Transcript
JO PHOENIX
Right, let's see how we can get out of this, right? Because I don't know about you. I don't like being depressed. I'm actually quite a cheery person, believe it or not. So how do we escape this endless circularity of age-related justice issues? How can we link social and criminal justice in what we do?
Now, I hope what's come out for you so far is that when we give precedence to considerations of age difference in debate about what to do with young people who are in trouble with the law, we end up in that circularity. It's a necessary thing, because the problematic becomes, how do we stop young people who are breaking the law from becoming adults breaking the law? And yet, even within some of the models that we've outlined earlier, it is possible to imagine a response that emphasises the role of social disadvantage as well as how a variety of social discriminations around class, race, gender, sex, religion, and so on shape the administration of justice.
Now, one way to do this, I want to suggest to you, is something that I'm calling community oriented justice. Community oriented justice sees young people and adults who are suspected or found guilty as part of the community in which they live, rather than merely or only a set of walking risk factors transitioning to a law-abiding adulthood. But before I tell you what community oriented justice is, I want to tell you what it is not.
It is not controlling crime via community policing. It is not controlling crime via community courts, although I'm going to call them community courts in a second, so it's a little bit confusing there. It's not restorative justice, and it's not reparative justice panels. All of these forms of justice require the individual to repair the damage that they have committed to the community. So again, it places the onus back on the individual. Nor are they problem-solving, specialist diversionary courts, which are an alternative to formal adjudication, even though these have been established to deal with complex and profound welfare-related problems.
Now, a community oriented justice has this main assumption, that adults and young people who come to the attention of criminal justice share more in common than separates them. And the emphasis of my suggestion for a community oriented justice needs to be on ameliorating the effects of social injustice. What would this look like?
These are a new form of community courts. These community courts are laypeople, comprised of laypeople, operating within the laws of the land. They are empowered to develop greater understanding and evidence of the criminogenic features of their communities. For those who don't know that term, it means the things that produce crime, such as the overpolicing of Black and ethnic minority young people, the lack of public leisure facilities for young people.
They would need to analyse data and trends, including the identification of areas producing disproportionate numbers of young lawbreakers and the socioeconomic drivers of any of these, of growth in any of these. They would use this understanding to hold local authorities, police constabularies, and through them, central government accountable for their abrogation in their duties to tackle the sources of youthful and adult crime in the area. And they could take part in political discussions at the local authority level about how to resolve some of the problems that young people face, such as youth unemployment, the lack of access to housing, the lack of further education or vocational training without burdening young people with debt.
Now, age here is treated as just one of the many salient factors that courts take account of, along with class, race, sex, and gender, when addressing the criminogenic features of the community. So the focus is the community. It's not the individual. Now, the possibilities are almost limitless. Community courts could order local police constabularies to address the manner in which they overpolice, arrest, and charge particular constituencies of individuals or particular types of people.
They could order local authorities to address the sources of fear and insecurity that drive other groups of young people to carry knives, for instance, or through concerted action to address the economic drivers that make knife and drug crime a rational and reasonable response to often extreme economic precarity. Or local authorities could create more usable, safe, friendly, and free public spaces and leisure facilities for young people. In other words, these things could offer entirely novel experimentation with a totally different way of understanding and addressing the issues inherent in the complexity of young people's transition to adulthood as well as in adult lives.
As I said at the beginning of the lecture, it was all about ideas. It's not about what can be done to reduce lawbreaking of young people or how to reform youth justice. The purpose was simply to open a space to conceive of a form of justice that does not take age differentiation and the idea of young people's transitions to adulthood as the overriding concerns determining our official response.
The lecture was also utterly utopian in its vision for an alternative form of justice. I make no apologies for this, as I believe it is not possible to address issues of social justice without recourse to blue-skies thinking and visions. And let's face it. If we were all tied to imagining only what was realistic and grounded in the realities of the present, I dare say that such a thing as an Open University would not exist.