Australia: control, containment or empowerment?

Abstract

[Extract] An overview of juvenile justice m Australia highlights certain longer term continuities in approaches to young people, as well as a range of more recent changes which themselves often seem conflicting or contradictory. A fundamental continuity in juvenile justice has been the ongoing focus on working class, minority and Indigenous youth. However, there have also been changes in both the ideological underpinning of juvenile justice, as well as changes in policy and practice. The last decade has seen heightened public concern and moral panics about ethnic minority youth; the imposition of mandatory sentences on juvenile offenders; adoption of zero tolerance policing (especially in public spaces) and the significant extension of police powers; persistent overrepresentation of Indigenous young people within the juvenile justice system; and intensification of intervention in the lives of young offenders and nonoffenders alike. Inequality and social polarisation have grown, accompanied by the racialisation of criminal justice and the criminalisation of the poor. Australia has also witnessed a widespread acceptance of risk prediction as an underlying principle of contemporary policy and practice.