YOUTH JUDICIARY UK

Youth Judiciary UK

Youth Judiciary UK

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis on the historical development of the youth justice in England and Wales. This paper also describes the emergence of youth as focus of regulation.

Historical Development of Youth Justice in England and Wales

To understand the historical development of youth justice in England and Wales is very important. A proper review of the youth justice system in England is necessary to understand the major trends and alterations in the youth justice. The youth Justice system of UK had been following a Modified Justice Model since Children's Act in 1908. The Children's Act 1908 has been considered, as the prime legislation to set up a juvenile system in UK. From the beginning of the 19th Century, the differentiation between the young and the adult offenders started (Gillespie 2005).

Post-prison facilities for the youth, the Philanthropic Society's House of Refuge, were established to ensure that youth were separated from adults and thus better deterred from committing further crimes. For youth who was at-risk or deemed by their parents to unimaginable, industrial schools were opened to instil “middle class family religious values”.

A separate youth court system for youth was introduced with the enactment of the Juvenile Offenders Act in 1874, which eventually led to a separate justice system under the 1908 Children's Act. The initial overarching objective of the English Juvenile Justice system was to counteract “dangerous criminal classes” and reform youth into good working class workers. The “discipline through work” approach was similar to JDA which assumed that “boys needed a firm guiding hand to develop into honest workers and social citizens”. Although not fully implemented, the Children' Act also pursued welfare goals. Specialist panels of magistrates, who were poor persons and came from “respectable middle-class backgrounds”, could choose from a variety of sentencing options that individually address the youth's needs, including the newly introduced disposition of probation supervision (Gillespie 2005).

" The "youth justice movement" was an attempt at maintaining a "dominant ideological approach taken by most English youth justice workers in the period 1985-97” (ibid: pg. 32). The movement was, however, quite significant as the authors point out, in terms of its "on-the-ground" effects on youth justice in the country (Goldson 2000). What characterized this movement was the philosophy of 'minimum intervention' by the youth justice over young offenders. Bottoms et al. (1990 cited in ibid: 2004) have cited the work of Pitts (1988) to show what this minimum intervention principle entailed. It included less involvement of and intervention of professionals in the lives of young offenders, less custodial and institutional placements and lastly, focusing attention to community-based programs as to prevent the adverse effects toward continued criminality. As Bottoms and Dignan (2004: 33) point out, the movement "was to 'hold' a juvenile offender in a not too intensive (and, therefore, in its view, not too damaging) environment until he or she had grown out of crime."

Interestingly enough, the youth justice movement was able to flourish ...