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Article Excerpt
Introduction
This article presents findings from ongoing research on interventions for violent and at-risk youth in Ontario through partnerships authorized under Canada's Youth Justice Renewal Initiative (YJRI) and the 2003 Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), its cornerstone (Canada, Department of Justice 2003a). These policy initiatives institutionalize a "preventative partnership" (Garland 2000) strategy aimed at reducing overreliance on the justice system by shifting responsibility for preventing and responding to youth crime "and its associated risks" to communities, families, and individuals. Situated broadly within a neo-liberal/advanced liberal approach to governance, the YCJA is shaped by Canada's participation in a global trade in policy ideas and technologies of implementation that is reshaping juvenile justice, crime prevention, and social welfare across Western jurisdictions (Edwards and Hughes 2005; Feeley 2003; Garland 1996, 2000; Hughes and Gilling 2004; Leonard, Rosario, Scott, and Bressan 2005; Muncie 2005; Newburn 2002; O'Malley 1999, 2002; Pratt 2001; Schofield 2002; Shaw and Andrew 2005; Stenson 2002, 2005). In this article, we address the promises and challenges of Canada's effort to implement this "new" approach, as exemplified in community responses to the needs and situation of a 16-year-old Ontario girl (pseudonym "Connie") who "ran away" from an abusive home at age 15.
Our analysis of this case draws upon interview data from two qualitative research projects. The first is the study in which Connie participated, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded project on intervention partnerships and their impacts under the YCJA and the larger YJRI. (2) The second is a much smaller university-funded participatory action research (PAR) project on youth in the sex industry, (3) which focuses specifically on problems faced by youth involved in prostitution, stripping, escorting, massage, and related "sex work." (4) In both projects, our principal methodological tool is semi-structured audiotaped interviews, thematically analysed by the four-member research team that co-authored this article.
We use Connie's story to exemplify themes and concerns that recur throughout our interview data to date (n = 47 staff; 35 female youth and 50 male youth--21 female youth and 44 male youth from the SSHRC project, and 14 female youth and 6 male youth from the PAR project). Specifically, we use Connie's account of her struggles since "running away" from home to demonstrate how victimization, child protection involvement, and vulnerability to criminal activity are linked and how efforts to address these adversities in schools, child-protection agencies, and social-welfare agencies do and do not foster YCJA goals. As outlined in the Preamble to the YCJA, these are "to prevent youth crime by addressing its underlying causes, to respond to the needs of young persons, and to provide guidance and support to those at risk of committing crime."
Our analysis draws broadly upon governmentality discourses on advanced liberal governance, a perspective informed by Foucauldian understandings of the ways in which competing, contradictory, and inevitably contested constellations of knowledge, interests, and actors shape governance strategies and their implementation at the present moment (Garland 1996, 1997, 2000; Rose 1999, 2000a, 2000b). This perspective acknowledges structural constraints of increasing political, economic, and cultural global interdependence; technological change; economic restructuring and the associated inequalities. However, it also recognizes political agency and, thus, "the concurrent existence of competing, multiple, publics" and "competing sovereignty projects" (Edwards and Hughes 2005, 356). Perhaps most importantly, it sees an array of "hybrid" (O'Malley 2002) alternatives that meld neo-liberal economic strategies and rationalities with neo-conservative (exclusionary) and/or social-democratic (inclusionary) aims (see also Hannah-Moffat 2000, 2005; Muncie 2005; O'Malley 1999; Schofield 2002; Stenson 2002, 2005).
In the discussion that follows, we briefly situate the YCJA historically and review the aims, principles, and mechanisms of preventative partnering as advanced in this strategy. We then examine Connie's account of her struggle to hold on to her personal morality, confidence, and future in the face of multiple risks, including opportunities to resort to "sex work" to survive--an all too readily available survival alternative for female and, to a lesser extent, male youth across Canadian urban communities (Artz, Nicholson, and Rodriquez 2005; Belknap and Holsinger 2006; Bittle 2002; Corrado, Odgers, and Cohen 2000; McCarthy and Hagan 2001; Reitsma-Street, Artz, and Nicholson 2005; Schissel and Fedec 2001; Welsh and Farrington 2005).
The YCJA and preventative partnering
The YCJA represents a third wave in juvenile justice in Canada (Bala 2005). The first wave prioritized child saving under the Juvenile Delinquents Act (JDA, in force 1908-1984). The second wave instituted "modified justice" or a soft "law-and-order" orientation under the Young Offenders Act (YOA, in force 1984-2003). (5) The current YCJA wave represents an attempt to reverse a YOA-fostered criminalization/incarceration spiral through the activation of a broad-based multi-sectoral preventative effort that goes "beyond the justice system to explore how society as a whole can address youth crime and its associated factors" (Canada, Department of Justice 2003a; see also 2003d, 2003e). (6) Through the YCJA, the YJRI, and the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS), through which YJRI funds are channelled, the federal government calls upon established and emerging "partners" across domains and sectors to participate in the innovation of "holistic interventions" that address the "root" or "underlying causes" of youth offending and re-offending so as to promote "the long-term protection of the public" (see YCJA, Preamble and s. 38; Canada, Department of Justice 2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c). This call is accompanied by a renewed, if insufficient, commitment to funding to "restore community capacity," funding that is to be
directed particularly towards enabling greater citizen/community participation [by strengthening and expanding] the involvement of a wide range of organizations, associations and community groups that are directly and indirectly involved with youth justice as they address the needs of youth. (Canada, Department of Justice 2003e)
David Garland is among those who characterize partnering strategies as "institutionally radical" and inherently problematic, requiring the formation of "hybrid organizations which traverse public and private boundaries" (2000, 348). However, like other emotionally laden advanced liberal constructs, partnering is a "discursive resource" (Schofield 2002), shaped by the contingencies of its application. It therefore varies across jurisdictions and manifests as less radically new in some instances than in others. Indeed, the widespread cross-jurisdictional embrace of partnering and related constructs arguably has as much to do with their symbolic or emotional appeal as with their substance (Edwards and Hughes 2002; Garland 1997; Hughes and Gilling 2004; Muncie 2005; Stenson 2002, 2005).
