Monica Barry

Youth offending in transition: The search for social recognition

Taking a new approach to youth crime, this book argues that the transition from childhood to adulthood can be an isolating and disempowering experience for young people. Children and young people are inherently vulnerable because of their age and status – they are a minority group, with the potential for being exploited, discriminated against, dominated and disrespected by adults. Youth Offending in Transition explores how their treatment by adult society may lead young people to resort to crime as a means of gaining respect from their peers.

Youth transitions: from offending to desistance

This article examines youth transitions and youth offending in tandem. It argues that the transition to adulthood is heavily implicated in the fact that most offending occurs in the youth phase. Drawing on a study of 20 male and 20 female persistent young offenders in Scotland, it explores young peoples desire for integration with others in the transition phases – with their families in childhood, with their friends in youth, and with the wider society in adulthood. During the youth phase, much of that integration comes from offending itself, whereas when more legitimate opportunities and sources of recognition are offered to them in early adulthood, desistance is more likely to occur.

On the cusp of recognition: Using critical theory to promote desistance among young offenders

Theories of desistance increasingly acknowledge the need to engage with political and economic discourses beyond the criminal justice system. This article turns to the critical theory of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and others to explore the relevance to criminology of the concepts of recognition and redistribution. Interview data from a Scottish study of youth offending and desistance illustrate the potential of these ideas in promoting desistance among young people in transition. The article concludes that desistance requires the restructuring of wider economic and social policy to ensure social justice for marginalised young people.

Desistance by Design: Offenders' Reflections on Criminal Justice Theory, Policy and Practice

This article highlights the views and advice of offenders in Scotland about what helps and hinders young people generally in the process of desistance, why interventions may or may not encourage desistance and what criminal justice and other agencies can do to alleviate the problems which may result in offending. The findings suggest that probation-style supervisory relationships with workers are still the key means to promote desistance but given the fact that offenders perceive desistance to be ‘by design’ rather than ‘by default’, there still needs to be a greater emphasis placed by criminal justice and wider agencies on the structural constraints to a legal, conventional and integrated lifestyle.

‘I realised that I wasn't alone’: the views and experiences of young carers from a social capital perspective

The concept of social capital is very much an ‘adult’ concept, created by adults for adults, with children as the passive recipients of, primarily, parental social capital. The concept has been broken down into three particular subcategories – bonding (getting by), bridging (getting on) and linking (getting around). However, these subcategories equally do not relate readily to children and young people nor to different groups of young people. Young carers, for example, are a hidden population and their circumstances are relatively unknown, not least in terms of their social networks and access to social capital within the confines of their caring role. This article draws on a research study of 20 young carers in Scotland to explore the views and experiences of this particular group about their social networks and experiences of relationships with others, such as the family, friends and teachers. It concludes that young carers tend to keep their friends, family, and community networks separate from each other, and coupled with their perceived resilience and desire for self-sufficiency, this separation and protection of their individual social networks may result in reduced access to social capital in terms of getting on rather than getting by.

Managing high risk offenders in the community: Compliance, cooperation and consent in a climate of concern

It is increasingly accepted that the change process underpinning the intended outcomes of community supervision, namely community safety, social rehabilitation and reintegration, cannot be achieved without the service user’s active involvement and participation in the process. Their consent, compliance and cooperation is therefore necessary to achieving these outcomes and yet, when it comes to very high risk sexual and violent offenders, in the pursuit of community safety, control oriented, preventative practices predominate over change focused, participatory approaches. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 professionals and 26 service users to explore how, under the auspices of MAPPA, the supervisory process is enacted and experienced, and the extent and means through which it affects people’s willingness to accept or invest in not only the process but also the purpose of supervision. It is argued that how the process of community supervision is experienced and what it comprises not only shapes the outcomes of supervision but also the nature of consent, compliance and cooperation. We conclude by advocating for more participatory processes and practices to promote service users’ active engagement in, and ownership of, the process of change, and in that, the realisation of both the normative dimensions and intended outcomes of community supervision.

Professional decision making and women offenders: Containing the chaos?

This article draws on the findings from research undertaken in south-east Scotland in 2008 which sought to identify the characteristics of female offenders and to document the views of policy makers and practitioners regarding the experiences of women involved in the Scottish criminal justice system. Despite Scotland having retained a stronger ‘welfare’ focus than elsewhere in the UK (e.g. McAra, 2008), this is not reflected in the treatment of women who offend, with the rate of female imprisonment having almost doubled in the last ten years and community-based disposals falling short of a welfare-oriented system. This article explores why the treatment that women offenders receive in the criminal justice system may be harsh and disproportionate both in relation to their offending and in relation to the treatment of men. It is argued that interventions with women need to be initiated earlier in their cycle of offending and at an earlier stage in the criminal justice process but also that the wide-ranging health, welfare, financial and behavioural needs of women who offend cannot be met solely within an increasingly risk-averse and punitive criminal justice environment.

The Failure of Recall to Prison: Early Release, Front-Door and Back-Door Sentencing and the Revolving Prison Door in Scotland

This article seeks to explain the reasons for the sharp rise in prison recall rates in Scotland. It argues that recall practices need to be understood not as a technical corner of the justice system, but as part of a wider analysis of the politics of sentencing and release policy. While there are sound reasons for a policy of ‘early release’ (incentivizing good behavior and enabling the resettlement of prisoners), in practice early release has increasingly been used as a tool to try to limit the growth in the custodial population. Unable to control prison numbers through the ‘front door’ (judicial sentencing and bail/remand), successive governments have increasingly relied on early release as a surreptitious way of, in effect, re-sentencing prisoners. We argue that this political strategy is ultimately self-defeating, not least in feeding public cynicism about the penal system and community supervision in particular. This article reviews the changing legislative, policy and practice landscape of the regulation of non-compliance and recall practice, and draws on the desistance literature to illustrate how offender-supervisor relationships can be undermined by recall policies which threaten the legitimacy of both the supervisory relationship and the conditions of supervision orders.

Rational Choice and Responsibilisation in Youth Justice in Scotland: Whose Evidence Matters in Evidence‐Based Policy?

Rational choice and responsibilisation of young offenders are concepts increasingly informing youth justice policy in Scotland, yet there is evidence from both academics and young offenders that such approaches are ineffective. This article explores the views of young people in care and contrasts their evidence with that from Rational Choice Theory (RCT), elements of which are increasingly influencing youth justice policy. Government policy now focuses not on desistance but on the containment and behaviour modification of young offenders, strategies which no longer deliver justice but anticipate and modify so�?called ‘rational’ thinking amongst young people.

Inequality and punitivism in late modern societies: Scandinavian exceptionalism revisited

In The Culture of Control, Garland (2001) suggests that whilst not inevitable, it is likely that late modern societies will experience increased punitivism. Certain critics have questioned to what extent Scandinavian countries should be included in that assumption, given their unique welfare systems and public/media reactions to crime, and this article comments on one in particular — Green (2008), in a comparison of child murder by children in England and Norway. We argue that punitivism is indeed increasing in Norway along the lines already identified in Anglo-American countries, albeit at the slower rate acknowledged by Green. However, the relevant benchmark for testing Garlands thesis is not only to compare between countries but also to look for changes within countries. We argue that there is a link between late modernity and increasing punitivism in Norway, that the main cause of the comparative ‘uniqueness’ of Norway is its low rates of inequality and that ‘cultural’ explanations, though relevant, are secondary.