insight into how post-Fordism has transformed the political economy of punishment. He argues that the new penality acts as a new mode of penal governance to manage and regulate the ‘multitude’ or ‘social surplus’ of disadvantaged, fragmented and excluded populations generated by post-Fordism. Along with Feeley and Simon (1992) he concurs that the new penality is underpinned by actuarial risk logic. One of the positive attributes of De Giorgi’s (2013) account of post-Fordist penality is his acknowledgement of diversity by agreeing with Lacey’s (2008) argument that the specific dynamics of penal practices are subject to variation dependent upon the socio-political and economic arrangements in different capitalist regimes. But other aspects of De Giorgi’s work lays him open to the same two criticisms that beset early theorizing about the new penality. First, De Giorgi’s analysis could be criticized for its reductionalist and universalizing tendencies which overstate the connection between economy and penality and the influence of actuarial risk logic. A second source of criticism would be his limited attention to the central importance of agency in the translation of penal policy into practice.
Earlier in this article I evidenced the acute levels of socio-economic disadvantage and social exclusion experienced by young people in conflict with the law, which Jamieson and Yates (2009) contend structure their experiences of marginalization and criminalization in the youth justice system. De Giorgi would argue that YOT partnerships as assemblages of penal governance in action are ‘classed’ enterprises which function solely as the coercive instrument of capitalist economic interests to regulate such young people’s ‘delinquent’ behaviour. While the flexibility of risk thinking does indeed lay it open to the articulation of ‘classed’ logic as well as a hybrid mix of other regulatory mentalities (Gray, 2009: 448), to pursue De Giorgi’s argument would eventually lead to accusations of dystopian, deterministic and functionalist thinking. But, as Rigakos (2001: 95) points out, the conceptualization of class power does not have to be ‘totalizing or universalizing’ and can be ‘sensitive to local variations and complexities’. What is needed is a set of middle range theoretical concepts which facilitate a non-reductionalist analysis of the micro-techniques by which class inequalities and social injustice are translated into the governance of youth justice relations via YOT partnerships, and credit YOT practitioners as reflexive active agents in this process. Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach based on his analysis of the capitalist state offers one such way of addressing this dilemma.
A strategic-relational perspective would conceptualize YOT partnerships as complex assemblages of penal relations which in themselves have no power. This is because power emanates from the various social forces (class being only one of them) that operate in and through them. Class strategies to regulate ‘delinquent’ working class young offenders are not masterminded by a conspiratorial elite based at the Ministry of Justice or the Youth Justice Board as power is understood to be dispersed to a multitude of competing ‘centres of calculation and action’ (Rose, 1996: 38). Hence these strategies emerge from the struggles and negotiations between the diverse and often conflicting socio-political and economic interests involved in YOT partnerships. But YOT practitioners and their partners are reflective decision-makers whose choices and actions are not impartial and are shaped by ‘structurally inscribed strategic selectivities’ (Jessop, 2008: 176) which offer preferential credence to some interest groups more than others. The codification of class power comes about when a distinctive hegemonic or governmental project such as that of New Labour is forged that blends and melds together diverse views to produce a coherent strategic direction which supports the socio-political and economic interests of dominant class groupings at several sites of power, including in YOT partnerships (Gray, 2009). The advantage of Jessop’s approach is that by building upon Foucault’s (1980) insights into the micro-physics of power and Poulantzas’ (1978) account of the regulatory dynamics of the capitalist state, it is able to highlight the centrality of agency, struggle, negotiation and diversity when considering the micro-processes by which YOT partnerships actively translate class inequalities into their routine practices, while avoiding the accusations of reductionalism that are often directed at structural-functionalist Marxism.
Drawing on Jessop’s strategic-relational approach, I will now fine-tune my original research question to interrogate how YOT professionals contribute to the exercise of unequal class power in their routine policies and practice, or how YOT partnerships are ‘classed’ in that by reproducing and reinforcing the socio-economic inequalities endemic to post-Fordist capitalist societies they deny young offenders equal access to the rights, opportunities and rewards of a socially just society. This article makes use of three sets of data to analyse this process. First, longitudinal data from several hundred interviews with practitioners and managers in 41 (out of a total of 157 at the time) YOTs collected between 2001 and 2007 on how they worked in partnership with social service agencies to tackle the needs of young offenders. 1 Second, in order to update this data set and provide greater insight into the operation of different partnership arrangements, 32 in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted between May 2011 and August 2012 with a purposive sample of youth justice professionals in two large YOT catchment areas that did not participate in the earlier research. These included YOT practitioners and managers, and strategic managers and workers from various partner agencies such as children’s, health and educational services, and crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Finally, individual interviews were supplemented by observational analysis of partnership forums in action where planning and decision making relating to tackling young offenders’ welfare difficulties took place between YOTs and their partners.
