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Sleep of (Criminological) Reason: KnowledgePolicy Rupture and New Labour's Youth Justice Legacy

NCJ Number
231254
Journal
Criminology & Criminal Justice Volume: 10 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2010 Pages: 155-178
Author(s)
Barry Goldson
Date Published
May 2010
Length
24 pages
Annotation
This article provides a detailed analysis of youth justice policy under the administrations of the New Labout Governments in the United Kingdom since 1997.
Abstract
For over a decade, three successive New Labour administrations have subjected the English youth justice system to a seemingly endless sequence of reforms. At the root of such activity lies a core tension between measured reason and punitive emotion; between an expressed commitment to 'evidence-based policy' and a populist rhetoric of 'tough' correctionalism. By engaging a detailed analytical assessment of New Labour's youth justice programme, this article advances an argument that the trajectory of policy has ultimately moved in a diametrically opposed direction to the route signalled by research-based knowledge and practice-based evidence. Moreover, such knowledge policy rupture has produced a youth justice system that ultimately comprises a conduit of social harm. All of this raises serious questions of knowledge/evidencepolicy relations and, more fundamentally, of democracy, power and accountability. Figure, notes, and references (Published Abstract)