The book offers an incisive collection of contemporary research into the problems of crime control and punishment. It has three inter-related aims: to take stock of current thinking on punishment, regulation, and control in the early years of a new century and in the wake of a number of critical junctures, including 9/11, which have transformed the social, political, and cultural environment; to present a selection of the diverse epistemological and methodological frameworks which inform current research; and finally to set out some fruitful directions for the future study of punishment. The contributions to this collection cover some of the most exciting and challenging areas of current research including terrorism and the politics of fear, penalty in societies in transition, penal policy and the construction of political identity, the impact of digital culture on modes of compliance, the emergent hegemony of information and surveillance systems, and the evolving politics of victim hood. Taken together, this work draws connections between local problems of crime control, transnational forms of governance, and the ways in which certain political and jurisprudential discourses have come to dominate policy and practice in western penal systems.

Based on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, this article challenges the evidence-base which policy-makers have drawn on to justify the evolving models of youth justice across the UK (both in Scotland and England/Wales). It argues that to deliver justice, systems need to address four key facts about youth crime: serious offending is linked to a broad range of vulnerabilities and social adversity; early identification of at-risk children is not an exact science and runs the risk of labelling and stigmatizing; pathways out of offending are facilitated or impeded by critical moments in the early teenage years, in particular school exclusion; and diversionary strategies facilitate the desistance process.The article concludes that the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems to deliver justice for children (due to its founding commitment to decriminalization and destigmatization). However, as currently implemented, it appears to be failing many young people.

This paper highlights the ways in which the formerly welfarist system of youth justice in Scotland has become infused with a set of competing and contradictory logics, including those of punitiveness, marketization, and managerialism. These changes have constructed a new set of audiences for youth justice (namely victims and communities) whose needs agencies must now strive to satisfy. All of this has been accompanied by a moral panic about youth offending started by Ministers and reinforced by the media. The paper argues that the key to understanding Scottish trends lies in an elision which has taken place between political capacity building (modalities of power) and a process of cultural drift (modalities of identity) in the post-devolutionary era. As such the Scottish case highlights the need to explore both convergent pressures and cultural singularities in building theories of penal transformation.

This survey of Scotland reviews: core Scottish criminal justice institutions; statistical trends in crime and punishment over the past forty years; the history and politics of Scottish criminal justice; and the emergence of a distinctively Scottish criminology. In particular, it highlights the cross-cutting modalities of power and identity that have shaped both institutional and policy development and made strong linkages between knowledge and politics.

This article assesses the effectiveness of the Scottish model of youth justice in the context of a growing body of international research which is challenging the ‘evidence-base’ of policy in many western jurisdictions. Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it shows how labelling processes within agency working cultures serve to recycle certain categories of children into the youth justice system, whilst other serious offenders escape the tutelage of the formal system altogether. The deeper a child penetrates the formal system, the less likely they are to desist from offending. The article concludes that the key to reducing offending lies in minimal intervention and maximum diversion. While the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems at delivering such an agenda (due to its founding commitment to decriminalisation and destigmatisation), as currently implemented, it appears to be failing many young people.

This article explores children's experience of policing. Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it argues that the police may be unfairly targeting certain categories of young people. Evidence is presented on the ways in which police working rules serve to construct a population of permanent suspects among children. The article concludes that the police act less as legal subjects and more as class subjects in their interactions with young people and that the policing of children may serve to sustain and reproduce the very problems which the institution ostensibly attempts to contain or eradicate.

Cet article explique comment et pourquoi le systeme de justice pour les mineurs en Ecosse a suivi une trajectoire differente de celle suivie en Europe et aux États Unis. Il éclaire le fait que les valeurs de l’assistance pénale dominent touts les aspects de la politique et de la pratique alors que les mêmes processus sociaux et culturels ont été identifiés comme étant la source d’importants changements dans la nature et la fonction de la pénalité dans d’autres jurisdictions. L’argument de cet article est que ceci est le résultat de la constance et de l’influence des réseaux d’actuers en Ecosse, du charactère distinct de la culture civique ecossaise et de la petite taille du système lui même.