Assemblages of YOT governance in action
The audit and managerialist culture
Initial theorizing about the key features of the new penality, as pointed out earlier, and the assemblages of penal governance that populate it contend that they are strongly influenced by an audit and managerialist culture informed by actuarial risk logic. Not unexpectedly, in this research there is ample evidence to show that YOT partnership professionals are steeped in this culture, as seen when they talk in the interviews of the myriad inspection procedures to which they are subjected and concerns about meeting targets and performance in league tables. The advent of a more managerial ethos was hailed as particularly progressive by one manager because it brought ‘structure and rigour’ to the YOT resulting in them becoming more efficient and ‘doing a better job’ with young offenders (YOT partnership professional 2 9).
In general YOTs receive high scores in inspection reports, with performance measured against reducing risk of reoffending, risk of harm and risk of vulnerability (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2011). Similarly in the interviews YOT workers and their strategic partners in mental health, education, family welfare and community safety felt that their interventions with young people were successful, summed up by one respondent as ‘we do a pretty good job’ (YOT partnership professional 24). The main problems in their work were seen to be managerial and related to operational issues such as thresholds, access and engagement. In the case of children’s services, for example, the main tensions were over thresholds or eligibility criteria which YOT workers felt were set too high, making it difficult for their clients to receive support. One worker argued: thresholds for intervention are a moveable feast as there is no defined level at which children’s services will become involved … If they’ve got a high demand they’ll put the threshold a bit higher and if the demand lowers they’ll move it a bit lower so the lack of clarity and the lack of understanding about that has always been an issue.
Concerns over mental health provision centred on access and engagement as it was felt that the main adolescent mental health agency delivered a very therapeutic, appointment-based service which did not address the type of mental health difficulties facing YOT clients or do enough to make itself accessible to them given their chaotic lifestyles. One worker commented: they’re not geared up for meeting our type of young person … they are working to a model where they are quite happy to take middle class anorexic girls whose parents can take them to nine o’clock appointments, but when it comes to our young people who maybe have a multitude of issues and are quite chaotic, then it’s really difficult for them to take them on.
The audit culture itself also created tensions as the pursuit of performance targets could undermine the achievement of more principled objectives. One source of grievance was alternative education providers, who frequently rejected YOT clients because it was felt that their disruptive behaviour was likely to lead them to drop out and so distort completion rates around which success was measured and funding secured. One worker reflected when ventilating his frustration at not getting a young person into further education: ‘they really didn’t want to know because of their completion rates … a person from the YOT is less likely to complete and so the college is less likely to get their money for a successful outcome’ (YOT partnership professional 26).
In the same way as the sources of tensions in YOT partnerships were interpreted as managerial problems, the solutions were also seen to be found in a managerial approach, reflecting the need for improving young people’s access and engagement and strengthening communication and understanding between partner agencies. Whether the outcome of interventions successfully met young people’s welfare needs was not the major consideration. The above findings evidence the tendency noted by Garland (2001: 189) for the meaning of success and failure to be redefined in the audit culture so that performance is measured not against the quality of ‘outcomes’ but against ‘inputs’ or what agencies do and how effectively they do it.
Hybridity and the reconfiguration of welfare
This research confirms the argument made by several theorists (Hannah-Moffat, 2005; O’Malley, 2008) and it is evidenced by numerous other research studies (Field, 2007; Goddard, 2012; Phoenix, 2009) that the influence of the audit and managerialist culture and actuarial risk thinking has been exaggerated. YOT partnership professionals are active human agents who do not simply follow centralized directives, but rather as they translate policy into practice influenced by the myriad choices at their disposal and the material context in which decision making takes place, they engage in a complex process of resistance, subversion and revision (Prior, 2009). Hence, while risk logic provided the backdrop, a hybrid assortment of rationalities and technologies informed YOTs in their work with young offenders and welfare considerations remained of paramount importance. As one respondent commented: ‘welfare would be the priority for most workers that work for the YOT and I think it’s management driven that we must talk about risk management’ (YOT partnership professional 30).
