Abstract
Max Travers sets out to describe the nature of professional work around sentencing young people through an ethnographic study of three jurisdictions. The data presented in the book are derived from research conducted in three Australian states: Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. The book presents observational research conducted in magistrates’ courts in each of the states alongside interviews with practitioners working in or servicing the courts. Travers states his objective as portraying the realities of the law in action, revealing messy contingencies and everyday accomplishment. To paraphrase Garfinkel (1967), his project is to describe the ‘ad-hocing’ of sentencing decisions – to demystify the court’s decision-making processes in order to show that in practice, rules demand to be interpreted creatively.
Travers presents the complexities of sentencing by first giving an overview of the developments in juvenile justice in Western countries over the past four decades (Chapter 2). He provides an accessible summary to the punishment–rehabilitation continuum and the rise of restorative justice. He then provides a summary of the roles of the various professionals involved in the sentencing of children (Chapter 4). Befitting Travers’ explicit commitment to reorienting criminology toward a greater interpretive appreciation in ‘an age of evaluation’ (p. 12) he then utilises the categorisation practices of professionals-in-action to demarcate the detailed findings chapters; Chapters 5–7 cover ‘minor offenders’, ‘repeat offenders’ and ‘vulnerable offenders’ in turn. In doing so, Travers amply demonstrates how professional groups collaborate to construct and then respond to different classifications of offender. Vivid examples of cases are provided throughout to illustrate the court proceedings, making use of significant extracts of court transcripts to bring to life the everyday workings of the children’s court. The book ends with a consideration of the practical implications of his work and the methodological challenges of undertaking naturalistic fieldwork within a discipline which seems to increasingly adopt positivistic understandings of the social.
The real strength and uniqueness of the book lies in its explicit theoretical and methodological challenge to criminology as a discipline. Indeed, with support from research which explores the accomplishment of caseness in professional practice (e.g. White, 2002), the book utilises an array of material to demonstrate that offending behaviours are interpreted by how young people engage with various professionals and how they perform within the court setting. In this regard, the book explores how the presentation and behaviour of the young person is interpreted, debated and frozen by institutional categorisation emerging from interagency discussion. Ample use is made of vignettes from court transcripts and interviews with professionals to explore these processes of habitualisation within a morally contested sphere. Travers’ analysis of the relationship between legal rules, professional heuristics and their application in specific settings leads to the re-imagining of sentencing decisions as culturally-imbued and locally situated accomplishments.
His careful descriptive work reminds readers of Cicourel’s (1968) fieldwork of two police forces, whilst Travers’ interest in exploring professional practice as account-giving chimes with Lynch’s (1997) interest in the place of ‘over-hearing’ in decision-making within public settings. These ties to ethnographic and ethnomethodological works underline the book’s interpretive methodology equipping Travers to garner rich accounts which trouble taken-for-granted notions of simplistic rule-following within statutory agencies. Travers reveals instead the heady interplay of local cultures for understanding the causes of offending (deprivation or deviancy), practical constraint (the lack of available support services) and the need for practitioners to provide an address to account for themselves in specific forms.
Travers breaks ranks with what he argues to be a preoccupation with aping the natural sciences through criminology’s quantitative turn, arguing, ‘those wanting to know how the cases have been selected, with possible concerns about representativeness or in the belief that more is better, are asking the wrong questions’ (p. 210). His is a study of messy practices and difficult decisions, an exploration as to how sentencing decisions are practically and politically accomplished. To return to Garfinkel (1967: 22), the challenge the book sets for the discipline of criminology is to re-emphasise the place of meaning-making as a central driver for the research endeavour and not, ‘as though ad hoc features in their use were a nuisance’.