av Gillian Dickinson 5 år siden
290
Mer som dette
The question relates to Section B, Question 2 and covers a number of central concerns:
Amidst rapid social and economic changes brought on by globalisation and the rise of the ‘risk-society’, the perceived rapid increase in crime is assumed to be an indication that traditional responses to crime are failing. The lure of market solutions in the pursuit of the elusive alchemy of greater efficiency, cheaper costs and better service has lead to a demand for apolitical explanations of ‘crime causation’. Within which, criminological theories prioritise the conversion of risk to a quantification- an objective fact that can be measured and assessed through statistical analysis. Termed ‘factorisation’ (Kemshall, 2008),
Privileging the search for micro- and meso-level factors have become the dominant language within theoretical discourse and the mainstay of penal policies. As a result, the enduring effects of such rapid social and economic change such as deindustrialization, and economic instability are overlooked.
As a result, overly deterministic conclusions have failed to elucidate the contradictory nature of and differentiation between individuals.
The rise of 'risk' and management of risk within penology and the use of actuarial techniques has led to a pre-occupation with ‘risk management’ and ‘early intervention’ within contemporary youth justice and practice (Haines and Case, 2018).
This is a consequences of the emergence of the 'Risk Focused Prevention Paradigm' to inform assessment, planning and intervention within the present youth justice system.
Argument:
The identification, assessment and management of risk has become a central theme of criminal justice policy. For some penal policy commentators this represents a 'sea-change' in crime management to a new era of 'actuarial justice'.
“the management of crime opportunities and risk distribution rather than the management of individual offenders."
Issues of cost have led to ill thought out policies and knee jerk responses to crime.
According to Hames and Case (2018), there is of the pre-occupation with ‘risk management’ and ‘early intervention’ within contemporary youth justice and practice.
life events which bring about short-term changes in social roles within long-term trajectories
“a pathway or line of development over the life span” (Sampson and Laud, 1993:8).
How does it manifest itself in the multiple transitions of young people? how does it impact in different ways on the young person as they age- their individual life-course trajectory?
According to the World Development Report summarizes five major areas of life in which young people make significant choices on the path to adulthood: continuing to learn, starting to work, developing a healthful lifestyle, beginning a family and exercising citizenship (World Bank 2006).
CFOS Model:
To access the universal entitlements as set out in the national policy statements and international convention (e.g. the Welsh Government’s ‘'Extending Entitlement’ youth strategy- National Assembly Policy Unit,, 2000, 2000; the UNCRC).
To particiate equitably in decision-making processes regarding their futures
They need to seek to work in partnership with young people to enable them to express their views in issues that effect them (in line with article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
Practitioners and policymakers need to view children as part of the solution (and not the problem).
Young people’s pathways into and out of crime as the result of interactions between psychosocial risk factors and socio-structural factors such as social controls in the community and physical environment, interactions with agencies of informal and formal control such as family, school, police and the YJS.
Voices
Needs
Perspectives
Experiences
Risk factors identified by artefactual risk factor theories are correlates not causes of offending.
There remains only limited scope for the equitable participation of young people.
Practitioners will be encouraged to privilege psychological and immediate social (family, education, neighbourhood) influences, which are the foundation of artefactual risk factor theories as explanatory influences on youth offending (see Chapter 3 of Case (2018)) to the neglect of socio-structural,. Socio-economic, political and systematic influences.
Leading to a reductionist, psychosocial bias
Deficits
Labelling and stigmatising offenders operates as a barrier to desistance from crime
Actuarial justice requires that individuals navigate causes of crime at the individual level, while ignoring various inequalities at the root of violence and criminalization.
Bundles of Risk Factors
They are likely to create an epistemic frame for practice that is a barrier to shedding an offending identity
Credibility in this performance, to manage ones own risk, determines progression within and release from punishment.
To take responsibility for and perform the reduction and manageability of his or her riskiness
Offenders are compelled to display the malleability of his or her riskiness
Structure and Agency
Research highlights the interaction of agency and structural influences and its impact on life transitions. Young people as ‘active agents’ means that as individuals they have the possibility and the freedom to create, change and influence events within their life transitions.
Research focusing on the interplay between agency and structure has used the notion of ‘navigating life transitions’ (Vaughan 2005)- characterised as coping, managing, and making informed choices in everyday life circumstances (see Boeck et al 2006; Evans 2002).
