Recognition, retribution and restoration : youth penal justice and the issue of youth, gangs and crime in Canada and England

Miller, Esmorie and McCall, Cathal and McBride, Cillian (2015) Recognition, retribution and restoration : youth penal justice and the issue of youth, gangs and crime in Canada and England. PhD thesis, Queen's University Belfast.

Abstract

This thesis focuses on contemporary penal and societal responses to inner-city youth gang crime. Guiding the research is the theoretical framework of recognition. I argue that contemporary youth penal legislation undermines the conditions of agency for the inner-city youth. This is because the focus on punitive sanctioning is prioritised over attention to the denigrating encounters youth have with policing authorities who enforce penal objectives in the inner-city. Guided by recognition theory, the thesis is grounded in empirical data gathered in two cities, London, England and Toronto, Canada. I chose as my focus in the field, another set of primary definers, those who work with inner-city youth in an advocate capacity. I observe that there are more appropriate ways to deal with deviance among youth. An alternate account to retribution is grounded in an integration of recognition theory and restorative justice. I have taken responses to the inner-city youth gang as my focus because these are so closely linked to the amplification of social anxieties about deviant youth. These perspectives are characterised, in the thesis, as part of a struggle for recognition; considerations about deviant, dangerous youth are connected to the broader issues of individual autonomy and social inclusion; indeed, institutional and societal about youth gang violence portray inner-city youth gang crime as a representation of individual failure to realise autonomy and social responsibility. On this basis, I argue that institutional and societal responses have driven the retributive turn apparent in contemporary youth penal justice. From this perspective, the inner-city youth gang is categorised as part of that violent and dangerous minority for whom the state has reserved its most punitive sanctions. The inner-city youth (as a status group), 1 therefore, is feared by society and punished by the state (Ralphs et al., 2009; Hogeveen, 2005).