Policing youth: Britain, 1945–70

By Louise Jackson and Angela Bartie

Policing youth probes beneath the media sensationalism surrounding youth crime in order to evaluate the workings of juvenile justice and the relationship between young people and practitioners in a key era of social change. The work of state representatives – the police, magistrates and probation officers – is mapped alongside discipline within families, neighbourhoods, schools and churches as well as the growing commercial sector of retail and leisure. Youth culture is considered alongside the social and moral regulation of everyday life.

The book offers an important comparison of England and Scotland, uses a wide variety of sources (including criminal statistics, media, film and autobiography), and combines quantitative research methods with textual and spatial analysis.

Individual chapters focus on police officers, the court system, violence, home and community, sexuality, commercial leisure and reform. This significant study will appeal to scholars and students of history, criminology, cultural studies, social policy and sociology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102188

Louise Jackson

Louise A. Jackson is Reader in Modern Social History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh

Book preview

1

Introduction: welfare and justice

The 1944 documentary film Children of the City, which aimed to educate parents, teachers, and all those involved in social work, criminal justice or local government about the work of the Scottish juvenile courts, made stark connections between urban living and youth crime. Overcrowding and poverty meant that the street, with all its temptations, was the only playground outside of school hours:

There are rides to be stolen on trams and lorries. There are the shopping centres, with miles of inviting windows. There are the big chain stores to wander through. There is noise and colour and bustle, and they can listen to people’s conversations. They get to know where everything is and how much it costs. They see that money is the key to all this, to the cinema, and to the billiard saloon, and Dixon Hawke (pie and beans). In this careless world of adults, who is to tell children where to draw the line, where excitement ends and crime begins?¹

The film was a response to local and national concerns about ‘juvenile delinquency’ in wartime, reflecting increased reports of burglary, housebreaking and vandalism by boys of 12 or 13 years of age.² Whilst the absent father, ‘the feckless mother’ and dislocation caused by evacuation were cited as factors leading to the breakdown of discipline in England and Wales, attention was also given in Scotland to economic conditions, lack of appropriate housing, amenities and leisure opportunities. Children of the City was researched, directed and scripted by 31-year-old Budge (Bridged) Cooper, with urban tenement scenes filmed largely in Dundee by émigré photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, who described them as ‘the worst slums I had ever seen’.³ It depicts the three fictional cases of Alec aged 13, Duncan aged 12, and Robbie aged 10, caught by a policeman breaking into a clothes shop. The juvenile court is shown weighing up their character, educational ability and home background (including parental culpability) before deciding on a different treatment for each: Robbie (who has learning difficulties) is to be treated at a Child Guidance Clinic, Duncan (from a ‘respectable’ but fatherless home) is to be befriended by a probation officer, whilst Alec (whose father is a ‘drunkard’ and mother ‘apathetic’) is sent away to a residential Approved School. Children of the City presented the work of the juvenile courts in terms of scientific intervention, with the socio-psychological profiling of young offenders informing decisions about individualised forms of rehabilitation. It also called on Scotland’s broader community – churches, youth organisations and schools – to join together to provide moral leadership and education for citizenship. It was confident that the problem of youth offending could be fixed through a combination of prevention, therapy and training in a time of crisis.

The film was a product of a particular period, most obviously in its optimistic belief in ‘penal welfarism’: an approach that sought to combine justice with education and social care to produce self-disciplined, well-adjusted and dutiful citizens.⁴ Significantly, the film presented youth offending as a normal or natural element of children’s development in deprived urban areas; it did not seek to identify one specific pariah group. Yet it did reinforce gendered perceptions of a distinction between the ‘respectable’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. Moreover, there are striking resonances across the decades since its making, in terms of the formulation of a social problem. Broader discussions about the causes of youth crime have continued to focus on young people’s misuse of both urban space and leisure time, on the corrupting effects of consumerism, and on inappropriate parenting (with the ‘feckless mother’ relabelled as the ‘single mother’).