Young people’s experiences of life are complicated by the fact that they can react and respond to structural influences and that they can make their own decisions. Evans refers to this as ‘bounded agency’ (Evans 2002:261).
This personal and individual engagement, known as agency, is influenced but not determined by existing structures (Evans 2002) and is shaped by the experiences of the past, the chances present in the current moment and the perceptions of possible futures.
the emphasis on exploring and explaining pathways into and out of crime. The personal constructions and understandings of these experiences (measured in an interpretivist way).
Constructivist Pathways Risk Factor Theories
'Teeside Studies
suggest what policy and practice interventions might ‘work’ in terms of securing ‘inclusive’ careers for disadvantaged youth and to explore the extent to which these can be extended further to other groups of young people.
examine and understand the range of ‘mainstream’ and ‘diverse’ careers that young people develop in this context;
explore the causes, extent and consequences of socioeconomic exclusion for a diverse sample of young people in one particularly disadvantaged locality;
See ‘Snakes and Ladders: Young People, Transitions and Social Exclusions (Johnston et al, 2000)
‘Pathways Into and Out of Crime’:
Understanding the social processes of protection, resilience and resistance that mediate between risk factors and pathways into and out of crime.
Hard-to-reach and minority groups.
How social process and demographic characteristics can mediate the constructions and experiences of risk in their current lives (Hine, 2005).
The potential for young people to reconstruct their pathways into and out of crime.
The Edinburgh Integrated Pathways Theory
Negotiated Order (McAra and McVie, 2010),
and diversionary strategies facilitate the desistance process.
pathways out of offending are facilitated or impeded by critical moments in the early teenage years, in particular school exclusion;
early identification of at-risk children is not an exact science and runs the risk of labelling and stigmatising;
serious offending is linked to a broad range of vulnerabilities and social adversity;
Impact on Youth Justice?- 'New' Youth Justice System
But the ‘privileging of managerialism and ‘risk’ is a unfounded argument.
Case (2016: online) suggests the ‘evidence’ comes from an endless stream of self-fulfilling, repetitive risk factor research studies and experimental, risk-based ‘what works interventions – all cohering to form the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’ (assess risk, target it through intervention, solve crime).
The readily understandable findings of RFR have now become embedded in the Youth Justice system in terms of policy and practice and a ready set of targets for intervention.
The approach has come to dominate assessment, planning and intervention tools for the identification of ‘factors’ in an attempt to predict ‘risk’. The first of these:
'Onset'
'Asset'
In response, 'No More Excuses' (1997) under the New Labour Government set out the ‘New Youth Justice’- in order to make the YJS more ‘effective, efficient and economical’, the government prescribed a prevention agenda.
Punitive responsiblisation through their focus on ‘at risk’ groups and was overwhelmingly presented by politicians and the media as a potential threat to be managed or mitigated.
The technical vehicle to pursue this agenda was risk management, underpinned by the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’ (RFPP):
From which Case (2016:online) suggests two harmful issues emerge:
Prescription
Prediction
Misspent Youth (1996)- Conservative Government's review of the YJS revealed it as ineffective, inefficient and uneconomical.
This called for all youth justice practice to be ‘effective’ and ‘evidence-based’:
Promoted an Interventionist model of youth justice.
which paved the way for the reliance on the risk factor prevention paradigm (RFPP).
Also known as Developmental and Life-Course Criminology- such Artefactual Risk Factor Theories make a number of basic suppositions that are both developmental and deterministic:
They then develop to the point that they determine offending behaviour in later life
That risk factors tend to occur in childhood and adolescence
Now seen as a hegemonic set of explanatory theories in Criminology (Case and Haines, 2009), statistical relationships or correlations are used to interpret how risk factors serve to predict or increase offending behaviour in the future.
Developmental theories try to account for offender careers and their relationship with age. This area or research began in criminology during the late 1980s and began to grow over the 1990s.
When we speak of the life-course, we mean the “age-graded sequence of roles, opportunities, constraints, and events that shape the biography from birth to death” (Shanahan and Macmillan, 2008:40).
Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control (Sampson and Laub, 1993)
Dual Taxonomy (Moffitt, 1990)
The Criminal Career Model (West and Farrington, 1973)
Multi-Factor Developmental Theory (Glueck and Glueck, 1930)