Throughout the 32 interviews YOT practitioners and their partners spoke authoritatively and with deep insight about the complex multi-faceted personal and welfare problems faced by young offenders. Learning, speech and communication difficulties were particularly noted, as well as more traditional concerns relating to family conflict, homelessness, educational underachievement and disengagement from school. Mild mental health difficulties, such as anxiety and depression, while disturbing, were not seen in most cases to be serious, but instead were described by one respondent as ‘generalized emotional malaise’ (YOT partnership practitioner 25). A common theme among respondents was that while there had been a marked reduction in the number of young people entering the youth justice system, their problems were getting worse. As one worker stressed: ‘the complexity and vulnerability of the children we work with has increased’ (YOT partnership professional 27).
Respondents were also well versed in the ‘every child matters’ agenda which had transformed the delivery of children’s services in England and Wales and had likewise influenced youth justice by advocating a more holistic, child-friendly, welfare-orientated approach in addressing young offenders’ needs by strengthening partnership arrangements between YOTs and mainstream social services (Department for Education and Skills, 2003). Similarly the recommendations of the Munro Review (Department for Education, 2011) to strengthen child protection and safeguarding procedures were seen to be equally applicable to vulnerable young offenders. While several respondents questioned whether young offenders mattered as much to mainstream social services as ‘other’ children, the majority wholeheartedly embraced the Munro guidelines and the ‘every child matters’ vision, as captured in the following quote: ‘The partnership runs to a set of core values and principles … protecting and safeguarding the child or young person is at the centre of our thinking’ (YOT partnership professional 12).
Although committed to a welfarist approach towards young offenders, the degree to which YOTs should be expected to become actively involved in the provision of welfare support was controversial, with some respondents adamant that their role was to act as alternative welfare providers to compensate for the shortfalls of partner agencies, while others, anxious not to become a dumping ground for all problems, argued the case for welfare matters to be signposted to mainstream social services. The two views are illustrated by the following quotes: to tackle offending we need to address welfare … we can’t just refer to mainstream social services … the reality is if we don’t deal with the problem it probably won’t get done.
we’re not social services for offenders … we’re careful not to do other people’s jobs for them because often in the YOT we uncover a lot of unmet need and it is important that we signpost it and refer to other agencies … advocacy is quite an important part of what we do.
Nevertheless, while welfare remained an enduring presence, it appeared in ‘reconstituted’ configurations (Field, 2007: 312). The processes by which amalgams of penal governance like YOT partnerships combine, blend and reconfigure welfare, risk and other logics to create what Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto (2012: 215) describe as ‘new architectures of risk/need management’, which turn upside down our understanding of the boundaries between welfare, treatment and punishment, are currently a key source of penological debate and one to which the data in this research can make a significant contribution. In a penal climate apparently saturated by actuarial thinking, this research shows, as in Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat’s (2006) earlier work, how notions of welfare and treatment have come to be framed in a language of risk which completely changes the conceptualization of offenders’ needs. Needs are assessed according to their criminogenic properties or the extent to which if successfully addressed they are likely to reduce the risk of reoffending. The end result of the melding together of need and risk is that the representation of offenders’ needs become restricted to narrowly defined ‘dynamic’ needs which on the basis of highly questionable statistical evidence are deemed to be amenable to treatment through targeted intervention.
The fusion of need and risk is made very explicitly in YOT inspection reports (see HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2011) and official policy statements, with a recent report by the National Audit Office (2010: 4) commenting: Family breakdown, educational underachievement, substance abuse, mental illness and other problems commonly affect young offenders … The youth justice system works on the basis that addressing such risk factors during the course of a sentence is the best way to reduce a young person’s risk of reoffending.
However, this process is also vividly illustrated in this research when interviewees were asked whether they considered the primary role of the YOT was to address criminality by changing attitudes and behaviour or deal with the welfare difficulties faced by young offenders. The majority argued that YOTs should adopt a holistic approach, by which they meant achieving a balance between welfare and correctionalism rather than in the therapeutic sense of working with the whole person. Despite the belief in holism, not unexpectedly there were variations in the degree of emphasis given to welfare or correctionalism in this balancing act as seen in the following quotes: they’re so interlinked that you couldn’t really successfully address one without trying also to address the other … it should be a balance … but I think generally as a YOT we have put a higher priority on addressing welfare.
