Doing Youth Justice

Doing Youth Justice is a theoretically informed, empirical analysis of the ways in which information about the risks and needs of young people is used to create knowledge about 'young offenders', which in turn provides the rationale for particular interventions and constitutes specific young penal subjectivities. One of its main themes is 'risk thinking' in youth justice practice, its operationalisation and its effects The book's object of analysis is the interrelationship between discourses of risk, welfare, need, age and punishment in the production of youth justice. It demonstrates how the practise of youth justice produces the young penal subjects who are seen as being the appropriate subjects for penal intervention - occasionally as welfare, occasionally as a means of supporting families, often as the calibrated inflection of pain - punishment. The paradox of these constructions is that they are based on a recognition of the fractured lives of many of the young lawbreakers - young lives disrupted, often shattered by poverty, neglect, abuse, economic and educational marginalisation. This innovative and original book provides a sociologically contextualised analysis of how discourses of 'risk' and 'need' operate in practice and to what effect. In that sense, the book is an examination of policy made live. By focusing on how these discourses shape and inflect youth justice practice, the book provides timely evidence about youth justice practice at a time when substantial youth justice policies shifts are, once more, on the agenda.