Since the Second World War there has been an almost perpetual wave of public anxiety, rhetoric and debate about youth and crime in Britain. This has been inflected through the stereotyping of a series of ‘folk devils’: the ‘cosh boy’ and ‘teddy boy’ in the 1950s; rioting ‘mods and rockers’ as well as knife-wielding Glasgow ‘gangs’ in the 1960s; ‘football hooligans’, ‘skinheads’ and ‘muggers’ in the early 1970s.⁵ From the mid-1950s, too, the theme of the ‘blackboard jungle’ relating to a perceived lack of discipline in state secondary schools has fired press headlines; the origins of these concerns can be linked to the expansion of ‘free’ education through the welfare state and the raising of the school leaving age (to 15 in 1947 and 16 in 1973). More recently, the spectre of the ‘hoodie’ or ‘chav’ (England) and the ‘ned’ (Scotland) framed discussions about the introduction of anti social behaviour orders for young people (in England from 1998 to 2010 and in Scotland since 2004), whilst young people’s involvement in protest against the raising of university tuition fees in December 2010 and in the ‘riots’ of August 2012 led to the labelling, by members of national and municipal government, of an underclass of ‘feral youth’.⁶ Historical research has much to contribute to current debates in reminding politicians and policy-makers that the problem of youth and crime is not in itself ‘new’; it is not an indicator of a society that has suddenly, or even gradually, ‘broken’ or gone off the rails. The relationship between law, order and young people cannot be reduced to the simplistic descriptions and categories that have all too frequently been invoked to talk about it.

This book joins a wealth of historical studies that have focused on the late-eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term ‘juvenile delinquency’ was first deployed around 1815 and was used to comment on the problem of the ‘street arab’ of the 1860s and the ‘hooligan’ of the 1890s.⁷ The more recent past has been substantially neglected, assumed to be the terrain of sociologists, criminologists, and the interdisciplinary area of cultural studies.⁸ Policing Youth not only seeks to fill this historical gap, but to offer a significant antidote to prevalent myths about ‘the Fifties’ and ‘the Sixties’ that have been formed through nostalgia and popular memory. Television series from Dixon of Dock Green to Heartbeat have helped construct a narrative of policing in the 1950s and early 1960s as a ‘golden age’ and of a society that was benign, safer and more deferential to authority. Similarly, the ‘teddy boy’, the ‘mod’ and the ‘rocker’ are now often affectionately remembered. Stripped of the ‘threat’ that shaped initial public reaction to them, they are used to signify whole decades without questioning their provenance. This book aims to probe beneath the sensationalism and stereotypes that have surrounded youth crime, to examine the everyday regulation of young people under 17 by police officers, magistrates, social workers and other practitioners during a key period of social change.

Young people as a social group were strikingly more visible by the late 1950s than in the late 1930s. An immediate postwar baby boom saw the number of live births rise substantially in 1945–47, with these ‘babies’ inhabiting their teens between 1958 and 1966.⁹ Whilst it is possible to talk of the existence of interwar youth culture, the end of rationing, opening up of markets and arrival of rock and roll music in the 1950s led to the delineation of specifically youthful styles of dress and of taste.¹⁰ The term ‘the teenager’, first used in the USA in the 1940s, was widely adopted in Britain from the early 1950s to describe a cultural identity, distinct from that of older children or, indeed, young adults. ‘Teenagers’ expected to spend time outside of school and work on leisure and recreation. They also increasingly saw themselves as a ‘generation’ distinct from parents and other figures of authority; this sense of being ‘young’ and of age as a great divide was popularised through song lyrics that spoke of generational identity.¹¹ As a number of recent studies have shown, many parents were often supportive of teenage leisure and culture, encouraging sons and daughters to participate in these expanded opportunities.¹² Nevertheless, some adults who were keen to defend an existing social order, value system and way of life against a new ‘permissiveness’ viewed the ‘teenager’ as a moral challenge or disruptive ‘other’. Intergenerational tensions were apparent across modern western and European states, while concerns about postwar delinquency and youth crime were international phenomena. Yet the specificities of policy and practice at national and local levels require unpacking. It is hoped that this book, in analysing regions and nations of the UK, will enable further international comparative discussion of the postwar years.

