History, Child Removal, and Youth Justice Policy

Abstract

Chapter 9 starts by summarizing the findings of the current study. Young Criminal Lives is the first study of its kind to use a life course approach to ask whether the early English youth justice system ‘worked’. Within that, it has focused on whether child removal to an institution ‘worked’. The chapter then considers the youth justice system in England and Wales today, which is overseen by the Youth Justice Board. There is then discussion of what can be learned from aspects of the Victorian and Edwardian regimes, and what is no longer possible or acceptable in current conditions. The chapter concludes that Victorian liberalism believed in the public value of ‘the social’ whereas neo-liberalism seeks to segment and monetize it. In the authors’ view, this runs counter to the nurturing of an ethic of care which, as Young Criminal Lives has shown, can never be fully commodified.