Explaining Youth Crime- Integrated to Enhanced Pathway Theories

Integrated Explanations of Crime

Artefactual Risk Factor Theories

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).

Multi-Factor Developmental Theory (Glueck and Glueck, 1930)

The Criminal Career Model (West and Farrington, 1973)

Dual Taxonomy (Moffitt, 1990)

Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control (Sampson and Laub, 1993)

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.

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:

That risk factors tend to occur in childhood and adolescence

They then develop to the point that they determine offending behaviour in later life

Impact on Youth Justice?- 'New' Youth Justice System

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’:

which paved the way for the reliance on the risk factor prevention paradigm (RFPP).

Promoted an Interventionist model of youth justice.

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:

Prediction

Prescription

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:

'Asset'

'Onset'

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).

Enhanced Pathway Risk Factor Theories

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).

The Edinburgh Integrated Pathways Theory

Negotiated Order (McAra and McVie, 2010),

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 stigmatising;

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.

Constructivist Pathways Risk Factor Theories

‘Pathways Into and Out of Crime’:

The potential for young people to reconstruct their pathways into and out of crime.

How social process and demographic characteristics can mediate the constructions and experiences of risk in their current lives (Hine, 2005).

Hard-to-reach and minority groups.

Understanding the social processes of protection, resilience and resistance that mediate between risk factors and pathways into and out of crime.

'Teeside Studies

See ‘Snakes and Ladders: Young People, Transitions and Social Exclusions (Johnston et al, 2000)

explore the causes, extent and consequences of socioeconomic exclusion for a diverse sample of young people in one particularly disadvantaged locality;

examine and understand the range of ‘mainstream’ and ‘diverse’ careers that young people develop in this context;

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

Risk Factor Research Paradigm

Can valid representations of the real world can be attained through artefactual qualification and subsequent statistical manipulation?

Risk factors identified by artefactual risk factor theories are correlates not causes of offending.

Bundles of Risk Factors

They are likely to create an epistemic frame for practice that is a barrier to shedding an offending identity

Offenders are compelled to display the malleability of his or her riskiness

To take responsibility for and perform the reduction and manageability of his or her riskiness

Credibility in this performance, to manage ones own risk, determines progression within and release from punishment.

Deficits

Actuarial justice requires that individuals navigate causes of crime at the individual level, while ignoring various inequalities at the root of violence and criminalization.

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

Enhanced Pathways Risk Factor Theories

The personal constructions and understandings of these experiences (measured in an interpretivist way).

Experiences

Perspectives

Needs

Voices

Need to avoids risk-based, negative, offender and offence-focused practice.

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.

Primary duty being respond to the status of ‘child’ possessed by all individuals who enter YJS.

CFOS Model:

Practitioners and policymakers need to view children as part of the solution (and not the problem).

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

To particiate equitably in decision-making processes regarding their futures

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).

The complexity of young people’s lives today are influenced and impacted by a myriad factors that ultimately shape the youth phase.

Socio-economic inequality

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).

Traditional theories negate the varying factors that are important at those crucial stages of development throughout the life-course such as:

Trajectories

“a pathway or line of development over the life span” (Sampson and Laud, 1993:8).

Transitions

life events which bring about short-term changes in social roles within long-term trajectories

It highlights how the choices made in these different arenas can enable young people to realize their full potential in adulthood as citizens, household heads, workers, entrepreneurs, leaders and so on, and, therefore, how constrained or ill-advised choices can have significant adverse implications for their human capital and future capabilities.

Transitions- life events which bring about short-term changes in social roles within long-term trajectories

Cost of our obsession with 'Risk'?

It leads to continuous detection of threats and assessment of
adverse probabilities, to the prevalence of defensive perceptions over optimistic ones and to the dominance of fear and anxiety over ambition and desire’ (Lianos and Douglas, 2000).

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.

Difficulties stem from the political need for the public acceptance of policies and practices as public opinion is a crucial element.

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."

Aims:

What is the question asking?

Objectives

How might you answer the question?

Context

In what context does the question relate to?

Content

What/Which research, studies, philosophies, theories, evidence have you analysed, evaluated, explored, discussed in an attempt to answer the question.

Reasoning

What was the reasoning behind these choices?

Recap

Aim

Objective

Main points of analysis

Main points of evaluation