Young people, crime and justice

Abstract

Most juvenile justice systems deal predominantly with offenders from working class backgrounds, and thereby reflect the class biases in definitions of social harm and crime, as well as basing responses on these biases. Those most frequently found in youth detention centres and custodial institutions, for example, consist predominantly of young men with backgrounds of low income, low educational achievement, poorly paid and/or casualised employment (if any) and strained familial relations. Ethnic minority and Indigenous youth are typically overrepresented (Cunneen and White, 2011; Muncie, 2013; Cunneen et al., 2013). This chapter provides a brief survey of key issues pertaining to juvenile justice in advanced capitalist countries such as Australia, the UK, the USA and Canada. Differences between a social control agenda, and a social empowerment agenda, are explored through consideration of two broad interrelated tendencies within juvenile justice. The first tendency is for criminal justice authorities to rely upon risk assessment as the preferred mode of understanding and intervening in young people's lives. The focus on the individual as potential threat or problem is reinforced by policy frameworks that stress the responsibility of young people for their own actions.