Ross Fergusson

Making Sense of the Melting Pot: Multiple Discourses in Youth Justice Policy

The paper proposes a framework for politically-informed analysis of policy processes, to enhance understanding of the inconsistencies of youth justice policies. It begins from the importance of political discourse and argues that multiple discourses reflect political tensions which produce inconsistency. It focuses on the punitive detention of young people, and the paradoxical disjunctures between policy and practice in the 1980s. A second example concerns young peoples rights. These analyses highlight the importance of theorizing differences between the rhetorical, the codificational and the implementational modes of the policy process, particularly with regard to governance, and the power of frontline staff.

Discourses of Exclusion: Reconceptualising Participation Amongst Young People

This paper considers how varying discourses of social exclusion have informed policies regarding young peoples participation in education, training and employment. Drawing on a cohort study of over 800 16–18 olds, the research suggests that the binary categories of exclusion/inclusion, and marginalisation/participation grow less and less adequate as parameters for understanding changing patterns of post-16 participation and non-participation. It is argued that a range of statutory, structural, financial and social pressures to normalise participation produce forms of inclusion that are ephemeral and that carry very different meanings from those implied in discourses of exclusion. The paper gives a brief overview of the changing context in which participation needs to be understood, then presents evidence and analysis of young peoples trajectories after 16. Some interpretations are offered of a wide range of meanings of participation, which suggest that old notions of transition to independence are unsustainable for a substantial minority of young people, and that patterns of participation are increasingly complex, have multiple significances, and carry the potential to mask inequalities and new forms of exclusion. These readings have major implications for how we conceptualise social exclusion, and for policy developments associated with it.

Against disengagement: non-participation as an object of governance

The discourse of disengagement has achieved ascendancy just as young people’s employment prospects have declined – in many countries to crisis levels. Conceptualising and interpreting young people’s non-participation in dominant modes of education, training and employment has been a preoccupation of academics, policymakers and journalists. This paper offers a critical analysis of the discourse of disengagement. It queries the primacy of participation as the dominant policy response to mass youth unemployment, identifies some paradoxes of this policy priority, and locates them within a political-economic analysis of youth unemployment. It proposes a view of prevailing policy responses as a mode of governance of problematised populations of young ‘non-participants’. By juxtaposing two ostensibly incompatible analytical frameworks, the paper draws attention to some potentially illuminating tensions between materialist and governmentalist analyses of dominant policy responses to ‘disengagement’, and considers how these might be exploited in researching and reconceptualising non-participation.

Hearing new voices: Re-viewing Youth Justice Policy through Practitioners’ Relationships with Young People

The relationship between young people and practitioners is the centrepiece of youth justice provision, yet little research-based knowledge has accumulated on its minutiae. After reviewing reforms affecting professional discretion, the article draws on the concepts of dyadic relationships and praxis to reinvigorate a research agenda aimed at delineating a more nuanced understanding of practice relationships. Drawing on practice wisdom from across related social work fields, we argue that centralizing the practitioner-young person relationship remains the key to successful practice and thus needs greater, more detailed research attention. These claims are supported with a number of pilot interviews with youth justice workers about successful interventions that complement and extend related studies. The article concludes with suggestions for research to enable joint activity between young people and practitioners to ‘rethink’ youth justice.

Risk, responsibilities and rights: Reassessing the ‘economic causes of crime’ thesis in a recession

This article explores competing accounts of an apparent inversion of the previously prevailing relationship between young people’s unemployment and the incidence of youth offending at a time of economic recession. It begins by highlighting the faltering association between unemployment and offending, and considers the paradoxical implications for risk-based methodologies in youth justice practice. The article then assesses explanations for the changing relationship that suggest that youth justice policies have successfully broken the unemployment–offending link; and alternatively that delayed effects of recession have yet to materialize, by reference to the work of four inter-governmental organizations and to youth protests beyond the UK. In place of ever more intensive risk analyses, the article then focuses on the adverse effects of unemployment on social cohesion, and proposes a rights-based approach to youth justice that recognizes the growing disjuncture between the rights afforded to young people and the responsibilities expected of them.

Business, as usual: the policy priorities of the World Bank’s discourses on youth unemployment and the global financial crisis

This article undertakes a detailed analysis of the formative role of the World Bank in the framing of youth unemployment. It charts the World Banks emergence as a powerful political actor in this policy field and identifies the ideational content of its policy discourses on the causes of youth unemployment and responses to it. Four principal themes are identified: skills deficits; wage regulation; the “demographication” of explanations for burgeoning youth unemployment; and connections between youth unemployment, criminal activity and social disorder. The discussion highlights significant evidence of neo-liberal continuity and reinvention in World Bank discourses as its normative and ideational frameworks are extended to new terrains of analysis in ways that infer links between youth unemployment and individual deficits of the unemployed.

Young people, welfare and crime: governing non-participation

Mass youth unemployment is now endemic and almost ubiquitous in middle-income, rich and poor countries alike. This book re-interprets the changing relationship between young people’s non-participation in education and labour markets, their access to state welfare and their involvement in crime by locating it in historical, political-economic and policy contexts in the UK and internationally before, during and after the Global Financial Crisis. It provides a critical assessment of evidence about the causes of non-participation in academic analysis and in policy-making. The principal aim of the book is to establish the non-participation-welfare-crime relationship at the centre of critical policy analysis in the fields of social and criminal justice policies as they shape the lives and life-chances of young people. It endeavours to circumnavigate the analytical limitations of working within a single tradition of youth studies, and works deliberately across historical separations between policy fields, social science disciplines and theoretical traditions which have, it argues, restricted the development of understanding of the relationship. It queries interpretations founded on dominant analytical approaches and places theories of governance and criminalisation at the centre of analysis. Part One sets out the context and aims of the book. Part Two focuses on data, research and policy in relation to work, welfare and crime, and on the limitations of the contested analyses they have generated. Part Three introduces two theorists whose work offers new ways of understanding non-participation and its relationship with welfare and crime. Part Four applies these understandings to argue that dominant modes of the governance of non-participation are becoming increasingly criminalising in their effects.