Since the 1707 Act of Union with England, Scotland had retained its own legal and educational systems. Indeed, when it came to the distribution plans for the film Children of the City, differences between English and Scots laws as well as juvenile justice provision became an area of contention. While the Scottish Office (which had sponsored the film) took considerable pride in the finished product, civil servants at the Home Office were of the view that it should not be shown south of the border because ‘the juvenile court, the probation office and the approved school scenes were over prim and not up to the best English standards’; instead they commissioned their own film, Children on Trial, released in 1946.¹³ The juvenile courts, which originated in 1908, followed different models in Scotland compared to England and Wales. Moreover, youth justice diverged significantly in 1968 with the introduction in Scotland of children’s hearings – non-judicial proceedings with a solely welfare orientation that did not involve formal criminalisation – while the juvenile courts were retained in England and Wales.¹⁴ This book explores the particularities of England and Scotland, arguing that, while similarities outweighed differences, important nuances are detectable. These were shaped by differences in structures, in resourcing, and also by the desire to protect local autonomy and discretion within Scotland against external centralising tendencies.

Historical sociology has demonstrated that the concepts of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ (and related terms that invoke age, development and maturity) are social and cultural constructs whose meanings shift across time.¹⁵ If ‘childhood’ in modern western societies had come to be associated with innocence, then ‘adolescence’ raised concerns about successful emotional transition to the state of knowledge and experience associated with adulthood, including the potential that this held for corruption.¹⁶ As Harry Hendrick has persuasively argued, this meant that young people were positioned symbolically as either innocent ‘victims’ to be pitied or contaminating ‘threats’ to be feared.¹⁷ This book makes use of the legal terminologies that contemporary practitioners used to talk about age bands in the postwar period since these ascribed status and agency (or their lack) in the eyes of the law. Thus the term ‘child’ is used to refer to those under 14 and ‘young person’ to those aged 14–17 as laid out in the Children and Young Persons Acts of 1933 (England/Wales) and 1937 (Scotland). The terms ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ are also used throughout to refer to male and female juveniles although it is recognised that this can be problematic in infantilising those on the cusp of adulthood. Given that the age of criminal responsibility was set at 8 in 1933 (raised to 10 in England/ Wales – although not in Scotland – in 1963), it focuses on young people aged 8–17.

The book as a whole examines ‘policing’ in its widest sense: as the range of practices concerned with the regulation of social behaviour within the modern state.¹⁸ This includes the specific bureaucratic institutions of the police service and criminal justice (including the juvenile courts) which are a central focus. However, it also deals with a series of related agencies – public, private and voluntary (including the churches, schools and also the family) – that were engaged in the social regulation and welfare of young people. The book is concerned with those who came to the attention of official agencies, as either possible perpetrators of criminal offences or as ‘victims’ in need of care or protection, but also with young people who were objects of the regulatory gaze but not of any formal intervention. This book evaluates the challenges that social change presented for practitioners, the range of mediations and responses that were developed, and the relationship between youth culture and the occupational cultures of practitioners. It investigates the negotiation of a social work ethic within the police service as well as synergies and tensions between police officers, social workers, probation officers, magistrates, teachers, and also parents.¹⁹ Whilst it is often claimed that ‘multi-agency’ approaches and ‘partnerships’ are innovative aspects of current policy, Policing Youth demonstrates that they were important components (formal and informal) of the preventative strategies developed in the earlier part of the twentieth century to reduce the likelihood of juvenile delinquency. The book identifies significant antecedents, most obviously Juvenile Liaison Schemes, initiated within a number of police forces from 1949 onwards. Indeed, ‘juvenile delinquency’ was presented as a collective responsibility requiring the involvement of a broad range of civil society associations and institutions working alongside the police and official state agencies.

Constructing and deconstructing the ‘juvenile delinquent’

Between 1945 and 1970 the primary object of this surveillance and intervention was the white working-class adolescent male, a striking continuity with the Victorian past. Discussing her influences for the film Children of the City, Budge Cooper referred back to her own childhood: ‘We did all the things that delinquents do, but of course we never got to court. You see, we were middle class.’²⁰ Her polemic neatly encapsulates a point that will be demonstrated empirically across this volume. Whilst the postwar education system led to social mobility for some, through the provision of places in grammar schools (England) and Senior High Schools (Scotland) for those achieving exam success, it also perpetuated and institutionalised class divisions for the sizeable majority. These divisions were reinforced through social agencies including criminal justice. It was assumed that public (fee-paying) and grammar school boys would be disciplined for misbehaviour by headmasters or parents, not by (working-class) police officers or juvenile court magistrates.

