Lesley McAra

The usual suspects? Street-life, young people and the police

This article explores childrens experience of policing. Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it argues that the police may be unfairly targeting certain categories of young people. Evidence is presented on the ways in which police working rules (relating to previous ‘form’ and suspiciousness) serve to construct a population of permanent suspects among children. While street-life places youngsters at greater risk of adversarial contact, ‘availability’ by itself, cannot explain this aspect of policing practice. The police appear to make distinctions about the respectable and unrespectable, children who can be accorded leniency and those who cannot; distinctions which are based as much on socio-economic status as serious and persistent offending. The article concludes that the police act less as legal subjects and more as class subjects in their interactions with young people and that the policing of children may serve to sustain and reproduce the very problems which the institution ostensibly attempts to contain or eradicate.

Youth crime and justice: Key messages from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime

Based on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, this article challenges the evidence-base which policy-makers have drawn on to justify the evolving models of youth justice across the UK (both in Scotland and England/Wales). It argues that to deliver justice, systems need to address four key facts about youth crime: serious offending is linked to a broad range of vulnerabilities and social adversity; early identification of at-risk children is not an exact science and runs the risk of labelling and stigmatizing; pathways out of offending are facilitated or impeded by critical moments in the early teenage years, in particular school exclusion; and diversionary strategies facilitate the desistance process.The article concludes that the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems to deliver justice for children (due to its founding commitment to decriminalization and destigmatization). However, as currently implemented, it appears to be failing many young people.

Crime, Criminology and Criminal Justice in Scotland

This survey of Scotland reviews: core Scottish criminal justice institutions; statistical trends in crime and punishment over the past 40 years; the history and politics of Scottish criminal justice; and the emergence of a distinctively Scottish criminology. In particular, it highlights the cross-cutting modalities of power and identity that have shaped both institutional and policy development and made strong linkages between knowledge and politics.

Modelling penal transformation

Using a systems analytical framework, this article explains how and why the Scottish penal system has followed a different trajectory to a number of its European and US counterparts. It highlights the manner in which penal-welfare values have continued to dominate all aspects of policy and practice in the face of the social and cultural factors that have been identified as prompting significant shifts in the nature and function of penality in other jurisdictions. The article argues that pressures for change within Scotland have been mediated by a number of localized political and cultural processes (relating specifically to elite policy networks and the characteristics of Scottish civic culture). These processes have facilitated a degree of boundary closure and self-reflexive modes of communication within the Scottish system and it is these which, to date, have mitigated against the sense of structural and cultural strain driving transformation elsewhere. The Scottish case suggests: that the environments which penal systems inhabit are complex and turbulent phenomena, containing a range of competing pressures with differential rather than uniform effects; and that small-scale penal systems have particular features which make them better able to ride out such turbulence without fundamental damage to their central principles and purposes.

Negotiated order: The groundwork for a theory of offending pathways:

This article explores the role which formal and informal regulatory orders play in the development of offender identity. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it argues that the cultural practices of formal orders (such as those imposed by schools and the police) and informal orders (such as the rules governing peer interactions) mirror each other in respect of their fundamental dynamics – animated primarily by an inclusionary–exclusionary imperative. Formal orders differentiate between categories of young people on the basis of class and suspiciousness. Informal orders differentiate between individuals on the basis of adherence to group norms, territorial sovereignty, and gender appropriate demeanour. Being excluded by either set of orders undermines the capacity of the individual to negotiate, limits autonomy and constrains choice. This renders the individual more likely to absorb identities ascribed to them with damaging consequences in terms of offending behaviour and the individual’s sense of self.

Review Symposium on Nicola Lacey, The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies: Global politics and local culture A response to Nicola Lacey

Key aims of Nicola Lacey’s book, The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008), are: (1) to explain the divergence that is evident across a range of western jurisdictions between countries which have sustained a commitment to inclusionary penal policies and those which have adopted a more exclusionary and punitive approach; and (2) to identify the institutional preconditions for a penal policy which offers an effective response to the problem of crime but which at the same time can guarantee ‘the democratic membership and entitlements of offenders’ (2008: 7–8). In this response, I am going to argue that Lacey’s work is significant, not so much because of her substantive account of policy variation, but more because her book raises important methodological and epistemological questions about how we should undertake comparative research (in particular what the appropriate object of study or level of analysis should be); and because it raises important normative questions about the purposes of penological scholarship (specifically who or what this scholarship is for). My response is constructed around three interrelated points of contention in the book (which I elaborate upon in the sections which follow):

Criminological Knowledge and the Politics of Impact: Implications for Researching Juvenile Justice

This chapter explores the politics of engaging in a research agenda aimed at maximising the impact of criminological knowledge on policy and practice. It is based on a case study of Scottish penal developments, with specific reference to the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, a longitudinal programme of research which has had demonstrable influence on the nature and function of Scottish juvenile justice (and beyond) (Howard League 2014). The chapter builds on an article first published in the British Journal of Criminology (McAra 2016), which highlighted a major dissonance between policy discourse on youth crime in Scotland and the decision-making practices of key institutions within the juvenile and adult justice systems. In the article I concluded that, for maximum impact, criminologists needed to engage with and challenge both political and institutional practice: a multi-level approach to transformative action.

Global Politics and Local Culture

Key aims of Nicola Lacey’s book, The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008), are: (1) to explain the divergence that is evident across a range of western jurisdictions between countries which have sustained a commitment to inclusionary penal policies and those which have adopted a more exclusionary and punitive approach; and (2) to identify the institutional preconditions for a penal policy which offers an effective response to the problem of crime but which at the same time can guarantee ‘the democratic membership and entitlements of offenders’ (2008: 7–8). In this response, I am going to argue that Lacey’s work is significant, not so much because of her substantive account of policy variation, but more because her book raises important methodological and epistemological questions about how we should undertake comparative research (in particular what the appropriate object of study or level of analysis should be); and because it raises important normative questions about the purposes of penological scholarship (specifically who or what this scholarship is for). My response is constructed around three interrelated points of contention in the book (which I elaborate upon in the sections which follow):

Global Politics and Local Culture: A Response to Nicola Lacey

Key aims of Nicola Lacey’s book, The Prisoners’ Dilemma (2008), are: (1) to explain the divergence that is evident across a range of western jurisdictions between countries which have sustained a commitment to inclusionary penal policies and those which have adopted a more exclusionary and punitive approach; and (2) to identify the institutional preconditions for a penal policy which offers an effective response to the problem of crime but which at the same time can guarantee ‘the democratic membership and entitlements of offenders’ (2008: 7–8). In this response, I am going to argue that Lacey’s work is significant, not so much because of her substantive account of policy variation, but more because her book raises important methodological and epistemological questions about how we should undertake comparative research (in particular what the appropriate object of study or level of analysis should be); and because it raises important normative questions about the purposes of penological scholarship (specifically who or what this scholarship is for). My response is constructed around three interrelated points of contention in the book (which I elaborate upon in the sections which follow):