Abstract
In great empirical and theoretical detail, Negotiating Class in Youth Justice explores how class influences relations between different actors and stakeholders in the field of criminal justice. At the core of Jasmina Arnež’s argument is a claim that class has been left out of much contemporary criminological research. There is also a suggestion that Bourdieu’s theories, combined with some others, allow for a better understanding of one of the classic topics in criminology: young people who are in trouble with the law.
The first chapter sets out the socioeconomic and political conditions of these “behaviourally challenging young people” in the UK. The emphasis is on social problems, failed policies, and the way that developmental and intergenerational explanations of delinquency have dominated family and crime control. The second chapter lays out the main theoretical synthesis, namely a combination of Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and field, and the associated relational understanding of class, with Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of lay normativity and Sayer’s moral understandings of class. The next five chapters explore in detail the different ways that class operates in action among different groups and in the interaction between them. Data is drawn from an impressive set of research with young people, their parents, and practitioners across nine settings. It includes participant observation, qualitative interviews, and focus group discussions. Topics that are studied vary from responses to manifestations of class, the negotiation of childrearing difficulties, classed distortions in professional responses including from the police and social workers, discrepancies in decision making according to class, and organizational and institutional pressure and rhetoric.
The book is theoretically informed, and Arnež dares to use big theory and to combine traditions that are usually seen as being in opposition to each other. There are few shortcuts, and the study is carefully researched and impressive in terms of the amount of empirical data. It is also written with exemplary sympathy and understanding for the participants, be it the youths, their parents, or the professionals. The presentation of long quotes that gives statements context and full meaning can also be seen to respect participants by giving their words extra weight. These long quotes also allow for more ambivalence and complexity because readers make up their own mind about the interpretation of data.
The book has already, rightly, been celebrated through the award of the British Society of Criminology Book Prize for 2023. Rachel Vipond, Chair of the committee comments that the book is “rich, powerful, emotive and uncomfortable reading at times”. While there is no doubt that the book has all these qualities (and more), in what follows I offer a narrative reading that seeks to draw out some of the text’s further insights. Following Bakhtin’s ideas of intertextuality, my suggestion is that Arnež’s book is not one but several books—all combined in a polyphony of somewhat different voices. In identifying and bringing these voices into dialogue, I hope to explore not only what the book says, but what is going on between the lines.
The first voice is a critical criminology one. In this narrative mode Arnež rightly criticizes contemporary society for having a long history of repressing the working class and for having a strong bias against some marginalized sections of this population. This voice is particularly strong in the first parts of the book. As a good critical criminologist, she is both normative and uncompromising, producing a compelling critique of class-discriminatory policing and the influence of life-course, self-control, and other versions of “mainstream criminology” in policy and professional practices. These academic traditions and the way they have been applied sidestepped the more important socioeconomic and political factors in discussions about young people in trouble with the law.
Another voice is the one of a pragmatic theory builder. Here the narrative tone is more compromising, and the reader gets the impression that most theories should be included, and that every perspective has something to offer. The argument is that bringing together different perspectives makes the analysis more comprehensive and complex. Arnež, for example, states that people can at times act differently from their class-interest (in accordance with Boltanski and Thévenot but largely in opposition to Bourdieu’s underlying logic). Seeking agreement for larger principles that everyone can agree upon is considered an important part of human interaction. The voice of the pragmatic theory builder is not always seamlessly combined with the voice of the critical criminologist. It is rather unclear why some perspectives are treated more generously than others. For example, could some insights from life-course and developmental criminology have been included in the theoretical synthesis and if not, why not?
The third voice is a more empirical one that stays exceptionally close to participants’ voices. In this narrative mode quotes are regarded as truth telling, which may also partly explain their unusual length. When participants say something in line with a certain theory or perspective this is seen as confirming it. For example, when participants say that police pick up more people with a working-class background, or that privileged people can get away with more, this confirms theories based on similar observations. Or when participants say that they can see beyond class, it means they can. Needless to say, there is some friction between such an approach to participants’ voices and the way data is treated by critical criminologists and scholars that synthetize theory.
The fourth and final voice is the most original one, but also the one that is the least spelled out. It follows from the previous one, but demonstrates more explicitly that youths, parents, and practitioners alike seem to be aware of many criminological ideas and insights that exist in the field of youth justice, especially the more critical ones. This includes, most importantly, the role of class and other structural factors for crime and behavior problems, the class-based discriminatory practices by police and social workers, and the many other ways cognitive biases influence how young people are treated in the criminal justice field.
The existence of such a lay or folk criminology is interesting, important, and raises key questions. If theories trickle down from the academic field to the practice field, it suggests that criminological and sociological research has real societal impact. A follow-up question would be how the presence of such a repertoire of (diverse and sometimes contradictory) critical stories might change practices in a field. However, if these criminological insights were already out there among youths, parents, and professionals, the question is rather if there is a point in criminology at all. It should at least make criminologists reflect more on what their role should be. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in between, but these would certainly be interesting topics to explore more.
So, do all the different qualities and voices in the book come together as one overall argument? My answer would be both yes and no. At its best, it allows for ambiguity and openness, enabling readers to make up their own mind; the book combines social criticism, theory syntheses, theory checking and represents an excellent example of the importance of studying crime storytelling. In parts the different voices join in a harmonious and fruitful polyphony. At other times the different voices and the overall academic project seem to point in somewhat different directions.
Regardless, in a time where larger theoretical and empirical studies seem to be increasingly outcompeted by shorter formats, Negotiating Class in Youth Justice is highly warranted. The book is not only a must-read for scholars and students of youth justice but has the potential to become a contemporary classic and point of reference in traditions as different as Bourdieusian and class-oriented criminology and studies of lay or folk criminology.