Ideas about criminality in the postwar period were also affected by discourses of racial difference in that adult black and minority ethnic males were constructed as a predatory sexual danger to young white females. Until the later 1960s, however, minority ethnic groups (including Afro-Caribbean and Cypriot) featured mainly as victims of attacks carried out by young white males. Black and Asian youth – the children of those who had migrated to Britain in the 1950s – were viewed as more law-abiding than their white contemporaries.²¹ This was to change at the very end of the period of this study, as black teenagers in large urban areas such as London and Manchester began to report harassment by police as black youth were constructed as a significant threat for the first time.²² In Scottish cities, as well as in English cities such as Liverpool where sectarianism between Catholic and Protestant had flourished as a point of conflict in the interwar period, religion retained its importance as a marker of identity. Where Catholic ‘ghettos’– inner-city ‘slum’ areas associated with Irish migrant communities – continued to exist, they were linked to high levels of ‘juvenile delinquency’ and attracted the attention of the police. Yet religion in itself was not viewed as causal (although lack of church attendance of any kind was viewed as morally detrimental). ‘Delinquency-prone neighbourhoods’, as they were described by criminologists and probation officers, usually correlated with areas of deprivation.

Of fundamental importance in the shaping of public debate regarding ‘juvenile delinquency’ was the annual publication of criminal justice statistics, which confirmed that criminality was overwhelmingly associated with males. In England girls constituted 8 per cent of juveniles against whom indictable convictions were recorded in the 1950s, rising to around 12 per cent in the mid-1960s. Even more starkly, in Scotland, girls constituted only 5 per cent of juveniles against whom charges were proved in courts of law in the 1950s and only 8 per cent by the late 1960s. This did not necessarily mean that they were not ‘misbehaving’; rather, that recourse to criminal justice solutions was more likely to be invoked in relation to male rather than female delinquency. As Pamela Cox has shown for the period before 1950, girls tended to be dealt with ‘through welfare mechanisms rather than criminal justice mechanisms’.²³ They were more likely to be made the subject of supervision orders (as in need of care or protection) than boys, and were more likely to be dealt with informally (through schools or through referral to a probation officer without court proceedings). The juvenile court, in Scotland even more so than in England, was viewed as a mechanism designed to deal with deviant masculinity.

Reluctance to release any information that might damage morale had meant that criminal justice statistics were not published during wartime. This did not stop local communities voicing concerns about perceived increases in juvenile property offences. When crime statistics were finally released in 1947, they demonstrated that there had been a hike in proceedings (as well as cases proven/convicted) against both boys and girls: in the year 1941 specifically for England and Wales, and from 1941 to 1945 in Scotland. Whilst this then dropped for Scotland, not rising again until the 1960s, England and Wales experienced gradual increases across the 1940s and another sharper rise from 1958 onwards (figures 1.1 and 1.2). These statistics starkly demonstrate a shift in the age profile of those assumed to be ‘juvenile delinquents’. Wartime concerns had focused, unusually, on those aged 12–14. In Scotland, however, those aged 14–17 rapidly began to outnumber the under-14s in the statistics from 1947 onwards. Contemporary commentators linked this to the rise in the school leaving age, which was unpopular among many working-class families, and which it was assumed simply encouraged truancy, boredom and bad behaviour. A similar shift was apparent in the statistics for England and Wales, but over a decade later, from 1963; the changing profile, here, was in part a function of the rise in the age of criminal responsibility (from 8 to 10). It was also linked to the baby-boom: it was in the early 1960s that those born shortly after the war reached 15. However, neither of these factors account for the steep rise in convictions of those aged 14–17 in the late 1960s. As this book demonstrates, those under 14 were increasingly more likely to be diverted away from criminal justice proceedings altogether (through initiatives such as Juvenile Liaison Schemes): because of their youth but also because they were also more likely to be first-time offenders. This was an approach that was favoured in Scotland in particular. By the 1960s it was the 15-year-old boy, who had already encountered the police in his younger years, who tended to be viewed as a troublemaker, was watched with suspicion, and was more likely to be dealt with through a formal charge.

