Youth Justice

Youth Justice Under the Radar

An excellent report from Howard League England and Wales has revealed how young people are placed under an ‘intensive supervision and surveillance’ (ISS) which is given as an 'additional punishment'. This sanction is not given by a judge but it includes tagging, a curfew and 25 hours specified activity. If a young person does not comply, they can be returned to jail. Howard League England and Wales have described this as an injustice,and an expensive one at that.

Howard League for Penal Reform (England & Wales): They couldn't do it to a grown up - tagging without due process

Children are 'Innocent Victims' of imprisonment

Often we only think of children in realtion to prison by the number of new borns in Cornton Vale's mother and baby unity. However, as Alan Robertson points out in a detailed article in today's Holyrood Magazine, there are a great number of children who must cope with the traumatic loss of their parent through imprinsment and all the difficulties which that entails. As Cyrus Tata states, 'It simply isn't good enough for us to say as a society that children are some sort of collateral damage of parents’ offending'.

This is one of the most important aspects of women's prisons regimes that SPS must get right if Inverclyde is to live up to its promise of 'reflect[ing] a fresh approach to rehabilitation and wellbeing' of women prisoners.

Find out more:

impact of parent's imprisonment on children

Moral Panic or Moral Crusade?

Prof Viv Cree of University of Edinburgh was a recent guest speaker for the Howard League Scotland. Professor Cree illustrated that moral panics about youth culture are not, despite the way they are often portrayed, a modern phenomena. For example, when cinema first emerged as a form of entertainment it was viewed as having the potential to be a morally perilous activity for young people in much the same way many people today decry the dangers of the internet. There is also something darker in these bouts of anxiety about young people in the way they become demonized, labelled with derogatory language. Viv's lecture went onto to explore possible explanations for moral panics concerning young people.
If you missed the lecture but want to find out more, see her power point slides see here: http://moralpanicseminars.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/howard-league-lect...

Pages

Archive

2021

2020

2018

2015

2014

Subscribe to Youth Justice