Janet Jamieson

Youth Crime, the 'Parenting Deficit' and State Intervention: A Contextual Critique

On 1 June 2000 a new court order was implemented in England and Wales. The Parenting Order provided for the extension of state intervention (primarily through youth justice agencies) into ‘family life’. We have recently completed research with regard to youth justice parenting initiatives, and during the course of our research, our interest in, and concern with, the broader question of ‘parenting’, ‘parental responsibility’ and the ‘parenting deficit’ consolidated. This article sets out our principal concerns by locating the new statutory powers within their wider context. By tracing their historical antecedents, theoretical foundations and policy expressions we aim to critique the latest developments in state intervention. Similarly, by analysing the material circumstances of the parents who are targeted by such intervention, and reviewing the means by which children, young people and parents conceive such intervention, we argue that the new powers essentially comprise an extension of punitiveness underpinned by stigmatising and pathologising constructions of working class families.

New Labour, Youth Justice and the Question of ‘Respect’

The launch of the ‘Respect Task Force’, on 2 September 2005, signals the New Labour governments ongoing electoral preoccupation with the behaviour of young people. Reflecting on how the ‘respect’ agenda fits into New Labours overall youth justice project, in England and Wales, this paper argues that the governments willingness to define, legislate and sanction with regard to those responsibilities it deems essential to the membership rights of ‘law-abiding’ society is unlikely to engender positive outcomes. Rather it is contended that the continuing commitment to authoritarian penal populism within youth justice rhetoric and policy is likely to prove alienating, damaging and ultimately counterproductive.

Cannabis Use in an English Community: Acceptance, Anxieties, and the Liminality of Drug Prohibition

Cannabis occupies an ambiguous social, cultural, economic, and legal position, meaning that the way communities construct, interact with, and interpret drug markets is a complicated and uncertain process. This article seeks to explain these ambiguities by investigating the place of cannabis use in a UK borough, drawing on qualitative empirical data collated from a sample (N = 68) of practitioners, local residents, cannabis users, and their families. In doing so, the article employs the concept of liminality (whereby individuals and spaces occupy a position at both ends of a threshold) to explore how community behaviors and norms relate to issues of space, harm, and drug policy. The article contextualizes the position of cannabis use within the fieldwork site, exploring a series of competing contradictions that divided participants between the rhetoric and reality of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition suggests cannabis use to be dangerous, which prompted concern. However, the lived reality of prohibition for residents sat in stark juxtaposition: The drug was used commonly and publicly, was effectively decriminalized, and its use (reluctantly) accommodated. This malaise placed residents within what is described here as the liminality of drug prohibition, in which notions of the licit and illicit became blurred and whereby the illegality of cannabis augmented anxieties yet simultaneously proved a barrier to addressing them. In conclusion, the current study provides further evidence of prohibitionist drug policy proliferating rather than mitigating drug-related harms.

Book Review: How Offenders Transform their LivesVeyseyBMChristianJMartinezDJ (eds) How Offenders Transform their Lives, Willan Publishing, Cullompton, 2009, £24.99 Pb, ISBN 978-1-84392-508-8.

academics, as a means of denying the politicality of their neoliberal agendas in order for the contentious to be re-presented as truthful, apolitical, and merely the extension of efficient administration of human life, in turn displacing proper political engagement, the role of the public criminologist is presumably to inform within the rules of this neoliberal game. But in challenging times the most challenging interventions often come from those willing to ‘think outside the box’ (to appropriate some of the moronic, insidious ‘managerialize’ which can so easily inflect one’s vocabulary in these neoliberal times). Scraton’s Power, Conflict and Criminalisation is one such intervention; a passionately written work that lays bare the central politicality and contingency of a range of harmful social relations and problems that are so routinely dismissed as surface inscriptions of individual pathology in neoliberal times. Scraton’s book is, then, centrally concerned with the politicality through which such ‘common sense’ neo-liberal truths are reproduced. If the logic of the public criminologist can often imply that the solution to the problem of post-politics lies in post-political technologies, Scraton’s text instead diagnoses – albeit implicitly and without any explicit conception of the political – a political alternative to the problematic. The book is appealingly written and engaging throughout, and with stylistic quirks of its own: how to read its self-referentialism? Actually, I found this aspect of the book refreshing and honest; a fresh alternative to the problem of selfhood in neoliberal times – no stale, formulaic self-work through reflection, but a writer placing himself within the text. This writerly technique may be unorthodox within the discipline, but it ultimately works. Some ethnographic traditions can be so voyeuristic and fetishistic of Others and objects of study that it was refreshing to see an author place himself and his own work within the text, particularly given that the book is at the end of the day an exploration of the politics of knowledge production. In challenging times, Scraton has produced a timely and far-reaching work that, as other reviewers have noted, is centrally about praxis. More than this, Scraton’s book is a centrally political intervention, and in an age in which the insipid and asinine lexicon of the neoliberal consensus increasingly displaces critical vocabularies, it is all the more important an intervention for that. This stimulating, challenging and unapologetic text is not a book that everybody will love, though for its originality, its capacity to prompt and provoke it is one I feel the better for having read, and one that opens wider questions of interest to us all in the fields of critical social science research.