Figure 1.1 Number of juveniles found guilty of indictable offences in England and Wales by age bands.

Source: British Parliamentary Papers, Criminal Statistics, England and Wales.

Figure 1.2 Number of juveniles against whom charges were proved, all courts in Scotland 1945–68, by age bands.

Source: British Parliamentary Papers, Criminal Statistics, Scotland.

Statistical information about juvenile delinquency was also presented and discussed in comparative geographical and regional perspectives; overall, crime rates in relation to population tended to be far higher in urban than in rural areas.²⁴ Metropolitan London consistently outstripped other cities in England as a location for high rates of recorded juvenile offending. In very rural areas of Scotland, youth offending was practically non-existent. For example, 0.5 per cent of Orkney’s juvenile population, and only 0.16 per cent of that of Shetland, had offences proven against them in the years 1946–50.²⁵ This compared very favourably to juvenile crime rates of around 1.6 per cent for Glasgow and an even higher 2.7 per cent in the west coast towns of Kilmarnock and Greenock. Whilst urban areas were presented as crimogenic environments, it is also highly likely that informal methods of discipline continued to be preferred in rural areas, particularly those remote from administrative centres. As this book demonstrates, variable policing practices mean that these figures should not be taken at face value.

Howard Taylor has argued that official criminal justice statistics (and the data submitted by police forces and constabularies to the central state) are a reflection of bureaucratic process and of the politics and economics of policing.²⁶ Figures for youth offending cannot be viewed as indicative of actual trends in young people’s criminal behaviour. Yet neither can they be dismissed as fictions. Rather, we need to deconstruct them by focusing on the processes that shaped their genesis, viewing the trends they present as an intersection between the practices of professionals and those of young people. The strategies and tactics of the police and other agencies become a crucial point of analysis as, indeed, do the social networks and behaviours of young people themselves. Forms of regulation and surveillance, including the labelling and measuring of ‘delinquency’, served to construct and thus constitute the very problem that they sought to solve. Criminal justice statistics in themselves formed a discourse through which particular and partial narratives about youth offending were circulated.

The sense of a rising ‘wave’ of youth offending (as well as crime more broadly) led to a proliferation of national and local inquiries, which sought to identify causes and propose solutions. Across the period the term ‘juvenile delinquency’ was used to encompass offending, but also other forms of anti-social behaviour and disobedience, including truancy and running away from home, which it was assumed might lead to criminality. In 1942, Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, wrote to local councils in areas considered ‘black spots’ for delinquency (Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Paisley and Dundee) asking them to organise local day conferences.²⁷ Questions relating to youth were also among the first that he asked a newly appointed Standing Advisory Committee on the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders (SACTRO) to consider in 1945. In England and Wales a similar process of reflection was initiated in 1948, with the organisation of a spring conference in London for representatives of the churches, local authorities, juvenile courts, teaching, and voluntary organisations. This was followed by a memorandum, sent to all local authorities in April 1949 by Labour Home Secretary James Chuter Ede and Minister of Education George Tomlinson, calling on local ‘leaders of public life’ to inquire into causes of delinquency and to seek close cooperation between all those engaged in the ‘welfare of young people’. The memo commented on ‘the widespread influence of changing moral standards’, expressing concern that the nation was entering a new moral era long before the so-called ‘permissive’ 1960s.²⁸ The hiatus of inquiry of the 1940s dissipated as juvenile crime rates momentarily fell. Nevertheless, the conferences of the 1940s reflect a clear and widespread belief that rational recreation, religious observation and education would provide the solution.

With offending rates rising from the late 1950s the next decade saw a proliferation of nationally appointed committees of enquiry relating to children and young persons, penal policy and the youth service, whilst the local conference model was also resurrected in 1959 by Conservative Home Secretary Rab Butler. In 1963 his successor Henry Brooke appointed a much-publicised Standing Advisory Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (SACJD), made up of forty criminal justice, education, and social work professionals from across England, Scotland and Wales, as well as the popular entertainer Frankie Vaughan, who was a supporter of the National Association of Boys’ Clubs.²⁹ Yet its members became rapidly disappointed in their inability to make progress; most felt the body that had been created was too big, unwieldy, and lacking in focus.