I think it’s both really … you can’t have one without the other … but we generally focus on the criminal behaviour.
It can be seen that in the conflation of risk and need, the concept of risk is not based on strictly actuarial logic but is intertwined in what Phoenix (2009: 124 and 125) describes as ‘a generalised notion of at riskiness’ in which risk of reoffending and the vulnerability risks attached to social welfare difficulties are blended together to produce the young offender who is ‘both risky and needy’.
Architectures of risk/need management are classed
Assemblages of penal governance like YOT partnerships have not only reconfigured the concept of welfare to create ‘new architectures of risk/need management’ (Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto, 2012: 215), they are also classed enterprises. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach, these can be conceptualized as complex networks of power invested penal relations whose willingness to accommodate a hybrid mix of penal rationalities and technologies lays them open to the possibility of classed logic and the articulation of powerful and unequal class interests. The key to understanding how assemblages of penal governance are classed is through the twin processes of the individualization and dematerialization of young offenders’ needs. The unfortunate consequence of the conflation of need and risk and the focus on narrowly defined criminogenic needs is that, while many of young offenders’ social welfare problems are recognized, they are frequently individualized and pathologized or interpreted in terms of personal failings in their attitudes, way of thinking and social skills. The wider structural constraints arising from high levels of socio-economic deprivation in post-Fordist societies that exacerbate young offenders’ personal and social difficulties are minimized (Kemshall, 2008).
Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto (2010: 275) provide a revealing account of how the actuarial risk assessment of the criminogenic needs of offenders from racial minorities in Canada dematerializes race issues by disassociating this target group from their ‘socio-political, economic and cultural conditions’ and by undervaluing ‘the importance of social and power relations and social inequality’ leading to racialized or discriminatory sentencing. Similarly, Gray (2009) explores how the dematerialization of need and risk produces classed effects in the governance of youth crime and the research on which this article is based further contributes to understanding how these processes operate in YOT partnerships.
The audit culture is, as Ferguson (2011: 129) argues, ‘a class-based project involving the application of neo-liberal ideas and practices to the public sector’. It provides the perfect medium for sovereign powers, such as those associated with class, to be articulated at micro-sites of governance by structuring, through the use of targets, national standards and performance indicators, the way in which YOT partnerships problematize young offenders’ needs and risks and deliver interventions. So how do YOT professionals, who are deeply inculcated in this culture, contribute to this process? Returning to Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational perspective, YOT practitioners and their partners can be seen as cognizant, ‘reflexive, strategically-calculating’ actors who have access to an assortment of penal expertise which ‘claims to speak the truth’ (Foucault, 1980: 131) about ‘what works’ in their dealings with young offenders. Strategic elements are interposed into these ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1980: 133) which have tangible material consequences in structuring their choices and actions. This is not to suggest that YOT professionals are passive disciples of powerful class interests, but as they bring to bear strategic elements from their knowledgeability into their daily work, they reinforce structural constraints that perpetuate class inequality and socio-economic disadvantage by individualizing and dematerializing young offenders’ needs.
How do the research interviews shed light on how this process takes place? Earlier it was shown how YOT professionals displayed a strong commitment to safeguarding and promoting young people’s welfare, albeit adopting a reconstituted formula that conflated need and risk of reoffending. This was based on an acknowledgement that the young people who they worked with lived chaotic lives, marred by family conflict, disaffection from school, disturbed mental health and sporadic employment. They equally accepted that high levels of socio-economic deprivation aggravated these problems. But despite this apparent empathy, in accord with the prevailing ‘regime of truth’ derived from Farrington’s (2000) ‘risk factor prevention paradigm’, the main reason for young people’s welfare difficulties was nevertheless narrowly interpreted as the result of their personal shortcomings, rather than the structural barriers that might limit their choices and life chances. Common shortcomings mentioned by interviewees related to deficits in young people’s ‘thinking skills’, ‘social cognition’, ‘verbal reasoning’ and ‘decision making’. This analysis echoes the 1970s critique of Freudian inspired social work which redefined social problems as individual pathologies and downplayed structural factors (Langan, 2011).
