NCJ Number
74512
Date Published
1980
Length
26 pages
Annotation
An outline of the current system of juvenile justice in Great Britain and criticisms of the contradictions within the system are presented.
Abstract
Juvenile justice is largely dependent on the provisions of the Children and Young Persons Act (CYPA) of 1969. The act is marked by such conflicts as welfarism and legalism, need and guilt, custody and therapy, and prevention and deterrence. In the CYPA, responsibility for juvenile behavior was assigned to the family. At the same time, intermediate treatments and family support were to replace borstals and detention centers, and jurisdiction was displaced in part from the judicial to social work. The result has been that family support efforts have opened private family responsibilities to public scrutiny and control. The inclusion of conditions within the family in the knowledges available to the court and the physical inclusion of parents in the secret trial of the juvenile court have enabled state agencies to supervise famillial relations in minute detail. This supervision falls predominantly on the working class family, the young, and the unemployed. Furthermore, social work has tended to lose sight of the wider conditions that tend to expose certain categories of families to supervision, regulation, and criminalization. Since 1970, right wing arguments have sought to introduce security and defense as increasingly necessary adjuncts to a 'soft' welfare jurisdiction. Arguments raised against right wing proposals fall into two broad and apparently contradictory theories: welfarism and legalism. Welfarism suggests that an extension of welfare programs for dealing with law breakers would prevent the worst effects of criminalization, while legalism holds that in rushing to embrace need as grounds for state intervention in the control of youth, certain fundamental rights have been subsequently denied by welfarism. Juvenile lawbreaking is a problem for the inner city population, but the present system of regulation is discriminatory, undermines liberal notions of civil liberties, and is ideologically effective in general right wing arguments of order and control. Thus, this area will continue to be fertile ground for political intervention. For related articles, see NCJ 74506.