It was rapidly dissolved after the general election of October 1964 by incoming Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice, who viewed the committee as a case of window-dressing on the part of the Conservative administration. Revealingly, Soskice informed Standing Committee members that ‘a diagnosis of the causes of delinquency is likely to come, if it comes at all, from long-term research rather than from discussion among people, however expert in their fields’.³⁰ As the whole area of crime and delinquency prevention became a political battlefield, the mood was shifting away from emphasis on local solutions and responsibilities towards the view that national policy interventions were paramount.

If the statistical and the governmental (local and national) were important sites through which youth crime was discursively constructed, so too, was the growing discipline of scientific criminology. The work of London County Council (LCC) psychologist Cyril Burt had been profoundly important in shaping the approach to youth offending that was set in place in the interwar period. First published in 1925, Burt’s The Young Delinquent, argued that ‘juvenile delinquency’ was caused by multiple factors (economic, social, cultural, environmental, medical and psychological) rather than originating in either hereditary defects or the ‘unnatural’ conditions of city slums (two previously favoured views). Moreover, the ‘young delinquent’ was not significantly different in any one aspect from the well-adjusted child; indeed, the early signs of ‘delinquency’ were imperceptible. This meant that a ‘preventative’ approach needed to be built into all aspects of child nurture:

The problem of delinquency in the young must be envisaged as but one inseparable portion of the larger enterprise of child welfare. Crime in children is not a unique, well-marked, or self-contained phenomenon, to be handled solely by the policeman and the children’s court. It touches every side of social work. The teacher, the care committee worker, the magistrate, the probation officer, all who come into official contact with the child, should be working hand in hand.³¹

This statement exemplifies the educative approach to delinquency prevention, which viewed penal and welfare policies as flipsides of the same coin, and that was hegemonic until the late 1950s. Whether it was actually delivered in this period – and whether the idea of ‘working hand in hand’ was realised in practice – is an important consideration of Policing Youth.

As civil servants turned their attentions to increases in the figures relating to juvenile offending, they identified a shortfall in subsequent criminological research in Britain.³² The only notable research that had been carried out in the 1930s was J.H. Bagot’s study of delinquency in Liverpool, which had found a high correlation between youth offending and severe poverty, and John Bowlby’s psychoanalytical study of cases brought before the London Child Guidance Clinic, which emphasised the role of emotional trauma, particularly ‘maternal deprivation’.³³ In Scotland, independent charity the Carnegie Trust UK was responsible for commissioning two very different pieces of research after the war: D.H. Stott’s psychological study of young offenders in Glasgow (published in 1950 as Delinquency and Human Nature), and a practical survey of agencies and activities engaged in delinquency prevention carried out by the Glasgow sociologist John Anderson Mack in 1951.³⁴ The two distinct and ostensibly contradictory research trajectories – the preoccupation of the psychologist with interiority and of the sociologist with broader ecological factors – were to play out across the postwar period. For those who emphasised the problems of emotional adjustment, the growing emphasis on affluence by the late 1950s was evidence that the old arguments about poverty had been insufficient. Many studies, however, emphasised interaction between ecological structures and psychical processes, including the ethnographic research published by Liverpool University settlement social worker John Barron Mays, which was an important stimulus for fieldwork involving participant observation.³⁵ The setting up of an official Home Office Sub-Committee on Delinquency Research in 1958 to coordinate and fund research on the causes of youth offending and recidivism is again suggestive of a change of emphasis from locally based solutions towards centralised research-informed decision-making.³⁶

A further discursive lens was that of the cinema. The documentary film movement had a clear influence on the didactic and moralising ‘social problem’ film that dealt with both male and female ‘delinquency’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Good Time Girl (1947), Boys in Brown (1949), The Blue Lamp (1950), I Believe in You (1951) and Cosh Boy (1953). A more nuanced treatment, that began to tell the story from the perspective of working-class youth, can be traced through the social realism of Violent Playground (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Bronco Bullfrog (1969), before shifting into the carnivalesque dystopias of If … (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1972).³⁷ Film (cinema and television), literary fiction and, of course, the news press formed another important site through which debate about youth offending took place and through which public ‘knowledge’ was acquired.

This book is not primarily about policy analysis, the history of criminological