This chapter assesses the effectiveness of the Scottish model of youth justice in the context of a growing body of international research that is challenging the `evidence base' of policy in many western jurisdictions. Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it shows how labelling processes within agency working cultures serve to recycle certain categories of children into the youth justice system, whereas other serious offenders escape the tutelage of the formal system altogether. The deeper a child penetrates the formal system, the less likely he or she is to desist from offending. The article concludes that the key to reducing offending lies in minimal intervention and maximum diversion. Although the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems at delivering such an agenda (owing to its founding commitment to decriminalization and destigmatization), as currently implemented it appears to be failing many young people.

“Society is, we believe, seriously concerned to secure a more effective and discriminatory machinery for interventions for the avoidance and reduction of juvenile delinquency.” (Kilbrandon, 1964)

This quotation from the report of the Kilbrandon committee which set up the existing system of juvenile justice in Scotland gives a flavour of the Scottish civic culture which has shaped Scotland’s unique institutions and processes for dealing with young offenders (McAra 2008). It highlights a sense of common-ownership of the problems posed by young offenders and a commitment to the development of effective practice. It also reflects a recurrent preoccupation of policy elites that extant structures of juvenile justice are inadequate to the task of reducing offending amongst children and young people and require to be reformed.

This chapter on youth crime and justice overviews the historical development of Scottish juvenile justice and describes the operation of the current system. It also presents empirical data relating to the nature and pattern of youth crime in Scotland, including data from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (the Edinburgh Study) and assesses the effectiveness of the system.

This chapter assesses the effectiveness of the Scottish model of youth justice in the context of a growing body of international research which is challenging the ‘evidence-base’ of policy in many western jurisdictions. Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it shows how labelling processes within agency working cultures serve to recycle certain categories of children into the youth justice system, whilst other serious offenders escape the tutelage of the formal system altogether. The deeper a child penetrates the formal system, the less likely they are to desist from offending. The article concludes that the key to reducing offending lies in minimal intervention and maximum diversion. While the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems at delivering such an agenda (due to its founding commitment to decriminalisation and destigmatisation), as currently implemented, it appears to be failing many young people.

This chapter assesses the effectiveness of the Scottish model of youth justice in the context of a growing body of international research which is challenging the ‘evidence-base’ of policy in many western jurisdictions. Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, it shows how labelling processes within agency working cultures serve to recycle certain categories of children into the youth justice system, whilst other serious offenders escape the tutelage of the formal system altogether. The deeper a child penetrates the formal system, the less likely they are to desist from offending. The article concludes that the key to reducing offending lies in minimal intervention and maximum diversion. While the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems at delivering such an agenda (due to its founding commitment to decriminalisation and destigmatisation), as currently implemented, it appears to be failing many young people.

This report explores transitions into the adult criminal justice system amongst a large cohort of young people who were involved in the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime. It includes: a description of patterns of criminal convictions and disposals for young people up to age 19 (on average); an examination of the characteristics and institutional histories of cohort members with a criminal record as compared with youngsters with no such record; and an exploration of the profile of young people who make the transition from the children’s hearings system to the adult criminal justice system as compared with youngsters with a hearings record but who have not made this transition by age 19.

The aim of this report is to present the key findings from the first three years of the Edinburgh Study, covering two sweeps of data collection. As the findings cover a broad range of topic areas, it is beyond the scope of this initial report to include an extensive review of the literature or a detailed discussion of theoretical issues. The content of the report is mainly descriptive, although relevant contextual information is referred to in each chapter. A concluding section is given at the end of each chapter, to sum up these findings, identify further areas of analysis and contemplate the issues for future stages of the Edinburgh.