Parents were deemed to be particularly blameworthy because of their failure to provide young people with adequate support. This assessment, as Langan (2011) points out, was based on moralistic and idealized middle class assumptions about what constituted ‘good parenting’ in sharp contrast to the stereotypical portrayal of the pathological parenting styles of working class families. One of the most pathologizing of the interviewees commented: I blame the parents … it all goes back to them … lots of services for young people even in this time of cuts … I’ve referred so many of my kids but they just didn’t turn up … It’s to do with upbringing, it’s to do with family, the families are just disastrous, they just model irresponsibility and chaos and that’s what their kids become … they’ve been formed in a crucible of dysfunction.
And even one of the more empathetic respondents reflected: From birth they have been raised in families where they haven’t had the love and nurture that one needs in order to grow into an adult and to be able to manage relationships, manage emotions and feelings … a lot of initial problems stem from the family … by the time they reach school the behaviour’s manifested itself into being distracted, not concentrating, having fights, being rude.
The clearest illustration of the individualization and dematerialization of need can be seen in respondents’ stance towards the employment issues faced by young offenders. It was generally accepted that the current economic climate had severely reduced opportunities in the youth labour market, particularly the loss of unskilled jobs in the construction industry which was a popular choice for YOT clients. Reflecting the opinion of many interviewees, one manager commented: ‘unemployment is a big problem that is going through the roof mainly because of the recession … the low level jobs that our young people would expect to go into are cutting right back’ (YOT partnership professional 23). However when asked to what extent young offenders’ employment difficulties related to either the economic constraints caused by the recession or their lack of appropriate attitudes, aspirations and employability skills, the majority chose to blame the latter rather than the former. YOT professionals who blamed the problem on poor attitudes argued along with the following interviewee: ‘there’s definitely a reduction in job opportunities but that’s a bit of a generalization as quite often it’s issues around motivation, timekeeping and unrealistic understanding of what the expectations of the employer will be’ (YOT partnership professional 2). Other YOT professionals who placed greater emphasis on young people’s employability skills commented: the problem is their lack of skills rather than the job market … for our young people the real life options are for them to work in some way for the unofficial economy and just get paid cash in hand to do labouring or some sort of unskilled work, but there is very little call for unskilled work these days … even to work on a building site you have to have a qualification.
Most respondents sought solutions to young offenders’ employability deficits by referring them to alternative training provision to make them ‘employment ready’ by enhancing social skills and work habits. Despite pessimism about the state of the job market for young people and a general dissatisfaction with the quality of the employability programmes and the fact that they rarely led to jobs, the majority of YOT professionals in this research contradictorily continued to talk ‘as if’ it was possible to get young offenders into work if only they had the right motivation and skills. The manner in which YOT professionals pursued improbable objectives, but satisfied the input mentality of the audit culture, mirrors Carlen’s (2008: 1) concept of ‘imaginary penalities’. The following comment illustrates this: We have a project which prepares young people for employment so it helps them to look for a job, fill in an application form, prepare a CV and then we have volunteers who give them a mock interview and get guidance on what to wear … But I was a bit concerned that I might be raising their hopes … getting them to do all this work to get a job and there’s no job out there … But there are some jobs out there so that’s why we continue with it.
The thematic analysis of the interviews with YOT partnership professionals in this section illustrates that they saw that their role was to transform rather than simply manage young offenders’ criminogenic needs in order to reduce their risk of reoffending. But the way in which they individualized and dematerialized these needs meant, as Hannah-Moffat (2005) argues, that the concept of transformation was depoliticized as attention was drawn away from challenging structural constraints to blaming and pathologizing individuals and their families.
The bleak employment prospects of young people in contact with YOT partnerships evidence the point that this vital need is largely unfulfilled by the emphasis on individualization and dematerialization. For example, a report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2011) shows that having a job or educational placement to go to significantly increases young people’s motivation to remain crime free upon release from custody, and much importance is attached to employability skills training during imprisonment. But this training was of little help when less than a third had secured work or an educational placement on release, and less than half of those were still so engaged a month later. This wide gap between engaging and sustaining young offenders in employment is not surprising as Joseph Rowntree research (Tunstall et al., 2012) found that in the current youth labour market disadvantaged young people with limited education have only a small chance of obtaining sustainable employment because of the poor quality work placements available to them. Most were condemned to intermittent spells of employment in poor quality, low paid, insecure jobs interspersed with longer periods of unemployment, or what Shildrick et al. (2012: 193) describe as the ‘low-pay, no pay cycle’. This situation is exacerbated in the case of young offenders by their criminal status. Further, the depoliticization of their needs, rather than tackling the structural problem of reduced employment opportunities, gives them little incentive to remain crime-free and further distances them from the attainment of social justice by reinforcing their experiences of economic marginalization and social exclusion (Garland, 2001).