YCJA/YJRI/NCPS texts employ community, partnering, responsibility, and related constructs to elicit and reinforce a "Gemeinschaft" of interest (Pratt 2001). These constructs were clearly expressed in assertions that "it takes a community [or village] to raise a child" at roundtables hosted for seven "traditional and non-traditional" justice-system partners in 1999-2000 (Canada, Department of Justice 2000). (7) In YJRI/NCPS texts, the term "communities" refers to collectivities and networks across which interests in, and responsibilities for, youth are shared. As explicitly stated, "communities may be defined by geography, as in the case of neighbourhoods or towns, or by shared goals and experiences" (Canada, NCPS 1998).
"Partners" and "partnering" are not explicitly defined. As employed in YJRI/NCPS texts, however, these constructs have at least three meanings. First, "partners" refers to all individuals and agencies that have an interest and share responsibility in preventing crime and supporting youth, including "youth themselves" (Canada, Department of Justice 2000). Second, and more concretely, "partners" refers to existing and potential beneficiaries of crime-prevention and youth-rehabilitation grants, and also to agencies and organizations with which grantees "network." This wide range of partners ideally innovates, shares, and implements "long-lasting solutions to preventing and dealing with youth crime," ideally but not exclusively through "inter-sectorial, collaborative, multidisciplinary, and integrated programs and services" (Canada, Department of Justice 2003e). Third, "partners" refers to co-grantees, especially provincial/territorial and/or municipal levels of government, and also to funders from the private sector (see also Canada, NCPS 1998, 2005).
"Responsibility" is a third key construct. In the YCJA, and in a host of associated YJRI/NCPS texts, the federal government stresses that government alone cannot prevent crime. Rather, "members of society share a responsibility ... [and should] take reasonable steps to prevent youth crime by addressing its underlying causes" (YCJA, Preamble). Governance theorists call this "responsibilizing" strategy "at-a-distance" governance (e.g., Garland 1996; Rose 1999). This approach offers and calls forth a "whole new infrastructure" (Garland 2000: 349), an infrastructure that diffuses lines of accountability and, ultimately, places blame for failures of responsibility on the subjects of governance - youth themselves. Youth must meet their responsibility as "partners." Those who refuse or fail to be "responsibilized" effectively "choose" their own marginalization and exclusion (Rose 1999, 2000a; see also Bauman 2000; Bittle 2002; Edwards and Hughes 2002, 2005; Garland 1997; Hannah-Moffat 2000; Muncie 2005; Newburn 2002).
These rhetorical tactics draw upon Canada's established tradition of partnering. Especially in Ontario, partnering across governmental and non-governmental domains is an established component of youth protection and youth justice delivery (Chunn 2000; Mishra, Laws, and Harding 1988; Valverde 1995). Under the JDA, treatment-oriented interventions were implemented through a pluralism of cooperating private and public agencies to which youth were diverted and referred. Mandated to identify and meet the needs of youth and their families, both in the community and in carceral and protective institutions, community-based agencies functioned as co-participants in legislatively authorized and court-coordinated webs of surveillance and support that cut across the social body (see especially Chunn 2000). The YCJA/YJRI rhetorically re-authorizes and reactivates this tradition; it effectively re-moralizes the social, renaming it "the community." As Steven Bittle (2002), Kelly Hannah-Moffat (2000, 2005), and others have observed, despite rhetorical shifts and "empowering" practices that name the subjects of governance as participants or partners, neo-liberal/advanced liberal governance strategies bear a strong resemblance to welfare-era interventions (see also Bala 2005).
YCJA mechanisms
To be effective, the YCJA must further YJRI goals, including, in particular, the goal of reducing "overreliance" on the justice system and on incarceration (Canada, Department of Justice 2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d; see also Bala and Anand 2005; Roberts 2004). To achieve these goals, the YCJA institutes warnings, cautions, extrajudicial measures, and extrajudicial sanctions for minor youth offending, broadly defined (ss. 6-10) (e.g., property offences and minor or "level one" assaults). Custody, as is reiterated in the preamble and throughout the act, is "reserved" for serious youth offences, including especially "serious violent offences," defined as "offences in the commission of which a young person causes or attempts to cause serious bodily harm" (s. 2(1)).
Coinciding with the YCJA's emphasis on custody as a remedy suitable only for serious offences, the act places restrictions on the use of pre-trial detention. Specifically, it prohibits the use of custody to meet child protection, welfare, or mental-health needs and institutes safeguards against the overuse of presumptive (adult-length) sentencing of youth found guilty of aggravated sexual assault, attempted murder, murder, or a series of other serious violent offences (ss. 28, 29, 72). Importantly, all youth are to be tried in youth courts; only upon conviction is an adult-length sentence applicable. (8) Moreover, no matter how serious an offence, the act requires the courts to consider all available sanctions other than custody, to apply the least restrictive sentence that is consistent with this aim, and to choose a sentence that is...
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