Christine Piper

Sentencing and punishment : the quest for justice

PART A: SENTENCING PRINCIPLES AND POLICIES 1. Introduction: New Penology and New Policies 2. Just Constraints 3. Just Deserts: From the Criminal Justice Act 1991 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 4. Utility and Deterrence 5. Risk and Danger 6. Making Amends 7. Dealing with Minors: Continuity and Change PART B: PUNISHING OFFENDERS 8. Fair Impact? 9. Punishing Youth 10. Just Punishment in the Community 11. Justice in the Modern Prison 12. Equality and Difference in the Experience of Imprisonment CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Social Exclusion and the Welfare of the Child

The ‘best interests of the child’ is a pervasive notion in law, and the welfare discourse within which it acquires meaning has become increasingly dominant in our culture’s stock of ‘common sense’. Because this discourse positions children as dependent and vulnerable, it underpins images of children that can perpetuate the social, legal, and political marginalization of children. This paper uses the area of children and divorce to explore the ways in which this exclusion of children persists alongside both an ostensible commitment to the welfare of children and an increasingly strong rights discourse. We argue that constructions of the child as victim have both political and psychological dimensions: they serve to legitimize state intervention into ‘private’ family life, and they help assuage social anxieties about the alleged demise of ‘the family’. At an individual level, they facilitate a process whereby children can become the repository for feelings with which adults cannot cope. We then suggest that two fundamental changes are required in order to address children’s exclusion: the development of a more psychodynamically informed view of personhood and a new image of the child to inform policies.

Parent Abuse: Can Law Be the Answer?

This article reviews the different forms of legal interventions which may be available to address parent abuse. It seeks to examine the evidence as to which are actually used currently and the problems which are inherent in them. We do this both by examining the statutory basis of the existing potential legal remedies and reported cases relating to those provisions, and by drawing on evidence from a small-scale study of relevant professional workers in one city. We conclude that while recourse to the police, and hence potentially the criminal justice system, is most frequent in practice, the criminal justice system is not suited to tackling the issue. Other interventions, such as anti-social behaviour orders and injunctions, also reveal problems. Law struggles to find an effective response to such a complex problem. Notwithstanding the acknowledged limits of law in changing behaviour, we argue that law could be used more effectively to reduce the incidence and impact of parent abuse.

Who are these Youths? Language in the Service of Policy

In the 1990s policy relating to children and young people who offend developed as a result of the interplay of political imperatives and populist demands. The ‘responsibilisation’ of young offenders and the ‘no excuses’ culture of youth justice have been ‘marketed’ through a discourse which evidences linguistic changes. This article focuses on one particular area of policy change, that relating to the prosecutorial decision, to show how particular images of children were both reflected and constructed through a changing selection of words to describe the non-adult suspect and offender. In such minutiae of discourse can be found not only the signifiers of public attitudinal and policy change, but also the means by which undesirable policy developments can be challenged.

Book Review: Youth Policy and Social Inclusion: Critical Debates with Young People

rehabilitation, but were uneasy with the spiritual language which some advocates of restorative justice use to argue for its potential to bring about change in offenders. The concluding chapters review the findings in the light of the concepts introduced in Chapter 2, and the potential for reforming community penalties so that they can communicate both disapproval and the possibility of constructive change in offenders’ lives. Although Rex is explicitly concerned with the adult criminal justice system, her arguments seem equally applicable to youth justice, and the book – while unfortunately available only as an expensive hardback – is well worth the attention of readers of this journal. The effort to explore the relevance of penal theorising to practical decision-making represents a major advance from abstract pronouncements about ‘principles of sentencing’ that have little or no relation to real world sentencing or even to the letter of the criminal law. Sue Rex has recently moved from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology to become Senior Policy Officer at the Home Office, and it is to be hoped that she can bring her ideas to bear on the development of policy on community penalties.