Concluding comments: YOT partnerships, therapeutic governance and punitive effects
This article has sought to show how penal assemblages operated by YOT partnership professionals, while embracing a hybrid collection of rationalities and technologies to govern ‘risky’ young people, whether they are constituted in terms of ‘neediness’ or likelihood of reoffending or a combination of the two, are ‘classed’. This is not to portray a dystopian vision that these assemblages are oppressive and regulatory as suggested by some critical criminologists (see Hughes, 2007). Rather they are examples of what Moore (2011: 265) has described as an ‘assemblage of therapeutic surveillance’. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power and evidenced by empirical research on Canadian drug treatment courts, Moore (2011: 256) theorizes how surveillance techniques take on many guises, including a nuanced mixture of benevolent care and control which can be ‘at times synonymous’.
Insight into the more negative, coercive side of therapeutic surveillance is provided by theorizing on ‘conditioning’ which Turnbull and Hannah-Moffat (2009: 535) explore through an analysis of the parole conditions imposed on women leaving prison. They view ‘conditioning’ as ‘targeted governance’ which, while providing women on parole with extensive welfare provision to address clearly defined criminogenic needs, is conditional on compliance with a range of stipulations to control and regulate specific shortcomings in their attitudes, behaviour and social situation. Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto (2012) further apply this argument to their research on the ‘conditioning’ experiences of defendants in problem-solving courts. In both contexts failure to comply with conditions is backed up by punitive sanctions. However the expectations underlying these conditions are ‘classed’ in that they are based on normative, middle class standards of ‘responsible self-governance’, such as having stable accommodation and finding a job which in reality are impossible for parolees and defendants to achieve when faced with social circumstances ‘beleaguered by poverty and other forms of structural inequality’ (Turnbull and Hannah-Moffat, 2009: 548).
The YOT practitioners and their partners in this research, like the professionals in the above empirical studies, were committed to ‘therapeutic enterprise’ (Moore, 2007: 42) which was motivated by benevolent and caring intentions. They did not see their jobs as being to discipline, regulate and correct, but genuinely sought to alleviate and transform the welfare problems facing young people in conflict with the law. As one respondent commented: ‘the team is very passionate, dedicated, they really believe in getting young people back on track’ (YOT partnership professional 14). Yet while young people under the supervision of YOTs are provided with wide-ranging social welfare support to target specific criminogenic needs, this support is ‘conditional’ on their compliance with requirements which are intended to responsibilize them to negotiate their own needs in order to reduce the likelihood of reoffending. The application of the therapeutic governance debate to this research bears a striking resemblance to the radical critique of social work in the 1970s which challenged the use of welfare measures to legitimate repressive regulation (Langan, 2011). Ironically Phoenix (2009: 114) argues that in the risk era there has been a ‘return to repressive welfarism’ as assessments of high social need are used to justify more intensive interference in young people’s lives to manage their risk of reoffending.
However, failure to remain crime-free and not engaging in pro-social behaviour has, as Moore (2007: 42) argues, ‘decidedly punitive effects’. In England and Wales, the Youth Rehabilitation Order is one of the main sentences in the youth court and 18 different requirements can be attached to it. Undoubtedly fuelled by the audit and performance management culture, since 2002 the incidence of return to court for non-compliance on all orders has doubled, resulting in a sharp rise in the number of young people ending up in custody for breach (Bateman, 2011). But as this article has shown the requirements or conditions in court orders are ‘classed’ in that they are based on narrowly defined ‘individualized’ interpretations of need which downplay and depoliticize the wider social and material constraints that make them difficult for young people to achieve. Yet when young people fail to comply it is seen as a consequence of personal shortcomings, and the resulting intensification of supervision in the community or time in custody simply reinforces and deepens 3 their experiences of criminalization, socio-economic marginalization and social injustice.