Drawing on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, this paper explores the role which formal and informal regulatory orders play in the development of offender identity. It argues that such orders currently function in an exclusionary manner. Formal orders (especially policing) differentiate between categories of young people on the basis of class and suspiciousness. Informal orders (particularly in terms of regulations governing peer interactions) differentiate between individuals on the basis of territorial location, group affiliation and gender appropriate demeanour. Experience of exclusion, particularly multiple and repeated modes of exclusion, undermines the capacity of the individual to negotiate, limits autonomy and constrains choice. This renders the individual more likely to absorb identities ascribed to them with damaging consequences in terms of subsequent behaviour and the individual's sense of self.

Over the past decade, youth justice discourse in many western jurisdictions has become dominated by the mantra of "evidence based" policy. Informed by the results of research on risk and protective factors and (more especially) the precepts underpinning the "what works" agenda, huge resources have been devoted to early intervention initiatives (for "at risk" children and their families) as well as to specialist programmes aimed at reducing re-offending amongst older, more persistent offenders.

As a counterweight to this, however, there is a growing body of international comparative research which indicates that contact with agencies of youth justice and experience of more severe forms of sanctioning, in particular, are likely to result in enhanced rather than diminished offending risk (see labelling theory) that contact with any youth justice system of whatever ethos is inherently criminogenic.

This paper presents findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, which show how early experience of adversarial police contact and involvement with (predominantly welfarist) institutions of juvenile justice, appear to amplify serious offending in the mid to late teenage years. It argues nonetheless that the principles on which the current Scottish juvenile justice system was originally based, offer the best model for delivering reductions in offending. However the effectiveness of the system has been undermined by biases in "gate-keeping" practices, failures of implementation and over-optimistic target-setting.

Internal paper looking at the theoretical development and methods of design of the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime

According to Muncie (2002), the search for consistently efficient and effective practice in a global context means that the dynamics of local contingencies are often overlooked. The youth justice system in Scotland is currently incorporating "what works" principles into dedicated programmes for child offenders and piloting fast track children's hearings for persistent offenders. These developments have the potential to undermine key elements of the Kilbrandon philosophy on which the current system was originally based, through their emphasis on specialist social work intervention focused on criminogenic need (rather than generic intervention based on the welfare needs of the child).

The aim of this paper is to assess the relative merits of these alternative visions of youth justice in dealing with children and young people who offend, It is based on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, a longitudinal study of pathways into and out of offending for a cohort of 4,300 young people who started secondary school in the city of Edinburgh in 1998. Drawing on self-report data and agency records from the first four sweeps of the study, we argue that (1) the model of offending which can be derived from the study findings is broadly supportive of the Kilbrandon philosophy, (2) current policies targeting persistent offenders are based on a spurious scientific rationale potentially damaging to the indigenous institutional ethos within the Scottish system and (3) such policies are likely to amplify the very problems which they were designed to contain or eradicate.

According to Muncie, the search for consistently efficient and effective practice in a global context means that the dynamics of local contingencies are often overlooked (Muncie 2003). The youth justice system in Scotland is currently incorporating "what works" principles into dedicated programmes for child offenders and piloting fast track children's hearings for persistent offenders. These developments have the potential to undermine key elements of the Kilbrandon philosophy on which the children's hearings system was originally based, through their emphasis on specialist social work intervention focused on criminogenic need (rather than generic intervention based on the welfare needs of the child).

The aim of this paper is to assess the relative merits of these alternative visions of youth justice at dealing with children and young people who offend. It is based on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, a longitudinal study of pathways into and out of offending for a cohort of 4,300 young people who started secondary school in the city of Edinburgh in 1998. A key objective of this study is to examine the impact of interactions with agencies of social control (including the hearings system) on the subsequent behaviour of young people. Drawing on self-report data and agency records from the first four sweeps of the study, we argue that the model of offending which can be derived from the study findings, is broadly supportive of the Kilbrandon philosophy and that current policies targeting persistent offenders are likely to have a deleterious impact on their behaviour in the longer term.